Orphans, victims and families An ethnography of children in Aceh
Silvia Vignato
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Abstract
30 years of civil conflict and a few minutes tsunami left Aceh crawling with “orphans”, that is, children who have lost at least one of their parents. There are no final statistics on the subject, but according to the Dinas Sosial (Dinsos - Department of Social Affairs) , in the region, in 2009 there were at least 80.000 orphans (about 69.000 of them lost their father, 7.000 lost their mother, 4.000 lost both parents). Sources in the Organisasi Konferens Islam (OKI – Islamic Relief) add at least 40.000 more . This made up for roughly 20% of the whole of Aceh population aged between 0 and 19 (Aceh dalam angka 2008), and points to orphanhood as a somewhat normal condition for post conflict Acehnese children . As Helen Morton (1996:7-18) underlines, “childhood” is a collective process and children contribute to shaping culture as much as they are receivers of their elders’ cultural heritage. Besides, in the specific Indonesian case, Strassler shows how some children are trained to voice an interpretation of their times which becomes dominant through the mediatic use of the very idea of “child” (Strassler 2006). I hold, then, that in the era of peace, Acehnese culture is going to be deeply marked by the presence of the orphans and their experience of themselves, as well as by the discourse on orphans and “neglected” children; already, what is said and done about children says a lot about Aceh’s conception of the future. Unveiling a fragment of this process is the matter of this article. More specifically, I consider some Acehnese orphans who grow up in institutions called panti asuhan, “home for the care of the needy”, as well as in dayah or pesantren, Islamic residential schools . My fieldwork has revolved around some of these institutions, their inmates, their families and the groups they come from in Aceh Besar and Bireuen . The children I worked with were between 7 and 18 years old, with a large majority in the 10-16 age span. In the following pages, I first describe what the idea of “orphanhood” conveys for the Acehnese I came in touch with, then turn to the dialogue between families and institutions in some specific cases. This will relate the astonishingly large majority of fatherless children (yatim) to practices and ideas of marriage and parenthood in a matrilocal, albeit not uniquely matrilineal, society, where single women (janda) are not an exception. The conclusions highlight how fatherless and motherless children must be considered with attention, especially as far as the “conflict orphans” are concerned, and how the idea of peace seems to be gendered and points to a transformation in gender ideologies.
