Student takes lasting memories home to Indonesia

Dinar Enggar Puspita

By N. Clark Judd

When Dinar Enggar Puspita returns to Indonesia from her stay in Riverdale for the school year, she’ll give a journal to her friends back home.

In it is the story of her time in New York City, which she has been writing throughout her stay. And what a story it is.

So many things were new and different for Ms. Puspita that she isn’t quite sure what her worldview was when she first met her host mother, Naomi Erickson, or arrived in the Skyview apartment where she stayed.

“I forgot what I expected,” Ms. Puspita admitted in a recent interview.

A 17-year-old with a dancer’s grace, a sly sense of humor and a bright smile, Ms. Puspita’s expectations were doubtless challenged in a lot of ways — not all of them pleasant.

Perhaps her most painful memory will be recollections of May 21, when she learned that Riverdale Jewish Center, across the street from the David A. Stein Riverdale/Kingsbridge Academy, MS/HS 141, where she went to school, was one of two local targets in an alleged bomb plot that was halted the night before.

Like her, the purported bombers were Muslim. At least, they professed to be, according to federal prosecutors.

Ms. Puspita, who had never seen the inside of a synagogue until she arrived last year, occasionally performed her afternoon prayers at RJC.

She had a relationship with the synagogue, its rabbi, Jonathan Rosenblatt, and its congregation. She even joined RJC’s congregants for one of their services.

Ms. Puspita had struggled with violence before. Islamic terrorists have committed several attacks in Indonesia in recent years.

But that was different, Ms. Puspita said.

“After 9/11, some people think that Muslims are terrorists. So these guys made it worse,” she said. “As a Muslim,” she later added, “it made me a little, well, embarrassed.”

What happened at RJC was close. Close enough to be scary.

She remembers talking with her family about terrorism years before, when there were attacks on the Indonesian island of Bali. But she and her family live in a city on the island of Java, not Bali. This attempted attack — Ms. Puspita couldn’t finish her thought. It was too unpleasant.

“I thought I was okay to talk about it again,” she later admitted, “but I’m not.”

The bomb plot and its aftermath was a dark stain on a bright stay. While here, she performed with a Harlem hip-hop and jazz class at Aaron Davis Hall at City College. She visited Amish country in western New York and celebrated Thanksgiving with her host mother, Ms. Erickson, and Ms. Erickson’s family. She was in school plays at RKA.

She learned that the Bronx isn’t nearly as scary as it looks in the movies.

Her journal is filled with pages of happy memories, so many memories, she said, that they’re hard to count.

One of the things she will remember is how kind RJC’s congregation was to her. She said she’d rather not think about what four men, who prosecutors say carried murderous intent in their hearts, wanted to do to the people she met and to their house of prayer.

Ms. Erickson says it will be easy to focus on the good.

“Dinar and I also talked about why it was that there wasn’t a single event that stood out in her mind and I think I understand why,” she wrote in an e-mail, after Ms. Dinar’s interview. “I couldn’t think of just one event that stood out for me either. There were just so many special moments throughout the year — the whole year was really special. I think that between us we must have somewhere around 800 pictures.”

Ms. Erickson is a coordinator for the Youth Exchange and Study program, an organization dedicated to sending students to the United States from nations with significant Islamic populations and viceversa. Ms. Puspita was one of four students near Riverdale — another attended Ethical Culture Fieldston School and lived with a family on the Upper West Side, and students from Turkey and Egypt stayed in Connecticut and Hastings-on- Hudson, respectively. Four hundred students were hosted in the U.S. this year through the YES program.

She’s seeking host families for next year, when a new group of students from around the world will seek to come to New York and learn.

This is part of the June 18, 2009 online edition of The Riverdale Press.

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