Everyone called her Elizabeth Taylor

Josta Rumahlaiselan and Wilma Pattinama, both employees of the organization HALIN in Jakarta, grew up in Jakarta in the fifties and sixties. One of their fellow school girls was Betty. Betty was, so it turned out much later, the child of a Dutch soldier. Wilma: “She was so beautiful that everyone at our school called her ‘Elizabeth Taylor’.”

Kalimantan

Josta recalls: “She was really very different from the other children. She was blonde, and she had a different face than the rest of us.”
At that time Josta and Wilma did not know that Betty was the child of a Dutch soldier. Her father had been stationed in Kalimantan, and Betty herself was also born in Kalimantan. At an early age she came to Jakarta and later in life she returned to Kalimantan.

Only much later, when they were already grown up, Betty told Josta: “I am the child of a Dutchman who has encamped as a soldier in Kalimantan."
Betty had never known her father. She was born in 1950, when her father had probably already gone back to the Netherlands. She did not even know her mother. She was taking care of by her foster parents, the Sirgar family. During her years at school she has never ever talked about her origins with her ​​schoolmates.

Unfortunately, Betty has died not so long ago, so we can not personally hear her story.

Thanks to Josta Rumahlaiselan and Wilma Pattinama, Jakarta, 8 Febr. 2012