EDR's childhood

Pakantan, Sumatra (editorial by Dr. Irene Artes Hedlin)

In the fall of 1869, Heinrich and Aganetha Dirks were sent out as the first missionaries from the Molotschna Mennonite settlement. The Dutch-Mennonite missionary society, which was also being supported by the Russian Mennonites, sent them to Sumatra, where they founded the mission station Pakantan in 1871.

The Dirks lived among the Angkola-Mandailing Bataks, one of four main language groups of the Batak people of Sumatra. At that time, the Bataks were animists. Now most of the approximately one million Angkola-Mandailing Bataks are Mudslim, about 10% are Christian.

The church in Pakantan still exists, together with a very small one in the larger neighboring city of Muara Sipongi. Evangeline’s great-grand-daughter, Diane Evangeline (Valentine Rempel janzen’s daughter traveled in May 1986 to Sumatra to find Pakantan, her great-grandmother's place of birth. She was able to visit this village and was greeted there as the great-great-granddaughter of Heinrich Dirks. To get to Pakantan, she went from Padang on the west coast of Sumatra to Bukittinggi. From there she traveled six hours by bus to the city of Padang Sidempuan. Then she had another six-hour bus ride to the village of Pakantan.

Evangeline Dirks was born on May 26, 1873 in Sumatra as the third child, after her sister Elisabeth and brother Heinrich, Jr. There she spent the first eight years of her life.

Childhood in Sumatra

In a notebook my grandmother wrote:

Since you (Irene) have asked me, I will tell you of my childhood. My earliest memory goes back to the time when I was not yet two-years-old and was still being carried by Kiya, my babysitter. It concerned our white poodle and her puppies. Kiya had shown them to me in the shed. When I saw men coming and carrying the shed away to another place, I became so concerned about the puppies, that I cried loudly, for I could not yet speak. My mother has confirmed this incident.

My childhood was spent on the tropical island of Sumatra. I can still see the mountains and tropical forest circling around me after we children had made ourselves dizzy by spinning ourselves around. The highest mountain was the Sikulbo. Not too far away two rivers rushed through rice fields. In one of them, I might have drowned had not Caroline, our native foster sister, caught me. In the middle of the river stood a flat rock, which could be reached by stepping on a row of big stones. While Caroline was carrying my brother there, I hopped along behind her and fell into the water.

The worst part was that, after being rescued, I had to walk home wearing Pap’s jacket, which reached down to my feet. As it was rice harvest time, the Batak women saw me and laughed. Of course, they would have simply let their child walk home without anything on. 

Smaller children wore strings of beads with little bells around their hips and around their neck and looked quite charming. The adults, too, wore little and my mother presented them with jackets and taught them modesty. Now 80 years later the Batak people are quite cultured, have their own ministers and schools and are fully dressed.

There are now roads throughout the whole island, whereas my father, as a pioneer, always had to go on foot through rivers and jungle. In the water, leeches would attach themselves to his feet and in the forest, two men with long resin-soaked torches would accompany him to provide protection against wild animals. My mother would always look from the veranda towards a spot in the mountains, where she could see them until they disappeared behind a bend. It was always a great joy, when on the day of my father’s expected return, we looked for him there and saw him in the distance. When we left Pakantan, we were accompanied by the Bataks, both Christian and pagans, up to that spot, and from there we saw our station for the last time.

In another part of her writings, Evangeline recalled:

As I look back to my childhood in Pakantan, I realize that as a child of the tropics, I was very sensitive. How often the air seemed to sparkle as if filled with little spheres and needles. In the afternoon when my parents wanted to rest, I used to sit still on the veranda and look towards the wood-covered mountains from where every evening the loud screeching of monkeys and other animals could be heard, repeated by an echo. Then my feet would go to sleep and I felt a terrible prickling sensation in the soles of my feet.

My mother said that I was a well-behaved little girl, and yet even then I experienced mental anguish because I realized my good behavior was really not that good. Once when we accompanied our parents on a walk in the garden between the tall rose hedges, we saw a wonderful red sunset. Liese said that maybe it is burning there as a sign of the end of the world. This frightened me and I ran off, and when Mother came into the bedroom, a little trembling sinner lay in her bed because of fear of the end of the world and hell. Only my mother could comfort me. She often told us that we should behave ourselves, but this was so difficult.

I had a desire to be good and well behaved, so that my dear parents would be pleased, but I could not achieve this. I already knew a string of bad words in Batak, which accused me and which I was not able to forget. This made me feel guilty

I also remember that for a while I would wake up with a start because I dreamt that the wasps were flying towards me. My father would hold me on his lap for a long time until I quietly fell asleep. I once happened to see a sheep being slaughtered and the blood squirted out. I became quite ill and threw up. After that I could not eat meat for a long time, and later only a little white meat from a chicken.

I had no playmates and liked to play with my younger brother David and his Batak friend, who was called Sikerek (monkey). He showed us which sprouts, roots, or blossoms were edible. We were always on the lookout for something to eat, since we had no cookies or candy.

It was time for us older children to go to school, and so we attended classes taught by Teacher Paul, one of the first Christians in Pakantan, whom Father had trained. He was an excellent teacher of geography, teaching us the names of mountains, rivers and cities in the world. Every day we repeated the Batak multiplication table by singing it, while Teacher Paul kept time.

Two Batak children lived with us. They were Johannes Lubis and his sister Caroline. My parents brought Johannes with them to Europe to get training as a minister and to help look after the small children. But he was so homesick that he returned home much sooner than planned. He studied in the teacher’s college in Depok, Java, and lived as a Christian in his community.

Farewell to Pakantan

In May 1881, when I was eight years old, our family returned to Gnadenfeld. Since my parents were saying goodbye, there was much weeping and I, too, sensed some of the pain. Therefore, being half a Batak, I put on a piteous mien and started to wail as I had seen women mourners do.  Our sedan bearers saw this and laughed. I stopped my act when my older brother Heinrich said I should be ashamed of myself, for I was not a Batak girl and was on my way to Europe.

Then we all had to get into the sedan chairs, two in each. We were carried most of the way, while Papa accompanied the long train riding a horse. Porters carried the baggage and the food on their heads. After three weeks we reached the seaport town of Padang, where we had to wait for a ship that would take us to Holland.

For us children, the journey to Padang was not as toilsome or monotonous as it was for the grown-ups. Again and again, we asked the porters who happened to be free at the moment to hand us flowers as we sat in our sedan chairs. We saw monkeys following us along in the trees or watching us while they shielded their eyes with their hands.

It was a clear starry night when we stopped in a government shelter, a small house in the middle of the tropical forest. However, because there were wasps inside the house, we had to spend the night outside in our sedan chairs. I awoke in the night and amidst the many different sounds made by the insects, I heard the cry of the tiger bird in the forest. I wanted to go to Mother, but she was washing clothes by the river with a couple of men. Since the bird is supposed to stay close to the tiger, whose teeth it picks off meat remains, I was very frightened. At last my mother came back and I felt safe and secure. “Pray, my child, and be quiet and go to sleep. We are watching and God is protecting us,” she said. The river was very wide at this point and we crossed it on a raft. In Padang, we went to see the ocean and watched the waves break against the shore. The ship arrived, with the Dutch flag waving high, and anchored three kilometers away at a small island called Monkey Hill.

On a Sunday afternoon we departed in two boats, accompanied by our host Mr. Liedman and by a missionary from Nias Island, Mr. Dornsaft. We called him Uncle Dornsaft, because he had played with us children and we liked him very much.  The weather was good when we left, but a storm arose. The waves were so high that we got wet and we were ordered to kneel down and hold on tightly to the benches in the boat. The second boat with the baggage, in which our Batak brother Johannes Lubis was, was lost from sight. Our boat rolled terribly and our father called to us again and again to hold on tightly. Mother held little Anna, just three months old, and Uncle Dornsaft helped shield Margarete and Maria. The rowers stopped rowing. I do not recall being afraid because I had my parents so close and also dear Uncle Dornsaft. They sang the beautiful hymn:

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty,

The King of creation

O my soul, praise Him,

For He is thy health and salvation.

At last the storm subsided and we reached the ship. Father called, “Koning der Nederlands!” and he answered with a loud “Ahoy!” A strong sailor waited on the ship’s ladder to help us up one by one into the ship. The boat was still being tossed by the waves, so each time the boat was driven against the ship, Father would hold out a child. I was taken up with such a strong grip and placed so quickly onto the deck that I felt dizzy and quite ill and was finally put to bed.

The second boat with our baggage and Johannes Lubis and the faithful Sultan Mogol also reached our vessel. The Sultan Mogol was a heathen priest who, out of love for my father, had accompanied us the whole long journey and even out to the ship. He lay the whole night beside Father’s bed and went back on a sloop that arrived the next morning with passengers. Although he was so devoted to my father, he remained a heathen. On the journey to Padang, he walked in front of Mother's sedan chair, admonishing the sedan bearers to carry the Nyonya well and pointed out a hole here and a stone there, saying they should be careful. Thus a heathen man was our protector and helper.

On board ship

Not counting us there were about forty children on board, who were being sent to school in Holland. They were children of Dutch government officials. Some of them were of mixed parentage. A strict lady was in charge of them. Piet and Alexander were two boys who misbehaved a lot. They were constantly squabbling, pinching and fighting. Once the lady held Piet over the railing and threatened to drop him, after which his behavior improved.

The first mate was German and all called him “Prince Hendrick.” When he appeared with a bowl of candy, all the children surrounded him. He made sure that the German children also got something, even though all, except my older sister, spoke only Batak. My older sister Elisabeth was very gifted and she had learned German from our parents, and even some French.

This time we were not traveling on a sailing ship as my parents had done twelve years before, but on a big steamship, the “Koning der Nederlands.” For three weeks, no land was in sight. Therefore, a small box full of earth stood on deck for the travelers to look at.  We came through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal up to Port Said. In the distance, we saw Mount Sinai and the desert at the place where the Israelites crossed the Red Sea.

Dark-skinned boys ran alongside the ship as we passed through the Suez Canal and, if a coin was thrown into the water, they were able to retrieve it every time. That is how skilful they were.

Negroes also came to the ship with baskets of fruit. A tall black man wearing a crimson cape and hat brought a large basket of seashells. Many children stood around him and admired them. I took a tiny seashell, the size of a button, black with red dots. It seemed the most beautiful one to me. Suddenly, the tall Negro pounced on the two boys Piet and Alexander and pulled out several seashells from their pockets and chased us all away. How glad I was that he had not noticed me. I immediately went down to our cabin with the seashell. There I examined it for a while, but my joy was gone, for a quiet voice branded me as a thief, and the little seashell disappeared in Mother’s buttonbag. When Mother saw it later, she asked where it might have come from, and I said that I had found it. “It is a pretty little seashell,” she said and put it back. I never had any pleasure in it again, for a stern inner voice said to me, “Stealing, stealing, lying, very bad.” It remained thus for a long time.

Evangeline’s conversion

In school, I had to learn to read and write German and Russian. In our primer were little stories that dealt with lying and stealing. The matter of the seashell had not been straightened out and I felt condemned. I was the worst child in the world, but only I knew it.

I loved my parents very much and I encouraged my younger brothers and sisters to be obedient. My mother praised me for this and was pleased with me. However, I was still unhappy, for although I could not stand lying and stealing, the matter of the seashell had not been put right. I had long since crushed it with a stone and thrown it away. Why did it not let go of me in my heart? In Sunday school we were told about Jesus as a boy and also how ZHe called sinners to repentance to free them from the power of Satan and hell. The song, “Jesus’ Little Lamb” I would have liked to make my own. Yes, I already felt my burden of sin and wanted to repent. But can something be undone again? How could I become Jesus’ lamb? Confess, confess sins, make amends as far as possible! There, confess everything to Mother and ask her forgiveness. I had to think this over for quite a while. Finally, one evening at dusk I happened to be alone with Mother in the room and this seemed to be a suitable time. I told her that I had made up my mind to seek the good, and that I felt guilty about several things, specifically the matter of the seashell and the lie I had told about it. I asked her to forgive me. She looked at me so earnestly and said that it was good that I had told her everything, and that I should also ask our dear Savior for forgiveness.

The next day, I had to watch our geese on the stubble field behind the woods until the sun went down. There, in the quietness by the woods, not far from the cemetery, I found I could sing the song, “Jesus’ Little Lamb” as my very own song. The covenant was made for life. Every day was to belong to God. I wanted to do what was good and to hate and shun evil. How light my heart was and a wonderful peace replaced my troubled mind. A second conversion did not follow. This childhood conversion lasted for my whole life with all its trials and challenges.