(Makalah untuk seminar pada “The First Asean Photo Festival”, diselenggarakan Konfederasi Wartawan Asean (CAJ) di Hanoi, Vietnam, 25-26 September 1997).
ONE DAY in 1979, I was with four Indonesian journalists on a tour to Vietnam that brought us to interesting places, includmg Dien Bien Phu. It was a brief visit, but I had strong impressions which stick in my memory until today.
Our team was the second Indonesian group to have visited Dien Bien Phu over the past three decades. (The visitors registrar listed Mr. Ruslan Abdulgani, the former Indonesian foreign minister, who visited Dien Bien Phu early in the 1950s).
While taking a walk through the village, I saw a mortar for pounding rice in a house b
asement. That mortar reminded me of the same tool in my home village in West Sumatera– called “lesung berindik”, used to husk paddy.