i don’t know if i can joke. i think i hit the point of massive culture shock. yesterday we were taken by our ever-generous hosts on a tour of the local area, one of the poorest in Jakarta. The four of us, with an escort, walked no more than a hundred metres to a tiny alleyway, crammed with little shops and dwellings.Dodging the ubiquitous scooters, we wound our way through the narrow streets to a road running by a stinking ditch of black water. almost immediately we were surrounded by kids, all crying ‘Mista! Mista! Hello mista!’ They giggled and shrieked with delight as we took photos, and smiled and laughed at them. They followed us for some time, dancing and singing and shouting. Through another narrow alley now, barely the width of two men abreast, out to the embankment of the train tracks.
All along the railway, there is a shanty town. Hundreds, even thousands of shacks and shanties and lean-tos. A horde of delighted children immediately vacated their soccer game, to cluster around us in an excited, chattering crowd. They weren’t interested in our money or exploiting us – just the excitement of something new, a pretty western girl and big western men. Their makeshift soccer pitch, just a concrete slab with lines painted on, was right next to the railway. As we stood there, showing the kids their pictures on our cameras, a massive train thundered through. We asked Ramon, our superstar guide, if it wasn’t dangerous for the kids to play here. He said, ‘Oh, yes. Very dangerous. They die.’ We crossed the train tracks, and as the rain started to pelt down, we took shelter in a bamboo-and-plastic hut above the river. Below, in the filthy water, men trawled through the shit and trash for plastic and cast-off rubbish to sell. The kids ran back and forth in front of the shelter, through the warm rain, shouting and laughing and calling to us. They were full of joy and playful energy, and it broke my heart to imagine them living and dying in this destitution.
Ramon told us that the government had bulldozed the shanty town only a month or so before, and that this collection of shacks had been rebuilt in only a short time. The residents of this are have nowhere to go.
Continuing on, we walked past the huts where the men sell the paper and plastic and bottles they collect, past tiny shacks selling beer or snacks. The people in the shanty towns are so far beyond desperate that I don’t even have a word for it. But the commercial imperative of Jakarta still holds – that libertarian, economic rationalist message that the poor are poor because the are unwilling or unable to work is proved false by the residents of the Tana Abang slums, wading through mud and shit and filth to earn enough to live? Raising children to play soccer in a railway siding, to die under a train, for their home to be razed to the ground. A poor work ethic doesn’t keep these kids in poverty – institutionalised indifference, corruption, injustice and prejudice does. This is the failure of late capitalism. A kid struck by a train, while his father wades through the detritus of the middle class to put food in that child’s mouth.