Indonesia

Padang is known for its food. Spicy, meaty, sort of rich. But it sits on the south coast of Sumatra, and the nature there is simlpy amazing. A four-hour drive brings us to Bukittingi where we will deliver a workshop at a student conference. The trafic is light, except at a point where the *only* road goes *through* a bustling market and *litteraly hundreds* of cars wait in line to cross, one at a time, a few meters of exotic fruits, spices and unidentified fauna and flaura on stalls. Some women along the road wear pointy straw hats, reminding us a lot of the typical Vietnamese hats, or even of some of the traditional hats in Japan, although the latter were not so pointy. In Sumatra "Nature" with a capital N blooms, expands, rolls on hills and distant mountains, takes away this road with a quick monsoon, or plants trees and grass and poultry nests in the middle of that other road, whenever it decides to. The conference place is set at the end of a village, with an overview of the valley. Maybe it is because we have spent the last months in pancake-flats countrysides, or maybe it is because there is an intrinsic charm in those landscapes; in any case, I am touched. In certain directions, rice paddies structure the view and almost look like a measurable scale descended upon the ground to make the line of perspective visible. The different levels of water in each enclosed square create a patchwork of colors, from shining blur or white when the sky reflects in water, to varying degrees of green and brown where the mud is dryng or the rice growing. the next day, on the way back to the airport, when out minibus slows down to let other cars pass on the other side, the odd buffalo raises its head from the mud to look at us, and I can almost sense its slow, bovine brain behind its blurry eyes not bothering to make sense of what it sees, just looking at us without any expectation nor judgment.


Jakarta is one of the three most polluted cities in the world. It shows. The pollution manifest in many ways, all affecting deeply the lives of its inhabitants, and giving it its ill reputation towards tourists. If you ask me, at the core of the problem lies trafic. The car has been decreed the allmighty god of the sprawling, urban and suburban area. Hence no sidewalks nor walkways, constant smog hovering over the city in the humid atmosphere, which even the afternoon downpour in the monsoon season cannot take away. The noise, the proximity of the sea, and the lack of urban planning and all-out corporate real estate deals only make things worse: business districts are scattered at various distances off the historical city center, and commuting between them can only be done by taxi. Cheap to mid-range hotels suffer from poor isolation from the outside humid heat and from the 24/7 rumble of cars, tuned motorbikes, tricycle rickshaws, and loud-horning Transjakarta bus. The latter is the backbone of the public transport system in the city. Actually, it would be more accurate to say it is the only occurence of a public transport system. It shares a design peculiarity with Curitiba's bus system, whereby fraud is impossible and it has dedicated lanes on most avenues in the city, making it impossibly faster than taxis and rickshaws that are doomed to crawling at a snail's pace in trafic jams: again, the trafic never seems to ease, or maybe on Sunday evening after midnight and on Friday during prayer.
Humidity, heat and indsutrial pollution combine to corrode and age everything faster than usual: metal beams of the pedestrian overpasses look like they were put up in the previous century, a greyish tone has become the universal coating of all concrete and brick buildings in the city. Towers and skyscrapers escape their fate through the cunning use of cheap labor costs in the cleaning industry and a high unemployment rate providing plenty of volunteers for low-qulified jobs.
It is now my understanding that the "fancy" areas of the city consists of those complex of malls upon office towers upon malls, which you can navigate barely without the need to go outside of the spacious air conditioned halls. The malls host a flurry of colorfoul shops and like in the rest of Asia, to my utmost delight, a seemingly infinite options for food, snacks, drinks and desert. I could totally live here!... or not.
We stay in a Chinese hotel where the staff has never heard of the concept of "service" like we mean it in western Europe, and it's not even a language barrier since we are following their own operateing procedures. But they smile a lot, and we do too, so it makes things easier. Other guests of the hotel really look like Chinese people we have met in northen China, and we are not sure whether they are travelers or if the influence of Asia's Big Brother has already come down to Jakarta in the form of an "expat" population of workers and business middlem-men. Communication is generally an issue. When ordering in a restaurant, it is wise to have the waiter or waitress repeat your order at least one; every single time when we overlooked this rule, the food was off by one or two item (it's part of the adventure, trying out new tastes), or sometimes it was the bill (it's hard to recognize which was your waiter, who knows what you really ordered, among an army of young Indonesian waiters).

Today's Jakarta bears the scars of its quick development in the past decade, since its turbulent political past has been put behind and new leadership has opened the doors to no-limits capitalism. Still, in the middle of it, traditions remain strong, in the form of the strong islamic finance branch of Mandiri Bank, the oldest and largest banking institution in the country. Company premises would typically include a prayer room, and female clerks at counter are a mix of women wearing a headscarf, or not, which is simply a standard situation here. There may be other populations mixed in significant proportions with the "native" local population of Indonesians: Chinese and Filipinos primarily, but we can also sense some Indian influence sometimes, and Australia is not too far away... For historical reasons, mostly a millenar war between kingdoms of Siam (more or less former Thailand) and Indonesia, the Thai and sometimes Malay are not well perceived here.

Maybe what is most striking is the unbalance that exists after those years of massive, clearly visible development: while the incrreasing middle-class spends its week-end in shopping malls, so many homeless poor sleep on the pavement and eat a meager subsistance along with street animals. Focusing on the big bucks from national-scale and international investors has left behind a good deal of the population... and an increasing part of it is in the city. Development programs, social business or philanthropy programs, and social support systems address the under-privilegedpopulation. But the "hot issues" for those players are: rural poverty, access to infrastructure, basic education, and the like. Those provide an impact, and the numbers are significant in this country. But we have not yet met social entrepreneurs working with the urban poor in Indonesia.