Beureunoen — pronounced Bernoen — is a place in the vallei of Pidië on the Atjeh-tram, the seat of the oeléebalang of Keumangan, Teukoe Oemar. From Beureunoen on the Atjeh-tram there is a connection to Lam Meulo, which lies south-west and is the chief place of the onderafdeeling of that name. Within the yard of the chief’s dwelling at Beureunoen stands a new house in the Atjehnese style, entirely decorated with carving and with the mouldings picked out in colours, which has revived, at least for a few years, the declining art of Atjehnese wood-carving.
Bernoen was a place on the North Coast of Atjeh, the seat of the Acehnese chief Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen, where the ophthalmologist Dr. J. Tijssen conducted part of the cataract campaign recorded in Een strijd in Atjeh (1934). The name as printed in the source is Bernoen; it corresponds to the district and market town known in modern orthography as Beureunuen, in the Pidie country of the north coast.
The campaign at Bernoen
The pamphlet’s account of Bernoen turns wholly on the dealings between the doctor and the chief. Observing the etiquette due to a personage of his weight, Tijssen requested an audience and asked the chief to gather all the blind he could find. The chief, out of humour and much afflicted by the malaise, objected that it would help little and give much soesah, and went off grumbling; but his sense of honour had been struck, and by the next morning everything was arranged “in de puntjes.”
From the great crowd assembled Tijssen selected eight sufferers; five were operated on at once for cataract, and five days later all five could see. There followed a great rush of patients, in which the chief took increasing personal pleasure and exerted himself to help. At Tijssen’s departure the chief asked the celebrated question “Blanda betoel?” — is the gentleman a real Dutchman? — which Tijssen recorded as the finest of insults and as evidence that cataract operations sometimes have a political side.
Context
Bernoen lay in the coastal belt where Tijssen had worked earlier, and which he called the East or so-called North Coast, in distinction from the West Coast he travelled in 1933. It was in four small villages of this North Coast that he had in 1923 caused the blind to be assembled and found two hundred and twenty-six of them; and it was here that in the campaign of 1932 he operated on eighty-three persons in twenty-six days, in a small polyclinic building, in an administrative office and in a buffalo stable. The cover photograph of the pamphlet shows treated cataract patients in the kampong of Long Poetoe on the same coast.
See Also
- Verkenningen in Atjeh (1923)
- Teukoe Oemar van Bernoen
- J. Tijssen
- Cataract campaign on the North Coast of Atjeh (1932)
- Noordkust van Atjeh
- Long Poetoe
- Een strijd in Atjeh (1934)
- Pedir
- 1933
Account from Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu
Place on the asweg where every Saturday a busy cattle pasar (livestock market) is held. Just off the road lies the residence of Teukoe Oemar Keumangan, former ‘crowned king of Pidië’.
Source: J. Jongejans, Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 64.
Sources
Verkenningen in Atjeh, by Dr. R. Broersma (De Locomotief, October 1923), passim.
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. 6–7.
Acknowledgement of sources. This article combines material from the publications cited above; the material newly added derives from Atjeh in de Tweede Kamer (Amsterdam: J. A. Fortuijn, 1897) and Een strijd in Atjeh (Rotterdam: N.V. Drukkerij Korteweg for the Vereeniging „SIMAVI”, 1934). Dutch passages are quoted in the original with an English rendering.
Land en Volk van Atjeh Vroeger en Nu, by J. Jongejans, Oud-Resident van het Gewest Atjeh en Onderhoorigheden, with a foreword by Dr. H. Colijn (Baarn: Hollandia Drukkerij N.V., c. 1938), pp. 383.