The Rain Stopper

Photo by Chris Gleisner

All this terrible weather lately in the Southern Hemisphere reminded me of an interesting guy photographer Chris Gleisner and I met while in Indonesia a few years back. A person who could come in handy now.

It was pouring with rain and there was definitely no hint of a rainbow on the horizon. Early wet season in East Java, the main island of Indonesia.

Players in an Ernst and Young expat accountantsgolfing tournament at the Finna Golf and Country Club resort near Surabaya battled on regardless.

But next to the 18th green we came across a disheveled looking old man in a worn black suit, white shirt, and crumpled hat, smoking a large roll your own kretek cigarette and looking not the least bit perturbed about getting wet.

I noticed his fingers were covered in large, exotic rings as he handed me his card.Red writing on white, in Indonesian it said Pawang Hujan, dll, whichtranslates as “rain stopper, etc”.

I learnt Mr P Anom Kartowiyono was the local magic man who comes up from his village whenever needed, to stop the rain spoiling a day’s play. The “etc” stood for his other talents – palm reading, fortune telling and so on (illustrated on his card by a genie emerging from an Aladdin’s lamp).

Many locals believe such rain stoppers have the power to move storms and they are hired by golf clubs and event organizers (such as weddings) throughout Indonesia’s 18,000 islands.

They are normally paid on commission, depending on whether the rain stops or not.

The club's manager at the time, Richard T.Wilson, who hailed originally from Texas, said s Mr Kartowiyono’s wife had complained to him during the previous particularly heavy rainy season that if the rain didn’t stop the family would starve. She begged for an out-of-season payment.

Normally rain stoppers use talismans that they place around an area where they don’t want rain and speak to the gods in a partly-Arabic mantra, despite their tradition being animist and pre-Muslim.

Mr Wilson said if he doesn’t hire a rain stopper and it rains, he’s in trouble. And he's castigated if he does hire one and it still rains. But to be on the safe side Mr Kartowiyono was invited back again.

What we could have done with recently, especially with the cyclone in northern Australia, though is a wind-stopper.