09 March 2010

Indonesia Left Its Mark on Obama

President remembers a “joyous time,” but also witnessed severe poverty

The future president, right, lived in a modest Jakarta neighborhood with his mother, stepfather and sister in 1967–1971.

By Stephen Kaufman
Staff Writer

Washington — When then-Senator Barack Obama wrote The Audacity of Hope, published in 2006, he reflected on the four years he lived in Indonesia as “a joyous time, full of adventure and mystery,” and said he wanted to bring his wife and daughters “to share that piece of my life.” Many years later, Obama is making his first visit to the country as the U.S. president, writing a new chapter in his personal relationship with the country.

When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs announced the visit February 1, he said Obama would be coming to formally launch the U.S.-Indonesia Comprehensive Partnership initiative. But White House reporters immediately asked if the president would also be coming to follow up on his November 2009 statement that he wants to show his family some of his “old haunting grounds.”

“I’d anticipate that that will likely be one of the stops,” Gibbs replied.

In 1967, 6-year-old Barack and his mother, Ann Dunham, left their home in Hawaii for Jakarta. They came to join his new stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, who had been forced to abandon his studies at the University of Hawaii when he was conscripted into the Indonesian army. The future president was soon enrolled in a local public school, and was known to friends as “Barry Soetoro.” Taller, foreign, and of a different ethnicity than his classmates, Barry stood out, but he soon made friends and his mother encouraged him to learn Indonesian and rapidly acculturate to his new surroundings.

“We lived in a modest house on the outskirts of town, without air-conditioning, refrigeration or flush toilets,” Obama wrote in Audacity. His best friends were “the children of farmers, servants, tailors and clerks,” and his years in Jakarta were “days of chasing down chickens and running from water buffalo, nights of shadow puppets and ghost stories and street vendors bringing delectable sweets to our door.”

Known to friends and classmates as “Barry Soetoro,” Obama, circled, said he gained special insights from living in a new culture.

He joined an Indonesian Boy Scout troop and played soccer, which would not become popular in the United States until years later. The future president also displayed a naughty schoolboy side, getting in trouble for crashing through a bamboo fence at school.

But young Obama’s life in Jakarta also exposed him to poverty, suffering and natural disaster — factors with which many Americans were unacquainted. “The world was violent, I was learning, unpredictable and often cruel,” Obama later wrote in his 1995 book Dreams From My Father.

Compared with many of his Indonesian neighbors, Barry was relatively well-off. His stepfather surveyed roads and tunnels for the army, and later got a job with Mobil Oil. His sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, was born in Jakarta. His mother earned additional income for the family by teaching English to Indonesian businessmen at the U.S. Embassy.

Obama said his mother’s ties to Indonesia never diminished, despite her decision to separate from Soetero and move back to the United States in 1972. “For the next 20 years she would travel back and forth, working for international agencies for six or twelve months at a time as a specialist in women’s development issues, designing programs to help village women start their own businesses or bring their produce to market,” he wrote in Audacity.

With the help of his sister, Maya, their mother’s doctoral dissertation, Surviving Against the Odds: Village Industry in Indonesia, was revised and published as a book by Duke University Press in 2009.

In Dreams, Obama wrote that his upbringing and exposure to a new culture “made me relatively self-sufficient, undemanding on a tight budget, and extremely well mannered when compared to other American children.”

But his mother ultimately decided to send him back to Hawaii to continue his schooling. “She now had learned … the chasm that separated the life chances of an American from those of an Indonesian. She knew which side of the divide she wanted her child to be on. I was an American, she decided, and my true life lay elsewhere,” he wrote in Dreams.