paddy fields, and marshland. Narrow alleys disappeared into warrens of tile-roofed houses in the rambling urban hamlets called kampungs. Central Jakarta had just one high-rise hotel—built with war reparations from the Japanese. A few neighborhoods, such as Menteng and Kebayoran Baru, were handsome and leafy, laid out meticulously by the Dutch. But squatter colonies lined the canals, which served as public baths, laundry facilities, and sewers, all in one. During the long rainy season from November through March, canals overflowed, saturating cardboard shanties and flooding much of the city. Cars, buses, and motorcycles were scarce. Denizens of the city traveled mostly on foot or by bicycle or bicycle-propelled rickshaws called becaks. Power outages were a fact of life. There were so few working phones that it was said that half the cars on the streets were ferrying messages from one office to the next. “Secretaries spent hours dialing and redialing phone numbers just to get through,” said Halimah Brugger, an American hired in 1968 to teach music to the children of foreign oil company executives and missionaries at the Jakarta International School. Westerners were rare, black people even rarer. Western women got a lot of attention. “I remember creating quite a sensation just being pedaled down the street in a becak, wearing a short skirt,” Brugger said. For adventurous travelers who washed up in Jakarta after hitchhiking across Java, there were no maps or guidebooks. The National Museum, stuffed with antiquities dating back to the ninth century, had languished for a decade. Letters from the United States took weeks to reach their destination. Foreigners endured all manner of gastrointestinal upsets. Deworming was de rigueur. In the open-air markets, where one shopped for food, bargaining was essential. “If you knew how to bargain, you could get a foreigner price down to a Chinese price,” said Halimah Bellows, another American who lived in Jakarta in the early 1970s. “But you would never get an Indonesian price.” Westerners needed to learn one cardinal virtue: patience.
But like Yogyakarta for Elizabeth Bryant, Jakarta had a magical charm. People who were children in the city in that period, including Obama, reminisce about the sound of the Muslim call to prayer in the days before public address systems, and the signature sounds called or rung out by street vendors wheeling their carts through the kampungs. Bureaucrats whiled away their days amid the faded splendor of Dutch colonial buildings. Tea was still served on the portico of the old Hotel des Indes. Ceiling fans turned languidly in the mid-afternoon heat, and kerosene lamps flickered in the houses lining the narrow alleys at night. For anyone of no interest to government security forces, life was simple. “Jakarta was very peaceful in those years,” said Samardal Manan, who arrived in 1967 at age twenty-five, a young man from a traditional Muslim family in a village in West Sumatra. The cost of living was low, and the city felt friendly and safe. As an Indonesian with a college degree, he had little trouble finding a job; soon after that, he could afford a house. For a foreigner, it was possible to arrive in Indonesia largely ignorant of the horror of just two years before. “I was quite naive about the whole thing,” said Halimah Brugger. “It was all over then. I never felt the slightest bit endangered.” Indonesians welcomed Americans, she said. Within a week of arrival, she was paying the equivalent of a few dollars a week, plus rice and soap, for a maid who made her breakfast, ironed her clothes, and worked for her seven days a week. It was in some ways a wonderful place to raise children. Javanese families crave, love, and indulge children. They are a collective responsibility of not just parents but siblings, cousins, aunts, and uncles—the entire community. “It was like the whole world was taking care of the children,” said Brugger, who raised three. By 1969, inflation was under control and the economy was improving. The government launched a series of five-year plans