Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (57 page)

A couple of days earlier, politicians in Jakarta had mooted taking English out of the primary school curriculum to make more room for religious and moral instruction. I asked Pak Kalend what he thought of the plan. He laughed. Then stared at me. ‘You
are
joking, aren’t you?
Please
say you are joking.’ I shook my head. The self-taught Dayak covered his face with his hands. Then he looked up with a slightly acid smile. ‘Well, as long as they don’t try to stick their oar in here and tell me how I should teach, it can only mean more profits for me.’

By the time I reached Indonesia’s second largest city, Surabaya, by way of tobacco warehouses and volcanic sulphur mines, I was thoroughly disabused of the notion that the whole of Java had turned into a long series of strip malls and identikit housing complexes linked by smooth asphalt roads and populated by the much vaunted ‘rising middle class’. The transformation is on the way, certainly. Some 80 million people now live in parts of Java that the government classifies as urban (using measures of electrification, asphalt roads, percentage working in non-farming jobs and access to services). But that still leaves 57 million in real, old-fashioned villages.

Much in Java still conforms to the descriptions given by the legendary American anthropologist Clifford Geertz as long ago as the 1950s. It is politically hierarchical, certainly, but the tradition of village-level collectivism remains strong in rural areas. And yet people seem to feel that this spirit of social solidarity is under threat, that it may not survive the pressures of the modern economy, much less the wholesale move to that other Java, the McDonald’s, Indomaret, toll-road, gated-community Java that is gobbling up the island, bite by bite.

In other islands, almost every conversation turned eventually to the glories and vicissitudes of regional autonomy. In Java, where people did not feel the same euphoric liberation from Javanese colonialism, the dominant worry was that Java would turn into Jakarta, a monumentally selfish society in which no one worried about their neighbours or even their extended family, a place in which individuals did nothing but struggle to get a leg up over those around them.

The phrase that is universally used to sum up this horrific prospect is ‘
loe loe, gue gue
’. From Jakarta slang, it translates literally as ‘you you, me me’, what’s yours is yours, what’s mine is mine. In sentiment, the closest English equivalent I can think of is ‘dog-eat-dog’. Every time I heard it, I was reminded of the political pow-wows of two decades earlier when Mohammad Mahathir in Malaysia, Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore and Suharto in Indonesia would wax lyrical about ‘Asian Values’. Misguided Westerners could criticize the Asian leaders for stamping on individual rights, they implied, but what the visionary leaders of South East Asia were really doing was protecting a culture that put the good of the collective ahead of the good of the individual.

It is certainly true that Jakarta, with its flooding, traffic and millions of mostly grumpy inhabitants is a shining example of the way in which individual selfishness destroys the common happiness. Surabaya is about a third the size of Jakarta. It sits about three-quarters of the way east along the north coast of Java and has a huge port, a thriving industrial sector, and one of the biggest red-light districts in South East Asia. When I had last visited in the early 2000s, it seemed quite likely that the city would follow Jakarta on the road to perdition. While preparing for an HIV survey in the city, I spent my time counting rent boys along the riverbanks and wading through used condoms and smashed whisky bottles in a vast cemetery whose tombstones doubled as knocking-shops.

Now, a decade later, the riverside cruising areas have turned into well-lit, landscaped parks with free wifi throughout, and Surabaya is virtually litter-free.

It is hard for someone who has not visited Indonesia to feel the full impact of those last five words: Surabaya is virtually litter-free. It is hard, too, to explain just how pervasive garbage is in this country. It is one of the strongest red threads binding the nation, and it is woven from the detritus of the commercial brands that get micro-packaged into sachets and find their way into every kiosk in the land.

All that packaging makes for a lot of litter. At the end of my long boat trip up through the islands of south-west Maluku, when I had carefully consolidated five days’ worth of rubbish into a single plastic bag, I asked the fierce cook on the cargo ship where the bin was. She looked at me as though I had grown a second head, took the bag of rubbish, and threw it into the sea. Another time, someone was telling stories of how strange foreigners are. ‘I’ve even seen them scrunch up a cigarette packet, then put it in their pocket instead of throwing it on the ground!’ he said, laughing. ‘Imagine!’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out: three empty sweet wrappers, the plastic seal off a water bottle, and some used bus tickets. This was so absurd that he had to call everyone else on deck to see it.

There’s such an assumption of littering that some companies even use it to appeal to consumers. Frutamin, a brand of sugary water that comes in various toxic flavours and was until recently owned by Pepsi, is packaged in single-dose plastic cups which turn into pretty coloured flowers if you throw them on the ground and stamp on them just right. There’s no point making old-fashioned tut-tutting noises when you see people throwing garbage on the roadside or into the sea; in most of Indonesia, people will just look at you blankly: what’s your point?

Some of the world’s prettiest beaches are, above the waterline, ankle deep in old flip-flops, leaking batteries, shampoo bottles, instant-noodle cups, old election T-shirts, rusting cans. Occasionally, especially in areas where NGOs like to congregate, you’ll see a hand-painted sign: No Littering! Ten times out of ten, it will be half buried in the backwash of the disposable consumer culture at which Indonesia excels.

And yet the second biggest city in Indonesia is almost litter-free. I was so amazed by this that I went to the town hall to try and find out what was going on. ‘Garbage? Sure!’ Without another question, a friendly guard took me to the fourth floor, and presented me to Ibu Anis, a civil servant who knew all about garbage. I told her I had been struck by the city’s cleanliness, and wanted to know about their policies. ‘Let’s start at the beginning, then,’ she said. I clearly wasn’t the first person to have noticed the transformation of the city.

In 2001, that heady time soon after Suharto lost his grip on the nation, Surabaya’s dump was closed following mass demonstrations by its neighbours. Actually, the dump was there long before the residents. They moved in because there was a good road leading to cleared land. ‘Then they started protesting about the trucks and the noise and the smell,’ said Anis. ‘You wanted to say well, you shouldn’t have built an illegal house next to the dump! But what can you do?’ With the dump closed, the garbage started to pile up in every corner of the city; there was no ignoring it. That made it easy to get a grass-roots movement started, Ibu Anis said. With help from Unilever’s do-good funds, the city trained neighbourhood ‘garbage cadres’. I raised an eyebrow at this: Unilever is one of the biggest producers of household and beauty products in Indonesia, and therefore one of the biggest producers of the shiny packaging that gets dropped in the canals. ‘I know, I know. Ironic, isn’t it?’ said Ibu Anis. But the programme worked; there are now 40,000 volunteers around the city, each organizing recycling in their neighbourhood. Most have also taken on the task of greening their areas; even the narrowest backstreets of Surabaya are lined with murals of open green landscapes fronted with rows of potted plants and flowers.

There’s also a large network of Garbage Banks, run by an NGO with the support of the city government. These are not just places to get rid of recycled materials, like London’s bottle banks. They are real banks, with savings books, cash payments and interest rates. Individuals and neighbourhoods can sign up for an account. Their waste gets weighed and they get paid for it; 5,000 rupiah a kilo for clean plastic if they put it in their savings account, slightly less if they want to be paid in cash. The NGO then sells it on to recycling plants at 7,000.

I visited one of the Garbage Banks. A woman with a hunched back and only one tooth limped in with a sack of plastic bottles. She showed me her savings book; she had over 200,000 rupiah in her account. She would use it, she said, to pay her electricity bill. The Garbage Banks have brokered a deal with the state electricity firm so that people can keep the lights on with their garbage savings. The neighbourhood accounts are usually emptied a few weeks before the annual ‘clean and green’ competition, in which each little clump of city blocks competes fiercely to cover itself with orchids and glory. ‘It’s amazing how hard people will work to win a cup for the neighbourhood and to get their names in the paper,’ Ibu Anis had said. The most energetic Garbage Cadres will be taken on a study tour to Singapore, a favourite source of new ideas for the current Mayor of Surabaya.
*
Trained as an architect, Tri Rismaharini was one of only eight women among Indonesia’s 500-plus heads of government. She was elected Mayor after heading the City Cleanliness Department.

Surabaya seemed to me like a city that had managed to preserve some of the better aspects of Javanese collectivism even while modernizing.
Loe loe, gue gue
was not, after all, the inevitable destination of the road to progress. But I notice that they had done it not with the tools commonly used by the Javanese rajas or the Dutch and Indonesian bureaucrats that inherited their methods. Surabaya did not terrorize the ‘little people’, did not threaten punishment or impose unenforceable fines on people who litter. No, the city did something singularly un-Indonesian. It worked through incentives, rewarding people for doing the right thing rather than punishing them for doing the wrong thing. And it showed that incentives can work at the community level.

Collectivist culture without the feudalism. Perhaps it should become Indonesia’s next Etc.

*
A pall of silence since then has meant that there has been no official reckoning of the number of dead. Estimates range from 200,000 to over one million. A careful review of these estimates is provided by Roger Cribb in his paper of 2001. See Robert Cribb, ‘How Many Deaths? Problems in the statistics of massacre in Indonesia (1965–1966) and East Timor (1975–1980)’. In Ingrid Wessel and Georgia Wimhofer (eds),
Violence in Indonesia
. Hamburg: Abera, 2001, pp. 82–98.

*
The Garbage Bank idea originated in Yogyakarta. ‘We’ll steal good ideas from anywhere and improve on them,’ Ibu Anis had told me when I visited her office. ‘We’re not proud.’

Epilogue

I wended my way back to Jakarta by way of batik workshops and rice farms, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to pack all the Indonesias I had wandered through into a single book, knowing too that there were thousands of other Indonesias still to discover.

At a farewell dinner in Jakarta (my umpteenth over the years) I turned up an hour late, wore a sandal tied on with purple ribbon, and answered my phone at the dinner table, listening patiently to an overweight transgender who had called from Tanimbar, 2,700 kilometres away, tell me how drunk she was. My (Indonesian) friends teased me about how ‘Indonesian’ I had become. I chose to take it as a compliment.

Right at the start of my trip a woman sitting near me on the deck of a ferry, trying to distract a screaming toddler, had pointed and told the child to give sweet granny a kiss. I had looked behind me, but there were no grannies there. The toddler had made for me, and given me a snotty embrace.
Sweet Granny?!
I had been appalled: I was a hard-drinking occasional smoker who could flirt at a bar in several languages and who was competitive even at yoga. Sweet Granny! But as the weeks and months of travel passed, I had settled into the rhythm of ordinary life in extraordinary places, a life that involved repetitive conversations, mindless tasks and an unaccustomed amount of public piety, a life that decidedly did not involve alcohol, cigarettes, or flirting with strangers. And I didn’t mind it.

I waited for boats that were eighteen hours late with little more than a shrug. I watched women balancing jerrycans of water over their shoulders, on their backs and on their heads all at once, and never asked if they had considered making a wheelbarrow. When I did ask questions, I often settled quickly for the most common answer:
Begitulah
. ‘That’s just the way it is.’ Over time, I grew to accept that there is a very great deal about Indonesia, the world and life in general that I will just never know.

Of some things, though, I have become more sure. On the way to the airport as I was leaving Indonesia after thirteen months of travel, the retired architect who drove my cab said he didn’t think Indonesia could withstand the centrifugal forces of decentralization. The country was headed for break-up, he feared. A year earlier, I had begun to share his concern; now I nearly jumped down his throat in defence of the integrity of the nation that declared independence in 1945 and that has weathered so many Etcs since.
*
The threads that bind this nation will not be easily dissolved.