November Twenty Five

Genesis of the Rahmandar Clan

I was born in Indonesia in 1946, and came from a large family of 11 children. I don't remember very much of my early childhood years, except for a few things that I will mention here to prevent scammers and identity theft from getting too much info about me. They are so prevalent nowadays.

When I was just a young boy, I remember that we were a poor family relative to some of our friends, and much better off when compared to the Indonesian villagers. By poor I meant that we have a mortar and brick house, but we do not have telephone or refrigerator, even till the time that I left the country for the US in 1966. My mom was the primary bread winner, and she earned her living by making embroidered shirts called "kebaya". She was married twice (one of them was my dad), but they both died fairly young. I remember my mom would hurry and finished an order, then she would sent me or my brother to the customer and collect the money so we could have the money for food or other needs. We used to hate doing that chore. It was so embarrassing. Our daily food ingredients were bought fresh from the open market, and leftovers just sat on top of the stove until they are fully consumed or went bad. Having chicken for a meal involved buying a live chicken, slitting its neck, draining the blood, and then letting the bird flutter for a few minutes till it died. Then its time to pluck the feathers. We did that by dunking it into a boiling water for a few minutes, then the feathers just slides off the skin.

Ever since I can remember, I have always made my own toys and kites. I made wooden tops with cut off nail as its spike, soccer ball made up of a balled up small stone wrapped in layers of newspaper and plenty of rubber bands. Remember those lamps with lampshade that rotates around an inner one with pictures of fishes swimming around the lamp as if they are in an aquarium? I made one of those too. I made my own kites using bamboo frame and thin crepe paper. One of the fun or naughty(?) thing I used to do was to capture big male crickets, feed them hot peppers, and then I would get together with my friends and let our crickets fight each other inside a shoe box. On occasions I would go to a nearby Zoo, and I'd try to find a hole in ground and lasso a scorpion using home made lasso made out of grass.

During my teen years, I had a small motorcycle, Zundapp with 50 cc engine. I worked on this bike almost all the time, and once I took everything apart and managed to put it back together, just for grins. I have always been the go to man when my mom's sewing machine broke. Her sewing machine is the treadle kind with a belt as the drive mechanism, and this belt is made of leather that breaks every so often. I also remember having a small shortwave radio, and I listened to Radio Australia English language broadcast almost everyday. I would probably still recognize the sound that they used to play at the beginning of their broadcast hour, the sound of a kookabura bird chirping.

I left Indonesia when I was twenty. Imagine how scary that time was for me. I have never left the place of my birth until that time. The furthest I had ever been at that time was perhaps 150 miles. I know very little of spoken English, but can read and understand some. Of course as you read this, you probably noticed that I have bad grammar. Indonesian language does not use any grammar whatsoever, thus I have a hard time using the proper tense, gender, the usage of singular/plural expressions in English. My mom scraped enough money for me to survive in the US for a year, but the rest was up to me. At that time, I have no idea what America is like except for Hollywood images. I remember arriving in San Fransisco airport, and had a phone number of my mom's friend who imigrated to the Netherlands, and later to the US. Since I have never used a tepehone in my life, I had to ask a stranger to call this family. I was so scared then.
Luckily someone there answered and they later picked me up at the Grand Rapids, MI airport.

The G family, although from Indonesia originally are pretty much an all American family. Their children all grew up in American school so they looked at me as "fresh of the boat" type person. I spent that summer with them, and they enrolled me at Calvin College in the fall of 1966. I lived in the dorm for the next couple of years, and sometimes when everyone had gone home for the holidays, I remember spending that time alone in the dorm as I had no place to go. I was lucky that they let me stay in the dorm for the holidays. Once my money ran out, I was able to obtain a work permit from the INS, and I worked everyday while working my way through school at a place called Keeler Brass. I had scheduled my classes so that they mostly in the mornings, and I'd go to work during the second shift. Needless to say, I didn't study much, and my grades suffered, but I managed to keep a passing grade. I spent three years at Calvin, and finished my pre-engineering degree there, and was accepted to continue my education at the University of Michigan School of Engineering. To be continued.