JAKARTA (AFP) — US President Barack Obama’s former classmates in Indonesia brimmed with pride and expectation Wednesday after the chubby kid they knew as Barry became the most powerful man in the world.
Dewi Asmara Oetojo, a lawmaker in Indonesia’s parliament who went to primary school with Obama in Jakarta in the late 1960s, said her old classmate was a peacemaker with a “global” vision.
“For sure we’re very proud and grateful that Barry, who was part of our childhood, has been elected president of the most powerful country in the world,” she told AFP the morning after Obama’s inauguration.
“We’re convinced that he’ll be able to bring change because even when he was a kid he already had a ‘go global’ attitude.
“It will be easy for him to bridge all the differences between West and East. He will bring peace to the world.”
Obama’s ex-classmates, who have followed his rise to the presidency, gathered Wednesday at his old school in the leafy central Jakarta suburb of Menteng for a party to celebrate the inauguration.
“We all want to congratulate Barry, his wife and his daughters and we will have a party here at our former school to celebrate his inauguration,” Oetojo said.
US Ambassador Cameron Hume joked in a speech to the gathering of former and current students of Menteng One primary school that he hoped to see Obama “shooting hoops” at the school on a visit to Indonesia soon.
The son of a white American mother and a black Kenyan father, Obama was raised in Hawaii and moved to Indonesia when he was six after his divorced mother remarried an Indonesian.
In his memoirs he recalled his time in Indonesia as the “bounty of a young man’s life.”
Onny Padma said he was “very, very, very proud” of his old playmate.
“It never crossed my mind that my friend, an Afro-American with a chubby face, would be elected as American president,” he said.
“He has a good understanding about Asian people. When he lived here he learned a lot about our culture. It will be easier for him to build better ties between Indonesia, Asia and America.”
Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world and has had a love-hate relationship with the United States since the 1960s, marked by US support for military dictator Suharto, who was ousted in 1998.
Many Indonesians opposed the Bush administration’s “war on terror” and its approach to foreign relations, and are hoping Obama brings a new style to US leadership with an emphasis on dialogue and understanding.
About 21 pupils from Obama’s old primary school performed traditional dances at a dinner in a posh hotel here late Tuesday to celebrate his inauguration.
One child read a letter entitled “Hope, Prayers and Expectations of the Children of Indonesia,” calling for an end to poverty and war and for better education around the world.
Newspaper salesman Iwan Tresna, 45, said he was doing brisk business as he wandered the tightly packed traffic jams in central Jakarta offering the news to motorists with the cry: “Obama is president! Buy! Buy!”
“Normally sales pick up when there’s big news. I’ve sold 80 copies today from 6:00 am to 11:00 am when normally I’d have only sold 60,” he told AFP.
“I think I can finish early today. I usually finish at 7:00 pm but today I can go home at 3:00 pm,” he added with a grin.
He said many people were buying two copies of newspapers when usually they would only buy one.
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