Jakarta It has lately occurred to me to ask, where does our trash go? The streets of Jakarta play host to varied forms of traffic – the much-maligned automobile traffic, the burgeoning motorcycle traffic, and considerable foot traffic. The latter is made all the more conspicuous by the general lack of sidewalks. Treading, obliviously it often seems, along the edges of the alleys and streets are schoolchildren, peddlers, people going to and from offices and shops, laborers, deliverymen, and the pushers and pullers of trash carts. If you ever went to the Monterrey House chain of plastix-Mex restaurants, you may recall their emblematic cart, balanced on two wheels, propping up a slumping and somnolent figure in an out-sized sombrero. Forgetting for a moment the brown-sugar, BHA-, and BHT-laden lump treats that lured us to the cashier’s counter after dinners there, I draw your attention to the cart itself, so you might conjure a picture of the kind of conveyance pulled around the streets here. Men and sometimes women trudge about with their arms draped over the long poles, offering their cartage services. Some of these sport a sign on the back stating, “beli barang bekas” – roughly, “I’ll buy your used stuff.” Many of them also will collect trash from the peculiar bins in front of houses, rummage through it, salvage what they can, and burn the rest, often simply on the roadside. Hence the question I raised (some 225 words ago): where does our trash go? I’ve been told that our trash-collection service has been paid for by the company, but I’ve begun to wonder about the nature and the contractual obligations of the arrangement. I feel certain that I’ve driven through some choking plume from the burning of my own household waste, complaining bitterly about the practice all the while. I do hope to actually pursue this issue, and I’ll provide an update when I learn more. We generated considerably more trash than usual beginning about ten days ago. Our ship came in on or about the 14th of August and our crates from Texas were delivered to the house on the 26th. I had spoken with other families who described receiving several boxes marked with “Customs Inspection” stamps. Some of their boxes were levied an unofficial import tax. However, not a single one of our boxes bore any evidence of being pilfered or even opened. Alissa had hoped to take off a bit early from work when the crates arrived, but she ended up having a series of extended meetings that day, and then we were expected at the Australia-New Zealand Association Masked Ball that evening. She didn’t even come home to see the state of the house because we had booked a room at the ball venue – the new Jakarta Ritz- Carlton. We’ve been told this ball was the beginning of the Jakarta social season (the very idea of being a part of anybody’s social season falling somewhere between intriguing and repugnant). All pressed, feathered, and sparkly, we made our debut. We traded our dress blacks for dungarees over the next days as we unpacked boxes and unwrapped the very few items of furniture we brought with us. Opening the large “dish pack” boxes often proved the most entertaining, since each item of glassware from our Texas kitchen was quintuple-wrapped in paper, generating a waist-high mountain of packaging for 24 glasses and a few Pyrex baking dishes. Every now and then these paper mounds would avalanche, and we’d realize one of the cats had gophered in and was trying to tunnel over to a neighboring knoll. Our personal effects had been delivered in four large crates. These, we soon found out, were rather coveted by our house staff. One of our drivers saw how the materials from the crates were perfectly suited for repairing his leaky porch at home. Koko the gardener, house- and pool- man just brought his wife and two very young children from outside Jakarta and he used the wood from one of the crates to build a wall in the new home they share nearby with Nani, our cook and housemaid. They divvied things up themselves and worked out when the crates would be knocked apart for easy transport on one of the small trucks that are hired out for such purposes. (There are certain streets where a queue of maybe 20 of these small trucks are parked, waiting for customers to engage them.) At one point Daniel remarked on their need to have things ready before the truck arrived because, as he said it, hiring the truck is “very expensive – maybe 50,000 rupiah" (about $5). Based on this remark (and owing to my striking ignorance about most economic matters), I’ve concluded that a multiplier of at least ten might be applied when considering the financial matters of the staff. That is, a ten-dollar expense for them is on the order of a hundred-dollar or more expense for me. There are many things I would never pay $20 for, but I don’t think too hard about handing over $2 for something that won’t last. For these folks, 25 cents might be the threshold for discretionary spending. It’s a topic that’ s worthy of further inquiry. I suppose I could gather local statistics on the so-called Big Mac index, where relative economies around the world are deduced in part by the local price of a certain McSandwich (but I refuse to do the on-site research). In other news, Arianna has been selected and will participate in the Middle School’s International Travel Club (see Javalogue 9, references to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, and several place names that employ the letters “x,” “j,” and “g”). I worked out that, once she arrives in China, she will have visited 12 countries before she turns 12 years old. After I turned two it took me nearly 19 more years to recapture a 1:1 years-to-countries ratio. Arianna will travel over Fall Break, in late October. This morning, in the midst of my bahasa Indonesia language lesson at the house, I asked the driver to take the gardener to the English lessons we’ve arranged for him at a nearby community center. They set out at about 9:15 for the 9:30 class. The high-school nurse phoned just before 10am and suggested that I pick up Annaliese and take her to the SOS Clinic. Annaliese was experiencing some shortness of breath, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting. I called to get the car back and learned that they were only about 1 kilometer away. The traffic was so heavy they had never gotten anywhere near the community center. Although there are definitely some very unpleasant peak travel times, this was quite unprecedented in my experience. It turns out the roads department has begun to re-build a bridge that happens to be near an already notorious bottleneck. This could be the first day of two (to five) months of delays, missed appointments, and standstills. Annaliese, by the way, is just fine. Maybe just a recurrence of the acid- reflux problem she had a year or more ago. She compared her treatment by nurses in Houston schools – student comes in, student states complaint, student is told (regardless of complaint) to lie on frayed and spatter- spotted couch while nurse calls to ask a parent to come get the kid – with the treatment she received at her new school – student led to one of the curtained examining bays and, after vital signs are taken, the nurse provides an oxygen mask to counter student’s shortness of breath, then, well… the nurse calls to ask a parent to come get the kid. (But they were contemplating the private ambulance ride to our chosen medical clinic.) |