The Rainbow Troops Read Online Free PDF Page B

long house of the Sawang tribe. Their house was long, and so is their story—which I promise to tell you later.
    The rest were government offices, built with no logical plan in mind, and eventually abandoned, or used for official projects, legal and halal (permissible by Islamic law). The term official was often used to legitimize the corrupt robbery of state money.
    The Chinese-Malays, as they sometimes are called, have lived on the island for a long time. They were first brought to Belitong by the Dutch to be tin laborers. Most of them were Khek from Hakka, Hokian from Fukien, Thongsans, Ho Phos, Shan Tungs, and Thio Cius. That tough ethnic community developed their own techniques for manually mining tin. Their terms for these techniques, aichang, phok, kiaw , and khaknai , are still spoken by Malay tin prospectors to this day.
    As for the Malays, they lived like puppets—controlled by a small and comical but very powerful puppet master called a siren. At seven o'clock every morning, the stillness shattered. The siren roared from the PN central office. Immediately, PN coolies bustled about, emerging from every corner of the village to line up along the side of the road, jumping and jamming themselves into the backs of trucks which would bring them to the dredges.
    The village fell quiet again. But moments later, an orchestra emerged as the women began crushing their spices. The sounds of pestles pounding against wooden mortars incessantly echoed from one stilted house to another, but when the clock struck five, the siren shrieked once again. The coolies dispersed to go home like ants fleeing a burning anthill. And that's how it went on, for hundreds of years.
    Unlike at the Estate, when eating, the PN coolies were not accompanied by Mozart's Haffner No. 35 in D Major. Their meals were accompanied by bickering, husbands complaining about the menu—always the cheapest fish for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The complaint was then countered by a hysterical blast from the wife, "I should have been the wife of a worker in the Estate instead. You are just a coolie, be grateful for your fish!"
    In the midst of their terrible fight at the dinner table, a calm backsound entered and harmonized the lyrics of their whimpering children, lined up neatly like boards in a fence, asking their parents to buy them new scout uniforms.
    The economic strength of Belitong Island was dominated by the Staff living in the Estate. The businessmen receiving concessions from the tin exploitation lived in Jakarta, and the conspirators receiving bribes were none other than the politicians. But we didn't know these underhanded, behind-the-scenes people or where they lived. They sat prosperously on the highest throne in the most exclusive class. They were the biggest benefactors of the riches of our island. The businessmen and politicians often visited Belitong to see the massive tin exploitation destroying the island's environment. The expressions on their faces led me to believe that they might have forgotten we existed.
    There was no middle class, or maybe there was—the public servants who engaged in small-scale corruption, or the law officers who took in extra money by intimidating the businessmen.
    The lowest class was occupied by our parents, the PN coolies. PN paid them 30,000 rupiah per month. Back then, one of Uncle Sam's dollars was worth 2,500 rupiah, meaning for 30 days work, they made no more than twelve U.S. dollars. They were also given about 50 kilograms of rice.
    They had no choice; that amount had to be sufficient to support a wife and at least seven children. But, don't worry, because surely, as sure as the coming of the judgment day, the coolies got an annual raise accompanied by a very personal message: With this raise, we would like to show the company's appreciation for your hard work and to thank you for making the company proud . Eight-hundred rupiah—that's about 80 cents—every year. Every year!
    It would be a miracle