My Young Friend

Back in Tano Batak, I am having an eye-opener. I met up with a young woman whom I have known from a distance for a few years, primarily through Facebook. She is bright and won a scholarship to the University of North Sumatra, which meant reduced tuition. Her family is poor but everybody agreed that she must not pass up this opportunity to study. Her father is ill and cannot work. Her mother is chronically sick but does her best to look after the family. They grow a bit of rice and chilli peppers. There are two younger siblings still at home. And so my young friend went off to University, to claim the right that she had won to a good university education and to assume a new challenge of adulthood. She was 19 years old. She is now in her second year and doing well with about a 75% average. How she is accomplishing this has left me awestruck. Her stories are stuff for a novel.

She plucked up her courage two years ago and took a bus to the city -- a luxury huge enough in itself because it cost money that the family didn't have. When she arrived, she got out of the bus and stood there in the station not knowing what to do. She had no family in town and no friends. Medan is a teeming, hard city and she had no money and no destination. The only thing she had was her courage and her confusion. Various men catcalled her, "Hey, where are you going? Do you need a lift?" Wisely, she did not trust them. When a young woman with a kind demeanour asked where she was going and invited her to come along, she decided to trust her. She found herself in the home of a kindly man who took in young students of her culture and helped them find a place to stay. She could speak her own language and met other young people in comparable situations. That kind man is still there and still a bit of a fall back for her, letting her know from time to time when there are hand-me-down clothes available for her to come and get. She has no clothes other than what her older sister hands down or other people give to her.

Initially she found a place to stay but it was a bad choice and led to a crisis with tears, sickness, fear and trauma. Now she has found a place that is tolerable. She sleeps in a small room with 4 other girls. They lie like sardines on two small mattresses. They share the cost of water and electricity. If one gets sick, they all get sick. The air quality is bad and the tropical heat is stifling in the small airless room. The important thing is that they all trust each other; they are good people. She has no bed, no closet, no clothes to speak of, no security. She lives by the grace of the young woman who rents the room. She has one bag in which she stores her stuff.

Her mother occasionally sends her money. She never knows when the money will come, or how much it will be. She puts in full days at the university and cannot take on a job. What she receives comes to almost US$1.00/day. She spends this money on food, water and electricity. Occasionally she receives fruit and vegetables from the village. Any and everything else is beyond her reach.

When she needs to use a computer, she goes to a computer cafe after hours. She has learned to survive on the good grace of people with kind hearts. The owner of the computer cafe allows her to type out her papers there, but it is night time when she does so, and walking there and back in the dead of night is frightening and risky. She had a kind friend, a fellow student, her first friend in Medan, who couldn't bear to know that she was out there alone at night. He used to get up and fetch her so that she wouldn't have to face that risk. Unfortunately, last month he died suddenly of meningitis leaving a black hole in her heart.

Walking to and from the University takes her 2 hours a day in the scorching heat. When she walks, she has time to think about her circumstances. She feels like everybody is watching her and thinking, "There goes that impoverished girl". She feels shame. She feels the burning rays of the sun. She wonders if this is what life is about, whether she should continue. But what are her options? Her sister calls her to pump her with courage.

She knows hunger. If her money runs out, she will do without food. She will sacrifice herself to be able to afford an extra. She has two more years to go. And then what? In this country, young people have to scramble together money to be able to apply for and accept jobs.

I invited her to occupy the second twin bed in my hotel room. She had never been in an elevator before, never slept on a box spring mattress. At home she grew up sleeping on a mat on the floor.  I invited her to come back to her homeland with me this Easter weekend because I will be traveling around Samosir Island. She has visited Samosir for a family ritual, but never traveled around. She had never been in a train before. She rarely gets to go home.

Every time we chat together more scales fall from my eyes. I have told her how much I admire her, that what she has accomplished is, in fact, impossible. Incredible. Not doable. And yet she does it and her marks are good. I tell her that she is capable of everything. She is unbeatable. She tells me about the psychological scars of poverty and her decision to smile. You can complain and worry, she says, but it doesn't help. It is best to be thankful for all that comes your way.

Saving Lasma Sitanggang

I have never seen the harrowing war film, 'Saving Private Ryan' but the title has always intrigued me. It points to the story, the complications, of following one's heart to do good for another.

When I met Lasma, she was in a state of desperation. The purchase of medicine for her chronically ill mother used up all of the family's resources and Lasma had not been able to qualify for a grant to go to university. The spectre of perpetuating the poverty into which she had been born stared her in the face. She would have to kiss goodbye to her youth. Her friends had gone off to school and she was left behind to work in the fields. With tears in her eyes she defiantly claimed that she had honest hands that could do an honest day's work, that she would follow in the footsteps of her ancestors and there was no reason to feel shame.

Thoughtful Lasma

I couldn't bear to see the unhappiness in this young woman who was so articulate and clearly so intelligent and deserving. I took her under my wing. It was a gradual process that took a few years, but now she is firmly lodged there, under my wing. I have committed to walk with her on her path and to confront the devil of poverty with her. Lasma and I are on a journey together. Where it will end we do not know. Where we want it to go is clear to both of us.

Lasma is a kind-hearted soul. She is bright and capable. Perhaps her only fault is her boundless sense of her own capacities. But this is also her greatest strength. It is the source of her positive 'can do' approach to everything. She shoulders every challenge thoughtfully and enthusiastically with both feet solidly on the ground. I know that this kind of drive in an individual can change the course of history. I don't try to correct her. I try to facilitate her dreams. I approve of them. Time will tell how far she will be able to run with the ball.

Thoughtful and critical

I try to put myself in her shoes. What would/could I do in her position? I dialogue with her, challenge her, think with her. What kind of course is strategic and effective? What is wise? I ask myself and her, what can I do as an outsider to clear away obstacles and facilitate her marching to her own drum? What are the needed interventions? I want to save her from that breaking point that I have seen far too often in the lives of young poverty-stricken Batak adults: that moment when they concede to poverty, when they know that they are defeated and are fated to never get ahead or achieve their dreams or realize their capacities and ambitions. This is the spectre that terrifies Lasma. It is what brought us together and continues to bind us: this need to present some opposition to the needless, senseless waste of talent and life!

The question that Lasma and I share is huge. Where is the path that will give her a good, fulfilling existence? What does it mean to have a 'good' life? What does it mean to be fulfilled? These are existential, political, social, historical, cultural and environmental questions; the soul-searching is not just psychological and individual. The answer does not lie in tearing her away from her family and village and turning her into a relatively wealthy Westerner. The answer is so much more complex. It lies in negotiating a path that is appropriate for her within her culture, situation and environment. It would break her heart to become alienated from her home in any sense. She would not be able to live with herself. She cannot rest until her parents are secure in their old age and her neighbours are no longer suffering. She is not the kind of person who coûte que coûte will run off to seek gain for herself leaving the rest to face hardship. The path to her goal is not lying there waiting to be trod; it will have to be constructed while walking on it.

'Saving Lasma Sitanggang' means saving the whole village. It means struggling to answer the challenge of how to make a good life despite all the forces that slap down the little farmer in Indonesia. This past year alone, four people in her village have committed suicide for reasons related to poverty. Lasma wants to honour her cultural heritage as well as find her way through this world that champions only the value of money. For me, traveling with Lasma Sitanggang means being willing to share the burden on her shoulders, to help construct strategies that fit with her local circumstances, to construct ways that will give everyone a chance to win and climb out of the hole together. What we undertake, the interventions that we construct, must meet the criterion of serving the well being of the whole village.

This must be possible because the alternative is not bearable to consider.

Lasma is not the same as all the other people in her situation because I am there beside her making sure that she does not drown. That lightens her load a little, but it does not render her challenge easier. And I also must not flag.

Life in the city is not what Lasma wants

We ask ourselves, "What is well being?" Lasma is not interested in an urban existence. She disparages of the dirt and buzz of a city. She loves to work with the soil and enjoys the beauty of a farmer's field, the breathability of the air in the countryside. That makes it easier for us to work on a program of well being that takes into account the health of the air, soil and water. We do not seek monetary wealth. We seek cultural, physical, environmental and community health. We focus consciously on the lasting, important values and the needs of this poor, beleaguered earth. Money is but one of the resources that we can deploy to make this happen. I often refer to the beauty of a tree and suggest that we should be like a tree. It gives abundantly. It gives and gives. It makes the soil richer and the air cleaner; it provides a home for every kind of creature; blossoms infinitely and so much more plentifully than what is needed just to reproduce itself. It offers shade and anchors the water and soil. It does not ask what it will get in return; it does not count beans and has no ledgers. It is simply generous. Even when it is old and falls over it continues to provide a home for species and the opportunity for new life. "Lasma, our job in this world is to be like trees. How can we do that?"

In future blogs I will write about our choices and selections. Saving Lasma Sitanggang is about a different kind of war, the everyday kind that we really have no choice but to fight.