As Indonesia prepares for the long-awaited visit of US President Barack Obama, it is worth looking at who this man is and how Indonesia ties into his story.
Barack Obama’s extraordinary American journey took him from his high school basketball-playing days in Hawaii to formative college years split between America’s two most alluring cities, Los Angeles and New York. After graduation, he worked as a community organizer in Chicago, spent his late twenties in Boston studying law at Harvard and then returned to Chicago where he would launch a political career that in 2008 landed him in the Oval Office.
Long before the epic presidential campaign, Barack Obama’s journey took him to Indonesia, where he spent four years of his childhood in central Jakarta. He was six years old when he arrived. His mother had recently married an Indonesian classmate from the University of Hawaii. He reminisced about his childhood: “The children of farmers, servants and low-level bureaucrats had become my best friends, and together we ran the streets morning and night, hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor sharp lines.” Unable to afford the international school that other foreign children attended, Obama’s mother supplemented her son’s education with lessons from a US correspondence course. Obama fondly recalled: “Five days a week she came into my room at four in the morning, force-fed me breakfast and proceeded to teach me my English lessons for three hours before I left for school and she went to work.” Obama’s election was invigorating to many groups of people around the world. American expatriates and backpackers often view their political leaders back home as being out of touch with the larger world.
Having a president with Obama’s background – a Kenyan father and years lived overseas – brought hope of an American foreign policy that would be guided by neither arrogance nor ignorance. Obama’s rise has aroused pride in many Indonesians as well. He has a younger sister that is half Indonesian, but has no Indonesian blood himself. Still, many Indonesians like to claim him as one of their own. It may be too early in his presidency to tell what the unique relationship between Obama and Indonesia will come to signify, but one would hope that Obama’s presidency will mean more for Indonesia than just a few smiles and handshakes during a tour of the old neighborhood.
Ann Dunham brought her son to Indonesia in 1967. In Obama’s words, “Before leaving Hawaii she had tried to learn all she could about Indonesia,” that evoked in her “the promise of something new and important, helping her [Indonesian] husband rebuild a country in a charged and challenging place…” Her dreams would never come to fruition.
Barack Obama has not been one to forget his mother’s lost dreams. Of the hundreds of universities he could have spent his days as a constitutional law professor, he chose the University of Chicago, the same school his mother was accepted to as a teenager, but deemed too far away by her protective father.
Forty-three years since Obama’s first arrival on Indonesian soil, the president makes his return at a time when many Indonesians are dealing with the devastation and continual threat of multiple natural disasters.
Kevin Lee
Padang, West Sumatra
