The Courage to Move On

Halmahera’s bitter and bloody recent history lives on in the frightened eyes of its adults. But it is the Maluku region’s children who offer hope for the future, Chriswan Sungkono finds.

It was the twins who first laid eyes on me, a stranger staying at a homey inn where their mother worked as a caretaker. Then, for motives unknown, the twins acquired a kind of curiosity about this new visitor.

Being children, they decided to pursue this interest in me. They wanted to find out more. And so they set out to approach me, looked me straight in the eye with wide smirks on their faces, and yelled, “Hey, long-haired brother! What’s your name?”

That was how I got to know Sela and Lona, the twins still in their tweens in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Tobelo, a simple town in northern Halmahera. From these two girls, I quickly became acquainted with their rascally younger brothers, Jovi and Siwa, their friends Jeni and Karen, and all the other children who often played tag and whatnot on the dirt path just in front of my room at the Villa Hermosa.

Everything that occurred afterward, on which I have no trouble reminiscing, resulted from their bravery in bridging the perceived strangeness that once spanned the infinity between us.

Just as they would another new kid on the block, the children treated me in an incredibly casual way. Showing no restraint, they occasionally punched me in the arm, toyed with my face, even yanked on both my hands to get me moving along with their herd. I was no new acquaintance; I was someone they seemed to have known for years.

At the same time I was to them an object of research, shedding pearls of wisdom whenever I walked around town in the evenings with them. They would pepper me with questions and, with a bottomless thirst for novelties shadowing their visages, would wait excitedly for my answers.

Little did they know that I too was seeking answers. I wanted to know whether this was something they normally did, whether they exhibited so much curiosity – perhaps nosiness to some people – about previous guests. I wished to learn how they had developed such boldness in approaching strangers and asking them things they might not be inclined to answer. Halmahera might have been known to the world since the Age of Discovery, thanks to the region’s prized spices, but today the island doesn’t get many visitors, domestic or otherwise, despite its indescribable natural beauty.

So how did they get to be so unreserved, so fearless and so casual with strangers? I remember asking myself that each night before bed.

Turns out the answers I was looking for were scattered in the darkly complicated annals of the island.

The only times Tobelo ever made headlines nationwide since independence were from 1999 to 2000. The news coming out at the time was a violent epic of interreligious strife so grisly and nightmarish it remains etched in the collective memory of those who lived through it.

It was an ignominious slice of history in which about 1,000 people in Halmahera were massacred, hundreds of homes torched to the ground, and hundreds of families forced to seek refuge as far away as possible – some never looking back.

Tobelo, now the administrative capital of the regency, was at that time emptied of its inhabitants, transformed into a ruined ghost town. Blackouts were as frequent as the fires smoldering in the ruins of houses. The violence lasted less than two years, but it took more than half a decade and numerous reconstruction and reconciliation efforts to bring back any semblance of normalcy.

The adults in Tobelo, whenever I inquired about the incident, would suddenly turn reticent. And these are otherwise wonderful, bubbly talkers who laugh unbridled at fresh, often risqué jokes, be they in a traditional market or at a government office. But bring this topic to the table and their eyes will narrow, almost as if contemplating drinking a bitter potion. You can sense the fear hanging in the air.

Now, if from a very young age you’d been exposed to bombs exploding at close range, to crimson puddles of blood on the ground, to the deafening screams of raging, machete-wielding mobs and their victims on the verge of death, it may just be that whatever fear was left in your heart would have been extinguished forever by all the horror.

So what would seem fearful to most people would seem normal to you. Fear would have lost its icy grip on you, receding into the background of your consciousness. By extension, what would appear normal to most people would be something of great joy to you.

This is what I believe happened to the children of Tobelo, who were essentially toddlers at that time.

I spent a week in Tobelo in early December, when the town’s Christian community celebrated Christmas. Along Jl. Kemakmuran, the town’s main street, houses and stores were festooned with twinkling lights and shimmering Christmas trees, and upbeat Christmas songs blared from the loudspeakers in public minivans and supermarkets.

It was to these supermarkets that the kids often took me during our walks. One of them held a special attraction for the kids: a whole aisle stocked with a dizzying variety of fireworks, sparklers and firecrackers of all sizes, shapes and colors. Some of the bigger ones I doubt would be legal elsewhere, but here the loudest and brightest fireworks were a constant source of excitement for the kids. And Christmas, people said, was usually the craziest time of the year when it came to igniting fireworks.

Back in their neighborhood, the kids showed no fear in lighting up firecracker after noisy firecracker, every evening, boys and girls alike. Why would they be afraid, after all? They’d heard bombs explode and seen the consequences. The loudest firecrackers here were nothing compared to those. Some of the kids even told me that on New Year’s Eve, the “older guys” – the youths – would often set off the leftover bombs from the conflict years.

If there is a single reason for which I long to come back to Halmahera (and there are myriad), it will be because I want to meet these kids again. I want to see how much they’ve grown. I forged a beautiful comradeship with them; the playful, no-fuss children that dare to slap you on the thigh and make fun of you no matter how much older you were, or how much stronger.

The kids sometimes asked me to explain things they hadn’t yet gotten to in school, but the truth is it was I who learned most from them. Sela, Lona, Jovi, Siwa, Jeni and everyone else in that neighborhood showed me that if the past was worth anything, it was worth letting go of. What’s done is done, nothing changes it: it can be remembered with joy or grief or anger. It can be forgotten, unlearned from. Or it can be kept in the memory, deprived of any sentiment.

And these kids knew there was no way to change their bitter past. They could only learn from it. To be intrepid. To be courageous in moving on with life. The future is what truly counts for them. For us all.

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