A Journey Through Time
My flight from Jakarta to Jayapura, with two transits in-between, lasted more than six hours. The last transit was in Biak, 55 flying minutes from Sentani Airport, within the Jayapura Regency. When the plane descended from its previous altitude to land at the Sentani Airport, I saw clouds edging away and presented me the stunning surface of a huge lake. Flanked by numerous, countless hills around the lake, it provides an astonishing view. My partner, the photographer, sitting behind me on the plane, shed light on me that down there is Lake Sentani. The word sentani is surprisingly foreign to the Sentani language itself. There exist diverse ideas and opinions regarding the origin of the word. The most widely held is being the idea that it sprung out of Japanese, which means thousand hills . There are in fact numerous hills surrounding Lake Sentani. Nevertheless, I have consulted a Web site for a free Kanji translation, which states that sen denotes thousand in Japanese, while tani means valley , ravine or mountain stream . This idea is, to some extent, strange, as the Japanese occupied the area only during the Second World War, while there are anthropological and ethnographical studies done by Europeans, which already mention Sentani , years before the Japanese entered the area in 1942.
An ondoafi (tribal chief) I met by chance, on the contrary, argued that the word is derived from Santa Annie , the Portuguese name for the place. The tribal chief s argument may carry weight, since the first European contact with Papua was made by Portuguese and/or Spanish sailors in the 16th century.
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For my part, I like to cling on the information provided by Jan H. Ramandei s Dari Samudranta ke Iriyan Jaya (1997) that Sentani s real name is Puyakha. Puyakha in Sentani language means an obvious feature , while Puyakhapu is a lake/waterway owned and controlled by Puyakha. The name stems from a story surrounding the purchase of water at Mount Dofonsoro by two ancestors of the Sentanis who had their home in Yonokhom Island. The word sentani itself sprung from hedam which later converted into setam, and then to sentani. The word hedam is still detectable in the ondofolo (traditional chief) of the Ohei tribe.
Earliest Human Inhabitants The meaning of hedam or setam is far-reaching, perhaps linked to the vastness of Lake Sentani. People inhabiting the area are known as the Sentanis, which is now administratively incorporated under one district consisting of 24 villages. According to an indigenous
Page 7 - Sunset in Sentani; photo taken from Mount Ifar. Next page - Sentani Airport with the Cyclops Mountains in the background.