Jakarta on two dollars a day
Resources are meager, and clean water is scarce.
Anita Bekenstein, a resident of Wayland, has been a supporter of the global relief and development organization Mercy Corps for the last two years. She and her husband, Josh, are part of a Mercy Corps delegation to Indonesia to assess the organization's community-led and economic development projects. Among the projects are nutrition and conflict resolution programs, and an effort to help tsunami survivors rebuild their communities.
By Anita Bekenstein
Sunday March 9
JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Two dollars a day! That, we are told, is what more than 40 percent of the residents of north Jakarta survive on. It is a figure that defies belief. How can people live with so little?
We are in north Jakarta, a neighborhood filled with migrants, to look in on a pilot Mercy Corps project that aims to convert household garbage into money-making compost.
The migrants' tale is like that of many others in the developing world. Laborers leave their families behind in rural areas of Indonesia and come in search of work to the capital, where better economic opportunities exist. They work in local factories, in construction jobs paid by the day, in shops, as street vendors. They live a meager life so they can send money back home to support their loved ones.
So, what does $2 a day mean for the people here? For one thing, it means precious little clean water, which, we learn quickly, is in terribly short supply.
Cheap sources of water are the few public wells where residents can access shallow well water. But it is both salty and contaminated, and is not suitable for drinking. Nevertheless, this precious water is carried to homes for bathing and cleaning.
Fewer than half the homes here are attached to the public water supply. The majority of the people have to purchase their water from those with the supply, or resort to the even more expensive option of buying bottled water. The water from the public supply still has to be boiled before drinking it, a time-consuming process which also adds to its cost.
Access to toilets is limited. Public toilets are available to adults for a fee. Children use the side of the road.
There is a constant fear of life-threatening afflictions: intestinal parasites, malnutrition, anemia, and diseases like dengue fever.
As we make our way through the neighborhood, filled with clotheslines crisscrossing in every possible location, residents line the alleys and greet us with beaming smiles and outstretched hands. With tremendous pride, people invite us into their homes to see their immaculate white tiled floors, the only contents being a flat pillow and sometimes a mattress. There are no kitchen tables anywhere; families sit in a circle on the floor to eat their meals together.
The women employed in the composting project being tested here voice pride in their accomplishments, collecting all the organic household waste -- that otherwise would be tossed into the channels and further pollute the environment -- for the compost that is sold in the market.
In north Jakarta, $2 a day also means that the children sitting in their homes here have no large space to play in. No yard, no field, no playground.
Yet amidst all this we see signs of joy, and hope. Hope in the eyes of a mother whose twin toddler daugthers, thanks to a community nutrition education program, survived infant malnutrition. And joy in the wide smile of a man who invites me to help his son take his first steps.
For more information about Mercy Corps and its projects, please visit its website, at www.mercycorps.org. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.
