Anniversary

I want to invite you contemplating on Anniversary of this country from my point of view and my experience as an English teacher.

I always begin my English lesson at each class with my true story based on my own experience and my knowledge. The purpose is to motivate my students getting spirit (at least) to follow my English class and so I often tell my true story that I could go to Australia and Europe, not because I am a rich man, I went abroad because I speak English!

I often motivate my students with a history fact, that the Dutch could colonized this country more than 350 years while Indonesian leaders have just aware that they were colonized in around 1920’s, and about 25 years or a quarter century later Indonesia get a freedom. Before getting freedom, however, Japanese (who was occupied Indonesia in death suffering and bad poverty for only three and half years) whose Hiroshima-Nagasaki were devastated by the USA yet dare asked Indonesian leaders (as a condition of freedom) to compose any philosophy background for Indonesia. And on June 1945 (two months before getting freedom) Soekarno the cleverest Indonesian leaders have created Pancasila as five basic principles as Indonesian freedom, and speech it up at a national forum.

I also tell a story about the Dutch who has a tiny island and who came from so far distance but could build anything she wanted in this country. Dutch could build railway webs from one isolated district to the others around Indonesia, including a railroad from Banjar (a center link web between west and central Java) through Cijulang railway station in the end of southern seashore district.

1. Why did the Dutch could colonize Indonesia more than three and half centuries?
2. Why did Japanese ask Indonesian leaders “a freedom conditions” to create a philosophy background?
3. Why did the Dutch build a railway station through any isolated district such as Cijulang?

I also tell my student about my own life experience:

Since I graduated from elementary school — it means since I was a student of grade VII in 1970 until I graduated from grade XII in 1977 —I have never lived independently free!

Since I was a student of grade VII, I didn’t live with and was not supported by my parents and so then for paying my school-fee and daily needs (until I graduated from grade XII), I must work as a servant for seven years.  And being a servant in another family have made me got a lot of experience; first of all, there was a real gap between a master and his family member and me as a servant. They were a real colonial and feudal and absolutely snobbish master, not a Dutch as a have heard over and over again from my history teacher at class but Indonesian a real colonial.

Since I graduated from grade XII I worked in a dam project, and my new master was foreigner workers. Gertz a German and Pronk a French (I am sorry I don’t remember their family name), and Gertz was more fluently in English than the French one.

Compare to my first local colored master, Gertz the German was a good and nice and more human boss. He employed me as a surveyor assistant, that’s all; it means I was neither his servant nor his house-boy, but his partner. He was a white European man, but he wasn’t a colonial.

From this point I should say thanks a lot to my beautiful ladies Ibu Dewi and Ibu Asoh who toughly taught me English at grade VII and grade X. Both have strongly motivated me to bravely speak English and I also impressed on the way they instructed me speaking.

I also should say many thanks to Gertz, although his English as standard as his Bahasa, but he used to speak English to me, and I do appreciate him being the first foreign man I spoke English with during I worked at his dam project. I should dare to say, I was only his man who was the most fluently in English, though all his men were engineers, and I was only graduated from grade XII!

There was another gap between me as a graduated student of grade XII and Gertz’s men who graduated from any engineers degree; the gap was not base on educational back-ground but on their jealousy.

I worked with Gertz only for nine months, I hate being around with so many stupid engineers.

I moved back to Bandung to study theater at an art college.

Again, I should live independently to pay my school-fee. And please don’t try to ask me about any social welfare here in this country. There does never have any social welfare in this country even though we are getting freedom for about 65 years.

I am nor a hypocrite neither a bootlicker while paying a dormitory is very expensive for me, also the school-fee, and my money I saved from my work at a dam project was only enough for daily needs. Instead of sleeping like a log (in a faculty senate room; in a theater club; in auditorium; and at my friend’s dormitory) I also should work for any thing I need, and for survive. It is always not easy to find honest work, so I should work in different part time jobs: I have been working as a translator and interpreter (I am still a translator-interpreter until now, indeed!); a tourist guide; free-lance writer, journalist and photographer for different local news papers; some times I should complete an order to compose another student’s paper; some other times I joined a theater club to play in a production, but I was only a ham actor, and theater was not a professional job yet in this country.

From this college I have got a lot of foreign friends, they come from different countries and different back grounds; they came to my college both as travelers and as foreign exchange students. From those friends my English ability getting more improved and more fluently as well. And again, I should dare to say that from those teens’ students and tutors, only two tutors and four students who speak English fluently, and I was one.

Almost every semester there came some tutorial foreign guests from any abroad country to my college, and I was their translator/interpreter, so I was not only earning money (the college paid my part time job) but also having some new foreign friends. And from those foreign friends I have got a great deal brighten information I had never heard during the fascist regime.

A Dutch student of Visual Anthropology at Amsterdam University told me about the Legend of Nyi Roro Kidul as a deception legend.

He told me the difference between the South and North Sea of Java, that the wave of south sea is bigger, higher and stronger than any north sea of Sumatera, Java and Bali islands. It is because there is a long and deep trench along the southern deepest sea; and this trench formed from a sub junction of tectonic plate, and it always produces a stronger high tide. So, the strong deadly wave of south sea is not because of Nyi Roro Kidul takes vengeance, but the  wave  strength and the unknown swimmers and in addition Javanese kings, use any legends to terrorize his people!

Indonesian people will never get any improved intellectual if they still keep behaving in stupidity.

Japan was devastated by USA bombers in 1940’s, yet in 1970’s they could produce so many kind of automotive and electricity kits to any countries in the world, Indonesia is not the exception.

Why doesn’t Indonesia?