Fading Joy

Kompas/Handining

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Do not be in a hurry to reach adulthood. There is no need to be in a rush to grow up, because joy peaks in childhood.

This was the advice a father gave his children during a light weekend conversation. At first glance, the advice may seem strange and perhaps raises many questions. Usually, parents want their children to grow up quickly and mature, so that they can immediately set out to attain their ideals.

Long before the online gaming fever, the children of old played with pull-toy cars made from the peels of Balinese oranges. The main body was made of a symmetrical section from a Balinese orange peel. The upper part was made of other, small symmetrical sections of orange peels. The four wheels were made of the same material, assembled with very simple tools, so it was difficult to make them exactly the same size.

The frame connecting the body, roof and wheels were made of small sticks of bamboo. A length of raffia was tied to the orange-peel car, which could then be pulled along, cruising the roads anywhere the children liked.

Within a day or two, the orange peels would wither and shrivel up, so the car would run in a rickety way, its wheels no longer balanced. Its color would also change. But back then, children still dragged the cars behind them everywhere.

These orange-peel cars were even raced against those of other children until finally, the cars fell apart on the gravel streets. There was no need to worry, as there was an abundant supply of Balinese orange peels. They would simply make new cars that would fall apart again later.

A rare thing

That is how joy was born. Making toys with their own hands, borrowing a knife from their mother\'s kitchen, teasing each other at their funny-looking cars that didn’t look anything like a real car, laughing out loud, and then playing together until dusk.

Children back then were also accustomed to play with bamboo cannons, made of two sections of old bamboo that they cut down themselves. A hole was made in the base of the first section, which was then filled with kerosene and a rag. A small bamboo stick was inserted into the hole of the handmade cannon as a fuse.

After that, a succession of bangs followed from one kampong to the next. Sometimes, these bamboo cannons were also used to play “war”, typically in the paddy fields after the harvest. One group of children with five bamboo cannons would face another group of children at a distance of about 150 meters. Before lighting their cannons upon the order to “fire!”, coconut shells were dropped into the cannons. The loud chain of sounds grew merrier as coconut shell fragments  flew everywhere.

There was no standard rule to determine the winner of the “war”. Even so, what was most interesting about the game was the missing eyelashes of the cannon operators, which were burned off by the flames that shot backward from the cannon balls. Small sparks flew out of heated bamboo bore. Joy and merriment were again born. The two opposing troops laughed with glee at their friends’ faces, blackened with charcoal and missing eyelashes from exposure to flames from the bamboo cannon.

And who does not know hide-and-seek? There is no area in Indonesia that doesn’t play this game, even though its name and rules might be different. This popular game created a lot of joy, an impossible feat once the children grew up.

If a group of children hid too well, the child who was “it” left and went home without making a sound. Even after they had huddled for hours, hiding, “it” never came to find them. As the day turned to dusk, what appeared instead was a mother crying out as though she had lost her child. As soon as they came out of hiding, they were disappointed, but also laughing, because they had all been deceived! So the next day, they played the game again.

Today, joy for the sake of joy is a rare thing, both in villages and in big cities. Once, during the school holidays, I took my children to my hometown in Sumatera. I wanted to introduce the adu sijontu, or cricket fights, a game I enjoyed as a child.

Before we left to go to the chili field that had been harvested in search of several male crickets, I asked one of my neighbors’ children about where we could find crickets. He simply shook his head. It wasn’t just because he couldn’t show us where the crickets lived, but because he didn’t really know what crickets were.

Addicted to gadgets

The feet of today\'s village children are no longer familiar with the rice fields. After school, they sit and jostled each other to play videogames at local PlayStation (PS) arcades. If the PS arcades were full, they spent hours glued to their smart phones in their rooms, playing online games. They are connected through an internet network in the digital game, but they never meet each other, even though they live in the same village.

The gadget addiction that is infecting the ”Kids Jaman Now” (today’s kids) has made them reluctant to get up and move around, and they never go out into open nature. Michael Rich (2015), a researcher of the Center on Media and Child Health at Boston Children’s Hospital, said that by 2013, at least 70 percent of children under 8 used gadgets, such as smartphones, tablets and iPods. In 2011, this figure was only 38 percent.

The results of a 2014 study reported by uswitch.com also showed that more than a quarter of the world’s children had mobile phones before they were 8 years old. The results from the same study showed that one in three children began using smartphones at the age of 3. The report also showed that millions of children were addicted to the device.

If you doubt this, check out how children behave when they don’t have their gadgets while on a picnic, or when their Wi-Fi networks at home are disrupted. They will become ill tempered and anxious, because their habit of playing in the virtual world has become their second life. Where, then, are the gundu, congklak, jumping rope, gobak sodor, pletokan, engklek, and the many other children’s games of the archipelago, the exact number of which is unknown?

It is possible that several of these games have been digitalized so that they can be played through digital applications, but the creative process of making toys, the physical interaction among friends of the same age, the closeness of playing group games, and the joy that comes from playing together occur in the real world, and cannot be replaced by the hysteria of virtual gaming. Instead of experience the joy of togetherness, the ”Kids Jaman Now” generation are sinking into the hole of isolation.

DAMHURI MUHAMMAD

Man of letters; writer of Anak-anak Masa Lalu (Children of the Past, 2015)