The Lucretius Plan

Assume the position

To those of us who enjoy the questionable benefits of frequent flyer status in Indonesia, the recent announcement that all Indonesian air carriers are banned from EU airspace, and that EU citizens are strongly advised to avoid flying with them, comes as little surprise. If anything, most of us assumed that such a ban was already in place. What is more interesting (and depressing) is the reaction of the Indonesian government.

The reaction was in two parts. Firstly, the government expressed the suspicion that this was a neo-colonial EU plot to exclude Garuda (Indonesia's flag carrier) from EU airspace so as to shield indigenous carriers from the competition. I can imagine that BA, KLM and Lufthansa are slightly concerned about the lean and hungry Asian competitors that may one day come and steal market share from them, but I somehow doubt that the noble Garuda logo figures very often in the powerpoint presentations of the executives. Garuda's market positioning in Indonesia is predicated on that fact that it is slightly less bad than all the others, many of whom (such as Merpati) operate planes inherited from Garuda, such as the 1970 fleet of Fokker 27's and 28's, which have featured many times on this blog.

The second point made by the government was that it was unfair of the EU to focus on safety issues, when other factors should have been taken into account, The argument appears to be that flying Garuda (or Adam Air, Batavia, Mandala etc.) may be unsafe, but, hey, look at this free towelette. The beef rendang is pretty tasty too. No doubt a cynical anthropologist would point out that this attitude reflects Indonesian fatalism, that somehow worrying about safety is to lose sight of one's small place in the great cosmic plan. It is too individualistic, and, frankly, Western. This may explain why most of my fellow passengers to Jakarta recently, many of them on a transit flight from doing the Haj pilgrimage in Mecca, prayed earnestly for deliverance on take-off, and then gave thanks to Allah for their safe arrival in Jakarta.

I am quite prepared to give Garuda the benefit of the doubt on many things (is this beef rendang edible? Why does my seat smell of vomit?) but where safety is concerned I think a faith position is probably unwise. Where the Indonesian government misses the point is that they have consistently prevented the results of investigations into the many transport accidents from becoming public. This gives the impression that some kind of cover-up is going on to protect those with good political connections. It also encourages leaks and rumours which (as in the case of the recent Yogyakarta crash) causes distress for the families of the victims while a blame culture prevents the real facts from emerging. The Yogya crash may well have been pilot error, but often the airlines find it convenient to blame one pilot rather then admit to systemic maintenance problems and under-investment.

Our neighbour in Jakarta is an Australian airline pilot who flies wealthy Indonesians and politicians as far away as Los Angeles on a top-of-the-range gulfstream private jet. Private jet travel is a a growth industry in Indonesia, which has a remarkable number of very rich people who see no reason to share the risks that ordinary people must face when travelling.

Sadly, Government ministers are more interested in avoiding accountability when they should be hanging their heads in shame that Indonesia, now almost a middle-income country, is unable to properly regulate its airlines or place the safety of travelers over the comfort of the corrupt businessmen and politicians who fly by private Gulfstream jet on their frequent shopping trips to Singapore.

molasses

A recent field research trip took me to this small Molasses factory in east Java. It is fairly basic and not entirely hygienic, but it smelt fantastic. When I get the time I will post some more pictures of the place.

Another Flores photo gallery

Follow this link to view the photos that our chum Mark Hunter took when in Flores last year. He seemed to take more (and better) pictures in two weeks than I took in two years!

Mark's NTA photos.

I will be returning to Flores next week to do some research and also to catch up with Pak Sirilus and the gang. These photos remind me of how much I miss the place.

Swamp thing

(Pic: AP)

You will be relieved to hear that so far we have stayed dry during this week's flooding, unlike 75% of the city which is now underwater in the city's worst flooding in living memory.

25 people had died from incidents such as electrocution, as the power sub-stations get submerged. Over 340,000 have been forced to abandon their homes. A colleague of mine was able to go fishing from his bedroom window yesterday, and caught quite a large fish, apparently, which his family then had for supper. In places the floods have been 7 metres deep and key bridges have almost been swept away as rubbish collects against their pillars.

The problem is that Jakarta is basically a shallow bowl with steep hills on one side and the sea on the other. Most of the city sits below sea level, and when the Dutch had the great idea of building their colonial capital here, Batavia (as it then was) was basically a mosquito-infested swamp. The redoubtable Captain Bligh, having survived the mutiny on the Bounty and an intrepid 3,400 mile trip in an open boat across turbulent seas dotted with treacherous reefs, almost died of malaria in Batavia and described the place as a pestilential hell-hole. Little has changed, and as flood water engulfed the State Palace on Friday, there is serious talk of reviving former President Sukarno's plan of moving the capital to Kalimantan or Sulawesi.

Although the rains have eased off in the city today, it continues to fall on the hills, adding pressure to the main sluice-gate that holds back the Ciliwung river. The water has nowhere else to go but through Jakarta to get to the sea, so later today it is anticipated that, literally, the floodgates will be opened, adding more misery to the damp citizens of the city.

Banjir di mana mana

(Pic from Jakarta Post)

As if to prove my point about impending disasters, this week Jakarta is flooded. Several days of rain, with a particularly heavy storm last night, have overwhelmed the shaky infrastructure. The sluices on the storm canals have been breached, and turbid muddy water occupies all low-lying areas. As Jakarta is several metres below sea-level, most of the city is vulnerable.

Unlike most city-dwellers, we have the good fortune to live in one of the (more expensive) drier areas, but coming to work today was slightly pointless as everyone else is stuck at home. I have just received a message from one colleague who is unable to leave her house because the water level is now at over 2 metres.

The rain is due to continue until Tuesday, so I may be swimming back home tonight.

Zero Tolerance

Visiting the cinema in Jakarta, like so many experiences in this city, is liable to encourage one's inner misanthrope to emerge bawling and weeping with impotent rage at all that is so deeply disappointing about our fellow humans. The cinema itself is the best I have ever fulminated in, furnished with plush lay-z-boy recliners that stretch out to a lie flat, waiter service for drinks and nibbles and a complementary wool blanket to keep out the icy blast of the air conditioning. All this for just $10, and a cold beer only another $1.40, what's not too like?

Alas, the cinema management sees fit to allow other people into the auditorium. I have always been fabulously intolerant of my fellow viewers in the UK, believing that films should be enjoyed in a respectful, cloistral hush. We all recognise those petty annoyances found in the average out-of-town multiplex: late arrivers, sweet wrapper rustlers, expectoraters, smug plot explainers ("don't you see, he was only pretending to be a baddie, but now he wants to impress the girl...") and their dim counterparts the terminally obtuse questioners ("So is he the same guy as the one who shot the Mexican drug-dealer?"). Worst of all, and sadly some of my friends are guilty of this (you know who you are) , the dialogue anticipators ("These are not the 'droids we are looking for, it's dark and we're wearing sunglasses, Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.").

In Jakarta, audience interference gets to a whole new level. Ringtones are of course common, as is texting, but it does not end there; I have sat next to a guy who was on the phone, loudly, for a full twenty minutes. Talking through the film is not just tolerated, it is basically compulsory. The cinema management compensate for this by turning up the volume to ear-bleed levels. The first thirty minutes of the film are regarded as inessential to the general plot, so many of the audience will shamble in long after the opening credits. I used to spend most of the film telling people to shut up, sit down, turn their phone off, but I no longer bother because it makes no difference. Back in the UK you can generally guilt-trip an offender, most of whom will silently blush with shame in the dark (along with all my friends, mortified by my behaviour or afraid that I am going to get thumped by the ox in row D). In Jakarta you will be met with indifference, amusement and mild surprise that someone is trying to tick them off. In Indonesia (huge generalisation) no one EVER ticks anyone off, because that would lead to loss of face for all parties involved. An angry bule (westerner) giving someone a bit of stick in the cinema for letting their mobile phone ring incessantly is basically just another dimension of a fun night out, the other components of which are fizzy drinks, conversation, texting friends, and oh yeah, of course the movie.

Ever a glutton for punishment, last night we went to see 'Blood Diamond' (Guardian review can be found here). This is a very visceral movie, with some very upsetting scenes of violence in Sierra Leone. In the UK it has a 15 certificate, and in Indonesia it is rated 'Adult'. So imagine our surprise that so many children were in the cinema, some as young as five or six. This is fairly usual in Jakarta, but this is the first time we have seen it happen in quite such a violent film. There is a scene in the film where some child soldiers are being brainwashed and de-sensitized to violence by the rebel army. This is one of the most intense parts of the film, where children are brutally corrupted and turned against all that is good or admirable in the world. Watching it was made even more uncomfortable by the awareness that several children in the cinema could not yet possibly be emotionally equipped to process what was happening on screen.

From my limited experience of the strange little people, kids deal with situations that exclude them by getting restless, and the noise they make can ruin a decent night at the movies. I could take no more, so I got out of my seat and approached one particularly vexing family, explaining to the father that this was no place for his young kids, and in any case other people are being distracted by his children's behaviour. I reminded the man that this was an 'adults only' film. Of course this was a pointless exercise that just got me even more discombobulated, so why did I bother?

I bothered because one of the things I find most frustrating about this country is that bad behavior is so rarely confronted. Be it appalling driving, corruption, religious bigotry, de-forestation or domestic abuse, the offenders generally escape the censure they deserve. Years of living under that most brutal personification of anti-social corruption, Bapak Suharto, seems to have conditioned the people of this great country to keep their heads down even while their wealth is being snatched from under their noses and stashed away in numbered accounts in Zurich or Guernsey.

One of the cameo roles in 'Blood Diamond' is Winston Ntshona, one of Africa's greatest actors, as a village elder and the only survivor of a massacre. He philosophizes that it would be better if Sierra Leone did not have diamonds to fight over, and then adds 'let's hope they never find oil, or else we are really finished!" Indonesia has oil, gas, massive forests and abundant fertile soils, and yet it is poor. Isn't it time to start tapping some of the 'big men' of this country on the shoulder and asking them to behave?

Deathrace 2006

The traffic in this city is legendary, almost iconic, and no conversation here is complete without reference to it.  There is no rush hour as such, the place is simply clogged up all day and sometimes late at night.  The common explanation is that Jakarta is a rapidly growing city in an emerging economy, so the infrastructure cannot keep up.  There is some truth in this: there is a very limited public transport system and no mass transit system such as a metro. There is plan for a monorail but so far this has stalled leaving random concrete pillars dotted around the city, remeniscant of that episode in the Simpsons when a charlaton persuades Springfield to build a monorail that then collapses due to bribery and corruption.

So perhaps the bad traffic is simply inevitable. However, our theory is that the main reason the traffic is so awful is that the road system is illogical and most of the drivers do not know how to drive.  It is astonishing that a country that prides itself on its community values should tolerate the most selfish driving seen anywhere on the planet.  Once in their cars (the ubiquitous Toyota Kijang prevails, a sort of pointless SUV) wealthy Jakartans choose to ignore their fellow man and the whole thing becomes a free-for-all.  I did a straw poll recently with some work colleagues and only one of them had passed a driving test, the rest had simply paid the bribe and received their license.  Ironically the one who had passed her test never drove. 

The road system is full of loops, off-ramps, u-turns and sudden bottlenecks.  A taxi ride costs twice as much returning home than it does going to work, simply because of the way the roads are laid out.  Every morning we have to run across five lanes of traffic to catch a taxi, to do otherwise would add 20 minutes to our journey.  There are no zebra crossings or pelican crossings, and even if they were they would be ignored by the growling traffic. 

The strategy to cross the road is to wait until there is a group of people who need to get across, so as to achieve some safety in numbers.  Then one person will be brave enough to step out into the road holding a hand up to the oncoming traffic, and the group advances as cars swerve, honk their horns and generally give no impression that they would be alarmed by the prospect of flattening a defenceless pedestrian.  Occasionally a policeman will be at one side of the street, limply waving an arm at the oncoming traffic, though it is unclear if this signal means ‘speed up’, ‘slow down’ or ‘where’s my bribe’.  Once I was almost run over by a speeding black sedan that ignored the group of pedestrians half way across the road.  Sitting at the wheel was a senior police officer resplendent in his uniform.  There is no pretence that the police here protect and serve, they are opposed to the public interest and one of the key impediments to progress in Indonesia.  The chaos on the roads is partly bad planning, partly inept and selfish driving, but largely the fault of a self-important police force that avoids all political censure.  When drivers know that they simply need to pay a bribe to escape penalty for even the most egregious violation, they are unlikely to take road regulations very seriously.

In many ways the Jakarta traffic system is a metaphor for the whole country.  Vibrant, thriving and energetic yet teetering on the brink of chaos and disaster, overseen by corrupt, bloated guys in uniform.

Chivalrous Enthusiasm

So the day has finally arrived that we must take our leave of all our friends and close this episode in our lives.  A great sadness descends.

It is hard to imagine life without the rhythms and observances of Maumere, and it is certainly hard to wrench ourselves away from all our friends and the extended family we have enjoyed out here.  All the steep challenges, frustrations and disappointments of the last two years fade to insignificance as only the high points come into sharp focus, and it suddenly becomes hard to envisage an experience that will top this one, and thus the unseen remainder of our mortal coil, still unwound, holds little interest for us.

We both feel more resilient (we have proved ourselves to be so, both physically and mentally, though what the legacy of Malaria, Dengue, Typhoid and numerous parasites will be we are yet to establish) yet at the same time we are more sensitive.  We feel more alive and yet also somehow disconnected from the outside world.  Perhaps the next few weeks will allow us to return to earth gracefully.

The last few months have been demanding (hence the lack of activity on this website) as we have tried desperately to tidy up all our various projects.  As is apparently often the case, we did not really hit our stride until six months ago, and we became really super-effective from about May onwards.  By that time our cultural understanding, language skills and constructive relationships with colleagues all aligned themselves in one indulgent constellation, and everything we touched seemed to yield to our ministrations.  We were, as they say, in the 'flow'.

This all culminated in our farewell ceremonies (acara perpisahan), one on Thursday in the health department, and then a major party at our house on  Friday night.  We did little to organise these events, they just sort of happened around us, and we were amazed that 150 people turned up on Friday to enjoy a prayer service (giving thanks for our presence) followed by food and dancing.  Our neighbour cooked his dog (which was delicious) and twenty chickens also made the ultimate sacrifice.  We danced traditional sequence dances (Poco-poco, Jai'i, rokatenda) until the early hours, while drinking some lethal arak ('tuak') provided by one of the villages.

The following morning we were accompanied to the airport, where more friends waited for hours to eventually wave us onto the (delayed, of course) Merpati flight.  It was a very glum couple that boarded that flight, and the tourists on board must have been confused by the strange white couple (looking bedraggled and frankly less than healthy) that sobbed their way through the flight to Bali.

So here we are in Bali, trying to make sense of the last two years, and so far (as this rambling blog entry testifies) failing to find coherence.  We are excited to be going home and seeing friends and family, many of whom we have not seen for well over two years.  But we are sad to be leaving our Flores family behind, and we are anxious about how we will cope with the reverse culture shock of the UK.  We have been rather cut off from events since April 2004, and the world somehow seems a more dangerous and less forgiving place than it was before.  Maybe it is just that the true state of things is now more apparent to us. 

No doubt it is unfashionable to quote Karl Marx nowadays, but one is tempted to ponder his comment that bourgeois capitalism has 'drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy waters of egotistical calculation.  It has resolved personal worth into exchange value.'

As we step back through the wardrobe and return to the 'real' world, we wonder what capitalism and materialism have done to the essence of humanity, and this I guess brings us full circle to what this 'Lucretius Plan' was all about: making sense of how what we need is so often eclipsed by what we are led to believe we desire.

Floating Palace

One of the more surreal things to happen to us in our last week in Maumere was an invitation to lunch aboard Orion, an Australian luxury cruise ship that put into Maumere harbour.  In return for some trivial assistance we gave the crew and their guests when the berthed here in June, they returned the favour in style by giving us a full tour and fabulous lunch. 

I take back everything I ever said about cruise ships.

Our new chum Jos, the hotel manager, insisted that we joined him for a glass of chilled Chardonnay, fresh salad, ripe French cheeses and an astonishing black forest gateaux.  After all this it was rather strange to disembark back to the dusty Maumere quayside and get back on our motorbike.  After an hour or so back on dry land we assumed we had dreamt the whole thing.  Funny what happens to you when you are a volunteer.

Rumble in the jungle

Unlike the disaster in Yogyakarta, most earthquakes in Indonesia are less dramatic and go unreported, but this does not make them any less scary.  On Saturday night we were sleeping in a bamboo hut on the beach in Ankermi (our retreat 28km east of Maumere), when we were awoken by a fairly strong tremor.  It shook the hut, and this was accentuated by the fact that we sleep on a raised platform in the roof of the hut.  After conferring with our friends we all went back to sleep again, only to be woken 20 minutes later by another tremor.  By this time one of the local villagers was on the beach for ‘tsunami watch’, and we all speculated what signs we would need to look out for (in the dark) that would presage an incoming deluge.

Fortunately, there was no further seismic activity that evening, and we have subsequently learned that the tremors were caused by Mount Egon, our friendly local volcano which has been quiescent since about November 2004 when an alleged human sacrifice placated its spirit guardian (see a previous post on this blog).   Apparently it is hungry once more, and may be gearing up for a fresh eruption.

One should be more blasé about such things now, but to be honest we still find earthquakes a little scary. When it starts you don’t know how long it will last, and how often it will be repeated, and it undermines your faith in terra firma.  Even the locals, who should be used to it by now, all packed their bags and ran for the hills on Saturday night, so maybe an certain amount of fear is a rational response.  This really is one of the craziest places in the world to live…