teacher gave us a large, round pill that resembled a raincoat button. It was white and tasted bitter, and after taking it you felt full. There were three large letters on the pill: APC—Aspirin, Phenacetin and Caffeine. The APC pill was legendary throughout the outskirts of Belitong as a magic medicine that could cure any illness. This generic cure-all was the government's solution to make up for the underallocation of healthcare funds for the poor.
Our school was never visited by officials, school administrators, or members of the legislative assembly. The only routine visitor was a man dressed like a ninja. He wore a large aluminum tube on his back and a hose trailed behind him. He looked like he was going to the moon. This man was sent by the department of health to spray for mosquitoes with chemical gas. Whenever the thick white puffs arose like smoke signals, we cheered and shouted with joy.
Our school wasn't guarded because there wasn't anything worth stealing. A yellow bamboo flagpole was the only thing that indicated this was a school building. A green chalkboard displaying a sun with white rays hung crookedly from the flagpole. Written in the middle was:
SD MD Sekolah Dasar Muhammadiyah There was a sentence written in Arabic directly under the sun. After I mastered Arabic in the second grade, I knew the sentence read amar makruf nahi mungkar , meaning "do what is good and prevent what is evil" —the primary principle of Muhammadiyah, the second largest Islamic organization in Indonesia with more than 30 million members. Those words were ingrained in our souls and remained there throughout the journey to adulthood; we knew them like the back of our own hands.
If seen from afar, our school looked like it was about to tumble over. The old wooden beams were slanted, unable to endure the weight of the heavy roof. It resembled a copra shed. The construction of the building hadn't followed proper architectural principles. The windows and door couldn't be locked because they were not symmetrical with their frames, but they never needed to be locked anyway.
The atmosphere inside the class could be described with words like these: underutilized, astonishing, and bitterly touching. Underutilized, among other things, was a decrepit glass display case with a door that wouldn't stay closed. A wedge of paper was the only thing that could keep it shut. Inside a proper classroom, such a display case usually held photos of successful alumni or of the principal with ministers of education, or vice-principals with vice-ministers of education; or it would be used to display plaques, medals, certificates, and trophies of the school's prestigious achievements. But in our class, the big glass display case stood untouched in the corner. It was a pathetic fixture completely void of content because no government officials wanted to visit our teachers, there were no graduates to be proud of, and we certainly hadn't achieved anything prestigious yet.
Unlike other elementary school classrooms, there were no multiplication tables inside our classroom. We also had no calendar. There wasn't even a picture of the President and VicePresident of Indonesia or our state symbol—the strange bird with an eight-feathered tail always looking to the right. The one thing we had hanging up in our class was a poster. It was directly behind Bu Mus' desk, and it was there to cover up a big hole in one of the wall planks. The poster showed a man with a dense beard. He wore a long, flowing robe and had a guitar stylishly slung over his shoulder. His melancholic eyes were aflame, like he had already experienced life's tremendous trials, and he appeared truly determined to oppose all wickedness on the face of this earth. He was sneaking a peek at the sky, and a lot of money was falling down toward his face. He was Rhoma Irama, the dangdut singer, a Malay backcountry idol—our Elvis Presley. On the bottom of the poster were two statements that, when I first