PROLOGUE
For as long as I can remember, I've always heard the story of how my grandfather left Indonesia to attend high school in the U.S.A., and thought not much of it until recently. It was one of those family quirks that you never really tell anyone unless they asked. And it's not because I'm not proud of it or anything, but it didn't feel like something that was different from everybody else' life. That was how normalized it became for me, at least until I stumbled upon a very old newspaper clipping.Â
The paper was faded and so brown you could've mistaken the sight for rust. But words were still on it, and they were legible still, and it was about the American Field Service, or "AFS" for short, program that ran from 1958 to 1959. The name felt familiar, even if I couldn't put a finger on it, then I remembered the stories of my grandfather's flight. All of a sudden, it clicked for me that this newspaper was, in part, about him. Those stories were now tangible history in my hands, and it was such a profound feeling that I became curious to see if there was more to this than a single newspaper clipping.
I couldn't very well fly off to the States and dig around, as fascinating as what I could uncover there might be. No, there was only one recourse for me, and so I returned to the living record himself: my grandfather, Prof. Emeritus Syamsuni Arman, Ph.D. I'll leave off at this point to let the man recount things in his own way.
And so, we begin.
GRANDPA SAM'S STORY
Array, you asked me to tell you the process of how I got the American Field Service Scholarship Award to study in an American High School about 63 years ago, 1958-1959 to be exact. You know, since 1955 I moved from Sampit (a small town in Central Kalimantan) where I was born and finished Junior High School. My parents made a very important decision, despites of all the financial burden they had to endure, to send me off all by myself, first to Banjarmasin (South Kalimantan ) in a small coastal boat, and from there to Surabaya (East Java) by bigger seafaring boat, and continued by train to Yogyakarta my final destination.Â
Thanks to my mother's distant relatives I was accepted to stay temporarily in their house while I was searching the city looking for Private High School where I could continue my education. A few students from my home town who happened to study in Jogja suggested that I enroll in SMA Muhammadiyah 2 High School in the middle of town. After moving from one boarding house to another, finally I settled in the Asrama Kalimantan dormitory, some 6 kilometers away from the school, and stayed there, commuting by bike, until I went to America.
