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By The Way: I used to go to school with Barry. Yeah, right.
Sun, 01/18/2009 10:33 AM | Headlines
As we passed a road overlooking a valley, admiring the view from the top, the Seattle cab driver pointed to a huge, white mansion by the lake below and said, “That’s where Bill lives.”
“Bill who?” I innocently ventured to ask.
“Gates of course” he replied, giving me a look that made his Indonesian passengers in the back feel completely ignorant.
“Everyone here calls him Bill because he is from here?”
“No. Not everyone. Only those close to him. I went to school with him.”
Impressed by this humble revelation, we nudged him to go on.
“Yeah, he was an average kind of kid, a little nerdy perhaps, but he was all right,” this friend of Bill said as he maneuvered the cab downhill to take us back to town.
The journalist within us was instinctively at work, taking notes at everything he said.
“Of course, he had that puffy face back then. He didn’t have that many friends. He was lucky to have me.”
“Are you still in touch with him?”
“From time to time, when we have school reunions.”
More scribbles on the notebook for a potential human interest story later on.
The next day our group, on a media visit that involved a two-day stop in this Northwest port city, took another cab for a meeting.
Low and behold, to our chagrin rather than surprise, the cab driver, a different one from the one we had the day before, also claimed he went to college with Bill, and had lengthy stories of how Bill struggled in class to make the grade.
By the second day in Seattle, we found that just about every other person in this town claimed to have had a personal or even familial connection with the founder and owner of Microsoft — today, one of the world’s richest persons.
Bill went to school in Washington, and people in Seattle, cab drivers in particular, have the right to claim he is one of them, and express their affection in different ways.
I discarded the notes I took from the first cab driver.
Something similar seems to be taking place here in Indonesia when it comes to Barack Obama, the man who will become president of the United States on Tuesday.
We are now hearing one or two claims from people somewhat related to Barry, who spent four years as a child in Jakarta in 1967-1971 and attended a local school, growing up among Indonesians rather than among children of wealthy expats.
These claims are hard to verify given that the Soetoro family are not well-known in Indonesia.
Lolo Soetoro, Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, led a quiet, private life for anyone to really know who he really was, and about his family connections.
The only person to have legitimate claim to Obama would be Maya Soetoro-Ng, who now lives in Hawaii and has been seen accompanying Barry for election campaigns.
The rest, for all we care, could be frauds, just like those Seattle cab drivers.
A few of his classmates from his Menteng school, who have formed an Obama supporters club, could legitimately claim to have known Obama well.
And there are the friends of Stanley Ann Durnham, Obama’s mother who dedicated her professional life helping the poor in Indonesia in the 1990s before her death.
Oh, the media in Indonesia should stop calling Obama the “Menteng kid” — a term reserved really for those rich kids living in Menteng. Barry never lived there, but he did go to school in Menteng.
No doubt we will be hearing more outrageous claims from people about being related to Obama or that they were friends in school.
In this Internet age, I could claim to be a friend of Obama too, because we are somehow connected, or got connected, courtesy of Facebook.
It’s one of those relationships. In my Facebook list of friends, I have a friend, who is a friend, who is a friend, who is a friend of Barack Obama. That makes me legitimately a friend of Obama, right?
— Eric Musa Piliang
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Alicia (not verified) — Sun, 01/18/2009 - 12:46pm
I believe, We as Indonesians,got the right to say Barrack Obama is our Friend rather than our foe,if his policy is friendly toward us,Indonesia our country. If his policy toward us,Indonesia is unfriendly;then,the term of Friend wouldnot be appropriate. Thus, He wouldnot be our friend. I assume we donot need to know the individual directly to call him 'My friend'.
Personally, I'd love to call our President the same term " My Friend" because I support and sympathize with his policy and his party that's all. I believe Mr.SBY doesnnot mind if all the Indonesian calling him "my friend" indeed, he would feel rather proud to have all Indonesian his friends.
As a matter of fact, we have the right to call Mr.Barrack Obama's brother, as we all live and share the same world,nothing wrong with that,no hypocrisy,my personal thought.