If I were a rich man

October 1, 2010

            For $55 a person, you can get a three hour tour of the slums of Jakarta, suddenly a destination after the popularity of Slumdog Millionaire – it’s apparently the latest trend in adventure tourism. I confess a desire, one that predates that movie, to visit such places, voyeuristic no matter what else it is, but reading that called up the deep sense one has as an economic entity as a westerner living in Indonesia. Fifty-five dollars is about what we pay our maid, per month, here – she works 35 hours a week for us and cooks all our food. She would have to work two months to buy one of the pairs of shoes I bought before we left Bozeman.

Playing in the gamelan orchestra. Graham is about to make an ear-splitting hit on the gong in the background.

            Last weekend we visited the Tlogo Plantation Resort, just south of us, and spent a night in a comfortable (but for the amazing cloud of mosquitoes) cottage that slept four. We had a giant breakfast, cooked for us by the inimitable Ibu Viva, and played with a gamelan orchestra (truly one of the highlights of the trip so far for me, hypnotizing and otherworldly, a musical practice that approximated deep meditation  – repetitive, metallic, mesmerizing – except for the parts when G or S were playing the gong, hitting it like Animal on the Muppet Show willy-nilly). We got a tour of the rubber plantation, and the rubber processing plant. The staff picked us up at home and took us back the next day. We had a great dinner and an amazing lunch, and the whole thing cost us just over $100.

In the processing plant.

            At the rubber plantation, we watched the laborers walking in with buckets full of sap, drained from the rubber tree that morning, to pour in a vat which would be processed into slabs, pressed, dried, and smoked, the highest grade rubber you can have, such a high grade that during the tour we had to take a brief time out to explain to Graham what a condom was. Every stage of the labor is intensive – the collection (requiring scoring a line down the side of the rubber tree to open it up for sap), the carrying (walking sometimes for several kilometers with a bucket of rubber sap over their shoulders), the processing (hot, and very stinky, and certainly not terribly healthy). Our guide said that they earned less than 20,000 rupiah per day, maybe about $2.

            I read an interview with an Indonesian labor activist; he mentioned the difficult times facing workers right now, and used as an example that a good lunch in Yogyakarta used to cost 2,000 rupiah but now it is about 4,500 rupiah. It has gone up, that is, from about twenty cents to about forty-five cents. (And to think that I pay between fifty cents and a dollar for lunch everyday.) I cannot order textbooks for my classes next semester, because my students simply cannot afford to buy them.  There are cut-rate factory outlet stores in Semarang, at the sweatshops that produce American clothes.

The house we rent costs $4,500 for 10 months, and it is giant, ridiculously large really, even by my standards in the United States, three stories tall and screaming wealth. The first thing our neighbors asked when we met them was “how much do you pay for your house?” (These kinds of questions are very Indonesian – the standard greeting here is “where are you going?” or “where have you been?”). They were shocked at the price, and we have since learned that we are paying much more than we should at that price (which is absurdly low by our standards of course). Whatever house we lived in, white people in Indonesia, for the most part correctly, are assumed to be made of money, and while I wouldn’t use the phrase “made of money” to describe us, the words do speak to the way economic issues feel so physical here.

            To live here as an American paid an American salary is to be exorbitantly wealthy, capable of the most extraordinary feats of economic prowess. I have never considered myself poor by any means (Bozeman is weird this way; Seamus can come home from his rather well-off middle school and complain about how poor we are, which has always rankled me. This trip will likely cure him of that silliness), but I have never felt my wealth so viscerally, never felt like economies circulated through – maybe more accurately even via - my skin quite so obviously. One can feel lucky about this – I am glad, I can honestly say, not to be a laborer on a rubber plantation making $2 a day – but to call it lucky is to dodge the depth of it all, and is to suggest that these workers are somehow just “unlucky.” Nor do I feel guilty. But I am present within it, whether I stand as a paying tourist photographing workers processing rubber or whether I never stepped foot in Indonesia, and it reminds me that I need to live that presence more fully, when I return to my home.