Ferry Herwanto was born in 1995 in Pekanbaru, Riau, Indonesia. Pekanbaru is the capital of Riau province on Sumatra island. It is located along the Siak River and suffers from seasonal haze from forest fires used to clear land for oil palm plantations. Many residents of Riau, including Ferry's family, work as farmers harvesting oil palms. The work is difficult, requiring climbing tall trees up to 25 meters using a long sickle. Ferry tried using the sickle but found it too heavy and instead uses a tool called an angkong. When it rains, the muddy roads to the fields are dangerous and slippery, and leeches called
1. My Hometown
My name is Ferry Herwanto,I was born on February 2nd,1995 in pekanbaru now my age
is 19 years old , my mother and my father were born in central java but they moved to riau
province since long - long time ago, I don't know exactly when.I would like to tell story about
my hometown.
Pekanbaru is the capital of Riau,riau isa province in Indonesia on the island of Sumatra.It
is located by the Siak River. Pekanbaru regularly suffers from haze problems due to forest fires,
particularly in the dry season.due to the needs of oil palms plantations that make people have
no choice but to burn all the trees and not only to surrounding the Riau Province regions but
also towards countries like Malaysia and Singapore.
Many of Riau citizen are farmer,they are farmingoil palms as their work, My family also
farming oil palm,we harvest them every week each month,work as palm oil farmer isn’t as easy
as it look, the palm tree’s height are about 25 meter maybe I don’t know exactly but that the
heaviest part of this job,we using sickle that called Egrek and it size as long as the tree’s height.
I ever tried to lift and harvest the palm fruit,and that palm tree’s height is about 10 meter and
guess what, I can’t do it, the sickle is too heavy for me,I chose to taking up the palm oil fruit
with angkong, and I can do it.
When rain, I completely hate it,theroads become slippery and muddy because in my
hometown the way to palm oil field isn’t paved yet,and if we harvest them after rain there is so
much leech, this leech called ‘Pacet’ and I often bitten by this leech.
Since Last 4 years ago I live in solo to continue my study and I miss my parent, I came
back to pekanbaru every years. I think only that the story from me about my hometown
pekanbaru, thank you for your attention.