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Remembering hurriedly
walking along a cracked and broken path, tufts of grass poking
up through the holes and cement collapsing into rubble on the
curbing, I came to the end and stepped over a very big dead rat.
It wasn't uncommon to see rats in Medan, in Indonesia, most
often live ones, scuttling away into the cracks in the walls,
drains or down the gangs [small lane ways], but that day there
was a dead one.
The rats of Indonesia
seemed to
have personalities of their own. They could think, peer, look,
plan and scrounge for rubbish. They were very well fed, as there
was a lot of rubbish everywhere in that dirty city. There were
two rats in particular that were unbeaten by any other rats in
the neighbourhood, one of which was an object of my sister's curiosity.
She would tell us tales of what she observed in their behaviour
over dinner, in that quaint little house that we lived in in
Gang Ismail.
Thinking back and reminiscing
about life in Indonesia, now that we live again in Australia, I
recall those evenings spent sitting as the locals did on a mat (tikar)
on the kitchen
floor, an unheard of thing to do in Australia, we exchanged our
stories of the day.
We had to be well
organised in our small little kitchen in the back of that cute little
house because the cooking, cleaning and eating all had to be
done before 9:30 or 10:00pm, as the water was turned off at that
time, thereby not having any other opportunity to do the dishes,
washing, wudhuing or bathing until the following morning, not to
mention the toilet.
One day I noticed 'evidence'
of a rat outside in the small cemented area at the back of our
house, so it needed to be dealt with. The drain had no cover
over the hole, so I nailed a plastic grate over it so as to
avoid the rat from emerging via that means, if that was where the
culprit came from.
That night, prior to
the 9:30pm deadline, I was washing the dishes and heard a
grinding, scratching, crunching sound. The rat's intellect
eventually surpassed my strategy and chewed through the plastic
grate. That rat had had a passion for my sister's soap evidenced
by the many tooth and bite marks. That wasn't the end of it, I
was determined to stop that rat, so I put a brick over the
drain. I thought there was no possible way the rat could move
the brick. The following night however, the same thing occurred.
I heard the grinding, scratching, crunching sound and the brick
was also defeated.
Somebody else in the
neighbourhood seemed to be having the same problem, because the
following day I went outside and the rat was standing out by the
drain hole. It was particularly unusual that the greasy rat
would be out in daylight and I was startled as I had never
actually seen our resident rat. I tried scaring it, stamping my
foot several times, clapping and yelling at it. It seemed the
rats of Medan had a greater determination than myself, or was it
a battle of the wits? The Australian in Medan verses the
Indonesian rat. All with the sound of the adhan in the
background, blaring from at least five different directions.
Maybe he came out just to hear the adhan ?
It became evident to
me that day, that the rat was very sick. Someone had poisoned all
the rats, so indeed he may have been listening to the adhan and
saying his last prayers. By that time, I was glad it was not my
brick that had done him any harm. I turned the tap on and the
rat slowly slimed and slipped its way back into the drain with
its tail hanging out the end. But this time, in my revulsion and
with my sister present, we decided three bricks might do it with
a good scrub of disinfectant in the back area. All this time,
our dear sweet Mother refused to listen or look at any rat and
in all the time she was there, she never saw one of them and in
her snobby kind of way, she said she would only talk to the cats,
while she would stroke her cat lovingly and refused to look in
any direction where a rat may have resided. My Mother lived in a
rat free zone world. It was interesting to observe her and the
cat.
On walking out the
front of our house and down the gang, I noticed several bloated
dead rats floating in the drains, which were always full of
filth, stagnant water and rubbish, in which all the rats had
died and lay decaying. These are the drains where the mosquitoes
bred ferociously and buzzed incessantly around ones head at night
time when one was trying to sleep. Paranoid thoughts of malaria
always passed through my mind, not to mention cholera with the
vision of the floating and decaying rats. But it seemed that
nobody had cholera nor malaria and in fact the local
Muslims were very healthy.
On speaking to a
local Christian family who were visiting our Muslim neighbours
who were from West Sumatra, we addressed the issue of rats and
rubbish in Medan and he, (the Christian) said,
"We don't want a system here in Medan like the Muslims
have introduced in West Sumatra to keep the cities clean. We
want the rubbish to stay the way it is so that people won't come
here because this is a bandit city !"
We can confirm that
this strategy did work against other Indonesian ethnic groups
who were too afraid to visit us in Medan. Even the tough, knife wielding
Makassan Muslims refused to go there.
 The Governor, Teuku
Rizal Nurdin, however, had a different idea and was hoping to slowly
clean up the city of Medan of its rats and rubbish and we read
in one of the newspapers before we left last year that they were
starting to clean up the city, street by street, starting with
the street near us, alhamdulillah. The Muslim voice won out over
that Christian man and hopefully one day we can go back to Medan
and enjoy a rat and rubbish free visit.
The Australian Consulate
in Medan recently informed us, however that Medan
was undergoing a 'beautification' program with 58,000 new
lights (lucky the mayor's brother-in-law's an electrical
contractor, isn't it?), and, fake tin palm trees that light up
at night. In Jl Kartini, cobble stone footpaths have been put in
on both sides of the road, and now the road's about to be
repaved. All for the wealthier folks of course. Meanwhile
beggars still line the streets of Medan and no doubt the rats
are as prolific as ever.
Reference:
"A Bundle
of Flowers" Compiled by Ayatullah Seyed Kamal
Faghih Imani, pge 191
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