Jakarta Floods 2007

My Amazonian Ibu walks into the house this morning, visibly shaken, and with moist eyes. The water has been in her house for 3 days. Over the weekend she was stuck on its upper floor without food or clean water. Someone dropped off a bucket of cooked rice per house. That was their meal. She must have watched with a strained heart as things that could not be rushed upstairs floated away with the murky brown floodwater; possessions accumulated over years, by cleaning other people’s houses. “All the clothes”, she said, with a choked voice, and her hand motioned their slow passing. She could not bring herself to give an accounting of all that was lost. Her precious shelter, how long and how much will it take to clean and repair that sanctuary? Every Rupiah is carefully budgeted towards essentials. Where is the money for this new challenge?

Ibu wakes at four, cooks two meals for three grown children, herself, and my nanny. She takes the bus for an hour to get to my house by 7:30 everyday, even though her start time is designated at 8. Then she works non-stop to clean, wash, iron all day. She is not one to sit around. She, like many other pembantus, is too embarrassed to be seen sitting down, and fears being insulted by the term lazy. I had bought a dining table and chair set, for her and my nanny, to eat their meals and rest their feet. It has become a resting place for our iron and their bags. I have often wondered where and when do they eat? One afternoon I found Ibu huddled in a corner of the pantry with the lights off. She was quickly scoffing down the food from her own lunch box. She did not feel entitled to sit and eat. Those “habits” come from past experiences and reminders of ones place in the world. After that kind of day, she gets home to take care of her own, sleep, and start all over the next day. This is her 25+ years of employment as a pembantu. No 401 K. Just what the body can make everyday. Hers is the life story of millions of others, deemed lucky to get 15 seconds of human-interest slot, squeezed in between heads of state, the stock market, star lives, and not-so-random violence. Yet this is her life, moving on, in-spite of the silence.

It is the man the man the papers whisper. The man who built too many luxury villas and apartments, cut down too many trees, didn’t get a move on to build flood control mechanisms, and built factories and cars that caused global warming. Some day we will find the man that lives in and amongst us. Today, all I see is Ibu renting a boat she can ill afford, to carry her down the flooded streets to her home in this concrete jungle.