De malaise — the world economic depression of the early 1930s — appears twice in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934) as a condition shaping the circumstances of Dr. J. Tijssen’s medical campaigns in Atjeh and the Batak country.
Effect on an Acehnese chief
The first instance concerns Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen, the chief of Bernoen on the North Coast of Atjeh. When Tijssen asked him to assemble the blind of his district, “Teukoe Oemar was erg uit zijn humeur. Redenen van persoonlijken aard, en meer algemeene. Teukoe Oemar had veel, zeer veel te lijden van de malaise…” — Teukoe Oemar was much out of humour. Reasons of a personal nature, and more general ones. Teukoe Oemar had much, very much, to suffer from the depression… He therefore objected that the undertaking would help little and give much soesah, all for nothing — until his sense of honour was engaged and he arranged everything perfectly the following morning.
Effect on the Batak taxi drivers
The second instance concerns the origin of the funds that financed the Samosir campaign. “Toen eenige jaren geleden de malaise de taxi-chauffeurs in hun bestaan bedreigde, ontdekten eenige van deze slimme heeren een wonderbron, die tegen alle ziekten genezing bood.” — When some years ago the depression threatened the taxi-drivers in their livelihood, some of these shrewd gentlemen discovered a miraculous spring which offered healing against all diseases. The spring — that of Bakara — was very remote, and the conveyance of the thousands of native bathers gave the drivers, in a country without railways, a good plate of rice; more than a hundred thousand people were carried there in a short time. The sanitary levy of ten cents per bather that the administration was obliged to impose left a surplus of some thousands of guilders, out of which the administration supported Tijssen’s work.
Significance
Both passages illustrate the depression as it reached the village level of the outer islands: a chief impoverished and reluctant to spend effort on an undertaking that promised no return, and unemployed drivers inventing a pilgrimage traffic. Tijssen’s own argument for kampong medicine was framed in the same economic climate: “Wij moeten genoegen nemen met het mindere, juist in dezen tijd, nu voor het meerdere het geld gaat ontbreken. Maar dat mindere dan ook doen zoo effectief mogelijk.” — We must be content with the lesser, precisely in this time, now that for the greater the money begins to fail. But then do that lesser as effectively as possible.
See Also
- Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen
- Bakara
- J. Tijssen
- Kampong medicine in Atjeh
- Trachoma campaign on Samosir (1933)
- Soesah
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- 1933
Source
Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad), door Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen, met een voorrede van den heer H. Wanting, redacteur Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg, uitgave van de Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934), pp. 6, 8, 12–13.
Acknowledgement of sources. The material in this article derives from Een strijd in Atjeh (Een oogarts op het oorlogspad) by Mr. C. Graadt van Roggen (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.