Published on 10th July, 2002

Reflections In Medan - The Children and
Rats and Rubbish

By M. Al-Zahra

Sitting in the City’s Central Mosque, Masjid Agung, Medan, Indonesia, after congregational Zuhur prayer, I felt the much-appreciated blessing of a cool breeze moving through the open frontage. This is rare for Medan’s stifling heat for it to be broken by any sensation of coolness. It was a blessing from our Almighty Allah (swt) for all the young and old women seated at the rear of the mosque, a distance from the men seated at the front.

The joy and sadness in Medan, as a temporary resident here, is in experiencing and being witness to the lives of the children. In walking to the Mosque today, I passed four young children playing in a drain, alone with very tattered clothing and dirty faces. Their parents were nowhere to be seen. They would have a home somewhere but are not at school and it appears the parents do not have the means of finances to attend. This leads to a common sight whereby children end up in the streets playing or begging.

In Medan, children can be seen begging by the side of the road with their plastic cups used for the collection of any coins that they may be blessed to be given. These coins and small notes insh’Allah assist the Mother in feeding the family, who will also be seated at an intersection with her baby, a tattered scarf on her head and a small bottle of dirty water for drinking. The children’s response to any coin given to them is of enormous gratitude as they look helplessly and dependently into one's eyes. It is common knowledge that many of these children have been hit by passing vehicles and have been killed accidentally.

In passing two bananas to a Mother one night at an intersection, seeing the hunger and sorrow in her face as she immediately pealed the bananas and gave them to her children, was a sight and emotion that has made an impact on my mind and memory. The Mothers and their children sit by the side of the road and collect donations and beg until very late at night, before they pack up their small package of a sarong and water bottle, before going to the place where they sleep for the night.

These sad experiences are in great contrast to many children who have homes and food and who go to school and play marbles in the gang (very small laneway). Many of these children, particularly the girls, chorus salams from every house, gang and toko (small shop) as I walk down the street on my way to catch the bus to work. They have bright faces and big clear eyes, clean clothes after their mandi (bath) and kind, innocent things to say. They generally defend righteousness and forbid evil acts, as experienced just recently, with one child stealing our cat to be malicious and the others scolding him for his actions. The child who stole the cat has a home, food and an employed family but has been badly influenced. Generalizations, therefore cannot be made about the characters and moulding of different children in Medan based on their environments. 

Concerns lie in the large groups of children who congregate late at night and walk the streets, yelling, fighting and hitting each other, which is common particularly on Saturday nights, but is not just isolated to weekends. These children also have homes, where their parents are, but the children are allowed to roam the streets in gangs, disrupting the neighbourhood, but not yet causing damage to property, as they are still of the ages of  approximately 7 years to 12 years. These children create their own culture in their gangs, work out hierarchies and are made up of a majority of boys with some girls who form their own groups. 

A recent observation of a movement of a gang of approximately 30 boys moving down the street separate from a group of girls, indicated that the girls were more violent than the boys. The girls were fighting and the boys were just being rowdy and noisy. Even toughened young Medan adults consider their language to be obscene. Residents of the houses sit by the side of the road and observe to ensure that nothing gets out of control and that property is not damaged.

I am concerned for the wellbeing of Indonesia’s youth as they grow into teenagers and young adults. How educated is the population going to be, will the innocent and kind children influence those who are badly influenced now, will the poor children have access to nutrition so that they will not be disadvantaged in the future?

These are some things which are my “Reflections In Medan”, and which need to be addressed so that the future for all our children and society will be prosperous and safe, insh’Allah.

Published on 1st May, 2003

Rats and Rubbish

By M. Al-Zahra

The Holy Prophet ('s) said: "Try to be clean as much as you are able to. Verily, Allah has based the foundation of Islam on cleanliness; hence, never can a person enter Paradise but the clean ones." Ref: Kanzul-'Ummal, Tradition 26,002"

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 I 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. The family had to be well organised in the 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 outdid my strategy and chewed through the plastic grate. That rat had a passion for the family soap evidenced by the many tooth and bite marks on it.. 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 that 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 former 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 that 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