Hello mister! On the hustle in London and Jakarta - street selling for beginners

Once, in another life, I chased posh Londoners down the King's Road in Chelsea and asked them where they got their hair done. Then, I quickly became their best friend and convinced them to give me their credit card, or cash, or write me a cheque... and in return I would give them a piece of cardboard which entitled them to hair and beauty treatments at a salon of which they had never heard. I could usually complete this process in a matter of minutes. The job was 100% commission based so it was easy to be motivated.

I knocked on doors, I shouted across streets, I tapped on shoulders, I trotted up to groups of women waiting at the lights. Sometimes I intercepted them as they rushed to catch the tube to get to their morning meetings. Often I raised a little corner of my mouth and made my voice high and fizzy with giggles, and sold to men for their girlfriends and wives and daughters and mothers. In my finest hour I sold a series of 4 visits for a hair salon to a bald man. For himself.

I did this job in the thin dark cold of the sunless English winter; on days when the light would travel from very far off and tentatively peek over the city, on and off, for just a few hours.

Perhaps you know something about Londoners in the winter; perhaps you know that it is a time when their faces become hardened and grey and their voices become thin with impatience and shivers.

Londoners in the winter mostly do not like having a strange Australian girl of uncertain hair colour (it was a time of hair experimentation) running up to them and asking them questions about their hair as a ruse to begin her sales pitch.

Once, I was detained and searched by police after slipping into a law firm on the coattails of one of its employees, who held the back door open for me as he returned to work after a cigarette break. I was in the middle of pitching my sales spiel to one of the senior lawyers (who I might say, was very interested) when someone called security. I was made to feel very special: they called a female police officer especially for me. She arrived and snapped on a plastic glove. I lifted a brow and emptied my pockets, hoping for the best.

Once, I made the equivalent of 700 Australian dollars in a single day of this foolishness.

Once, I did this job with pink hair and bad skin. (This job of making people give me money because they believed I knew best how to make them beautiful). Let me add that I am not one of those cool funky types who wears her hair pink because it looks cool. I was more the colour-gone-wrong type of orangey-pink disaster. However, with pink hair, I still sold.

I tell you all this by way of saying that I know a thing or two about how to sell. And by way of explaining why I now totally get why things are the way they are on the streets of Jakarta.

It is one of the most inspirational and maddening things about living in this city: the entrepreneurial spirit of the people who have made this place their home. In Jakarta, everyone is on the hustle.

Arriving into the airport, you’re greeted by a cacophony of airport tycoons – everyone has what you need, in fact they have what you didn’t even realise you needed (but you do, you really do!)

Every morning leaving your apartment into the embracing heat of the day, you are a consumer immediately. Oooojeeeeeek croak the motorcycle taxi men from across the street as you walk past, looking down. If you accidentally look up, they are already swinging legs over motorbikes and chugging over to you. And when you do want to catch a motorbike, you need only to raise your index finger and there is one by your side by the time you’ve dropped your arm. On the streets of Jakarta, things happen quickly.

As a fellow hawker, I know what they’re playing at. I recognise this behaviour as one of the golden rules of selling: always assume the sale. Whether you’re selling a bald man a haircut, or offering a ride to someone who has just stepped out of a taxi – you just need to assume that your customer wants and needs what you’ve got, and they will in turn assume that they want it too. (I must want this, it seems ridiculous not to want it. Why would I walk to the end of this street when I could get on the back of a motorbike?).

But it’s all sales. Jakarta hawkers know their rules for sales success and this one ties in with another important one – “work your numbers” - ask as many people as you possibly can and eventually someone will say yes. This selling tool is in full use among Jakarta’s modes of transport, where a strange “opt-out” system has been developed. In most cities of the world, you must seek out taxis – and they are often elusive and annoyingly stand-offish (exhibit A: Kings Cross in Sydney at about 3am, changeover time). This is not at all the case in Jakarta. In Jakarta you spend your days refusing the services of all kinds of modes of transport – taxis, ojeks (motorbike taxis), bejajs (tuk tuks), anggots and mikrolets (combi-vans). You feel as though someone needs to sit all these drivers down and say – “hey, you know what might make a bit more sense? Instead of you always asking me if I need you, perhaps we could do it the other way around and I can hail you when I need you... as opposed to un-hailing you, constantly, all day and every day.”

Not to mentioned the rehash and double your cash (upsell!) – if you’ve sold one, sell more. You need 2 or three sarongs, 5 or 10 DVDs. You do, don’t you?

The untiring and entrepreneurial spirit of Indonesians, if particularly evident in the Jakarta, is found all over the country. If there is a need here, there is a bustling queue of people ready to service it. Often the need aspect of this is faint. But sometimes it’s nice to know you’re going in the right direction down a one way street, because there’s a 12-year-old in a threadbare t-shirt collecting Rupiah for the service of pointing you in the direction of traffic (the direction in which you’re already headed). What would happen if these people weren’t there?! Mayhem surely. It’s like a pat on the back – yep, just keep going, you’re going the right way! If only we could have this sort of reassurance in everyday life.

These are some of the best, most ambitious sales people I’ve ever come across. Poverty exists in a flurry of activity. Markets brim with people toiling away – cutting the heads off still flip-flopping lele (catfish), packing bright yellow fish into little banana tree bark compartments like tiny little coffins, shelling and shredding coconuts; always always busy hands. People are not poor because they’re lazy. Try pushing around a cart of food and cooking materials all day and all night and finding the energy to call out your sales spiel; or riding a bike whilst balancing gas cylinders or great tubs of water; or balancing your wares over your shoulders and bounce-jogging them around the city in your own outdoor-market selling space. It is hard to conceive of how exhausting this work must be.

I became a street hawker in London because I had holes in my shoes and was living off cornflakes and hiding from my friend’s landlord so I could sleep on his couch. I thought that was motivation enough. But imagine leaving your family behind in your village and moving to Jakarta so you can earn a tiny bit of money to send back home ... for so many people, it’s a way of life.

Once, I used to wonder whether all the selling would ever stop – the croaking sales calls, the beeping horns, the irritating repetitive ice cream song, the ‘hello misters’ ... always, everywhere, someone is calling and asking and wanting from you.

And then I remembered with a flashback to the streets of London ... that was me, once.
___

* Keen readers may recognise that at the beginning and end of this post I’ve borrowed the style of Morris Gleitzman’s lovely and awfully sad book “Once.” Read it. Read it privately, unless you’re a fan of sobbing in public.

A year above uncertain ground - resolutions, regulators and failing to establish neutral buoyancy

2009 began and ended in the ocean. It began on a beach in Rio and ended in the sea off a little island in Indonesia. In Rio I wore white for peace, and as the world took its first few breaths of 2009, I made a wish and threw flowers into the water for Iemanja, the Goddess of the Sea. I remember wishing, and I remember throwing the flowers so that Iemanja would grant me her blessings in return. But I have no idea what I wished for. It’s funny how you can ask for things and then you can’t even remember whether you were given them or not.

2010 began with a swim off a little island in Indonesia that you can walk all the way around. In the water with a Bintang in hand, I wore a black bikini, or perhaps it was the one with red polka dots, I’m not sure... the colour is only important to the extent that it wasn’t green. Indonesia also has a goddess of the sea - Nyai Loro Kidul - and green is her colour. People who dare to wear green risk being dragged under the surface and out to sea, never to be seen again. And that was not the new beginning I was after.

So here we are, safe from sea goddesses, a few days into a fresh-smelling year. New beginnings are a good time to be hopeful and ambitious. To giggle at how ridiculously you’ve behaved and to hope you can keep it going for another year. To seize on opportunities to be well and truly, completely and heart-fully, free of old spent love. To be self indulgent and think about all the things that have happened, and try to establish a few things you may have learnt.

The past year has been one of extremes. I’ve lived in a country where the air is always either slippery with heat or dry with artificially conditioned air; where the world is either blaringly loud or eerily quiet; where spaces are either packed with people and rubbish or entirely empty but for the resounding prayers; where the sky is either resolutely dry or entirely unhinged. And when it’s raining then it’s pouring.

This year a lot of things happened under the pelting of hard-surfaced raindrops, and some of them were chest-leapingly wonderful.

This year I learnt that actions of affection, when made truthfully, feel like you’re operating the machinery of life.

This year I discovered new sweat glands and gave them a very good work out.

This year I felt the floor shift and loosen beneath my feet and I looked out of my 28th floor apartment to watch the Jakarta skyline move pendulously from side to side. This year I learnt what you’re meant to do when the tectonic plates misbehave.

This year a friend - an old friend whose path had since separated from mine, a lovely friend with the most simple, happiness-hunting intentions – passed away. He passed away unexpectedly, very far away, in a manner that was quiet and undramatic. With distance, I felt the sadness of this in a pure sort of way. This year I learnt how easy it is to let people drift in and out of your life without consciously choosing to set them free or hitch them tighter. One of my resolutions is to deliberately choose the people who surround me – to leave some people in 2009 and the years preceding it, and to draw others in tighter, lashed near me as we head into 2010 and beyond.

This year, fittingly, I breathed underwater for the very first time. I learnt to dive just days after the Jakarta bombings and I remember feeling like I had found a trapdoor to another dimension. And I remember how freeing that was.

I wrote this about what I found: diving is like descending into a magic eye picture; as you slowly slide under the surface, the awkward weight of the equipment fades away and the chaos of the earth-bound world is slowly squeezed out. The pressure of the water envelopes you and the atmosphere thickens into a thrilling embrace. You’re suspended around layers and layers of fish- little darts of colour rushing and wallowing, chasing and nipping each other, shooting spurts of yellow shit behind them. Everywhere you look there are great civilisations under the sea, factories of activity, fish coming and going, currents pushing and pulling like invisible conveyor belts, and all around there are the sounds of little crunches and pings as coral cracks and fish munch. There are caverns and outcrops and on the bottom of the sea sit lavender mounds of enormous clams and spiky yellow cactus plants. There are giant sea turtles and cuttlefish and tiny, delicate dancing shrimp. You swim alongside your dive-master and she points urgently behind you - directly behind you – so you swing around and *squeal* into your regulator at the sight of a dugong moving determinedly through the blue abyss beyond, its square face nudging the currents. You clap your hands at the sight of an eagle ray swooping above you, and emit little yelps of glee at being caught in a storm of multicoloured fish, little flecks of life darting and drifting in every direction in suspended fish schools, with rebel castaways zooming past your ears and through your legs.

It’s all you can do to keep breathing (because if you don’t your head will explode, or something like that – I learnt it in the course). You just keep drawing the enriched air in and out with excited gasps and hope that you never have to re-enter the world above - the only evidence of which is the shafts of shifting light searching for the bottom of the earth. You’ll try (and mostly fail) to establish neutral buoyancy – a beautiful state where you are perfectly weighted so can stay still in the sea and move without fuss from one place to another. Neutral buoyancy involves weights around your waist and then filling your jacket with just the right amount of air... you can even move from place to place simply by the intake and exhalation of oxygen from your tank – filling your lungs will make you rise, and then letting it out will make you lower. It's a delicious prospect. You’ll watch others do this with impeccable precision while you flail about ridiculously, shooting up and down, high and low. It should not surprise you in the least that you have trouble establishing and maintaining neutral buoyancy.

I remember when I dived for the first time, an hour underwater passed in moments. When we returned to the surface it seemed like madness to re-enter this world, with all its gravity-entrapped bumblings and unpredictable, awful possibilities. On the surface, with my inflated jacket bobbing me afloat and another dimension stretching deep below my flippers, I felt all the weight of my equipment become real again. I felt the urge to follow that glinting light - past the teeming fish families in their underwater villages - deep into the caverns of the earth.

This year I learnt that sometimes life is hard above an uncertain ground.

A few days ago I did my first dive of the decade and this time it felt different. I breached the sea surface, swelled my floatation jacket and leaned back to turn my face to a friendly shining sky, arching over a renewed world.

Later, the clouds would bunch and pick up the yellow of another ending day and then settle over the ancient volcanoes that carved out the landscape so many lifetimes ago ... and there I was, floating in the middle of it all after an hour of breathing underwater.

This year I learnt that we live in a world of wonderful possibility.

And for 2010, I wish the most wonderful things for all the amazing people in my life, who I’ve just hitched a little tighter.

---

The Brazilian author, Jorge Amado, wrote:

The ocean is large, the sea is a road without end, waters make up more than half the world, they are three-quarters of it, and all that belongs to Iemanjá. There she combs her hair (beautiful slave girls come with combs of silver and ivory), hears the prayers of the women of the sea, unleashes storms, chooses the men she is to take on the bottomless journey to the depths of the sea. And it is here that her feast takes place. Because the night of the feast of Iemanjá is a thing of beauty. On those nights the sea is of a color between blue and green, the moon is always in the sky, the stars accompany the lanterns on the sloops, Iemanjá slowly spreads her hair out toward the sea and there is nothing in the world as beautiful (sailors on big ships that travel all over always say) than the color that emerges from the mingling of Iemanjá's hair with the sea.

A letter to my lover – the shadow play of half-won affection

Address:

Sewer number 552

behind the mall

just next to the warungs

in the shadow of some great erection of a monument

to some dictator

or perhaps just To Hope

just down the road from that shiny international hotel

next to the kampong with the barefoot kids

and the hollowed out little men

wearing SBY t-shirts with blue sleeves.

Under the yellow-orange light of the almost-dark

- because it never gets dark here, never -

there lies my Jakarta.

A nondescript afternoon during the quiet of Ramadan 2009, looking out over Bundaran HI with its rigidly hopeful figures symbolising the optimism of tomorrow.

To my Jakarta,

I’m not sure if I ever told you. But I almost left you. A few months back I was offered a job living in Bali and travelling to eco-lodges in some of the most beautiful places in this country – places that are easy to love. When I was offered that job my mind whirred with new possibility. I was so excited I felt like my skin might rupture and erupt with starbursts; I was so charged with hope and opportunity.

My job would have been to inspire people to visit these incredible places, to help them reconnect with what drives them, with what feeds their souls. After living in Jakarta for some months, I could appreciate how important it was to escape to a naturally beautiful place – to appreciate the wondrousness of the world and remember why life is such a gift. I remember digging my fingers into my thighs and emitting a little screech with my eyes shut tight. It was all a little too exciting. I even had to do a couple of handstands to get rid of some excess excitement. Yep, it was like New Love.

And then, there was you. I felt that I had given you a fair go to show yourself to me and it appeared that we were not really hitting it off, and that most likely we would never really hit it off. Every day you muffle my skin with your smog and your heat and trip me up with your broken pavements. You gave me an eye-ulcer, blurring your beauty; you fractured my kneecap so I had to hobble across you, you infested my digestive tract with warring bacteria and parasites and then pumped me full of antibiotics that made me feel that I was dying and eating nails at the same time - but somehow didn’t kill the nuclear-resistant amoeba.

I know you’re trying to tell me I’m not made for this place; that I’m too fragile to exist here. And you’re looking to poison me from the inside out. Last night my stomach warped and bubbled and I threw up black sludge that looked like the rancid stuff that pumps through your sewer canals - your lifeblood, carrying whispers of corruption and unmet expectations across the skin of your city. Well, it’s not my life-blood. My body thinks that stuff is poison and to be honest, I’m inclined to agree. Do you think you’re fooling anyone, pumping poison through your veins every day and pretending it is blood? After a while people can tell poison from blood and they want the real thing.

Sometimes it’s hard to love you. Sometimes I need tequila shots just to get a laugh out of you.

But. We had our moments. Like that time when I was walking home with my idealism dribbling in my wake and I looked up and you’d made the moon full and bright and yellow, and a breeze skipped up my spine and with Feist in my ears you gave me goose-bumps into the thick night. I thought of you fondly then. And that time I was really sick and just needed to get home, and you opened up the magical skyways of the city and flew me home with no macet at all. And all the times when one of your people – one of the 18 million beating hearts throbbing within you – has reached across the chasm between us and handed me a little piece of understanding, with a gaze or a conversation or a brush of fingertips.

I want you to know that I notice. Every time you rustle your skirts and show me a bit of beauty, I’m watching.

But I still want more. I want that feeling of lacing my fingers into yours in the middle of the night and feeling the squeeze around my knuckles which says yes, I’m here. I want to fall asleep with the knowledge that when I wake up your beating heart will be within reach of my fingertips. All this I can see in shadows, like the ghostly apparitions of a wayang puppet show. Just beyond my reach, on the other side beneath your cloaks, where other people make the shadow-play of our almost love story. I’m wondering if you’ll ever make it real. I want it to be and I’m willing to suspend disbelief to make it so.

So here we are. I gave up that job in Bali to be with you. And now we’ve got less than 3 months left together and already I’m feeling the nostalgia of losing you. I look out into the glowing clenched-fist night and feel a swell of clarity. I feel like I’m finally starting to understand you, and I can see your fingers unfurling so I know you feel the same. I like to think of you as one of those songs that I didn’t like at first but then I kept hearing it and eventually I fell in love with it, because it’s not as cheap and easy as a pop song. People ask me if I think we can work it out and I say ... maybe. Clear-eyed Sydney calls me home and makes so much sense, like the boy with the clean fingernails and a full time job. And of course Sydney will win in the end.

But I’ll always look for you, blazing and darkening in shadow movements behind the screen. I’ll sit and watch untiringly through the night like Indonesians do; everyone else will be on the side where they can watch the skilful puppet master and the intricately designed puppets, with the gamelan orchestra creating its nightmarish soundtracks. I’ll be alone on the other side of the screen, watching the silhouettes shifting and stirring and embracing and quivering as they love, fight and betray their way through life. And I’ll make it all real with my belief.

We’re the lucky ones, because we know ahead of time that we are ending; we can say everything we’ve always wanted to say. So let’s just enjoy the time we have left together. I know you’re not big on beginnings and endings (more on that later), but I am – so try to think of something meaningful for our farewell.

Love, (that’s right- love, don’t be malu)

Ali xx

Peering across the divide - a few little notes on faith

I’ve wanted to write about faith since I moved in Indonesia. But finding words to talk about faith is difficult and feels fraudulent, like saying I love you just because someone else says it and you want it to be true.

It’s necessary to think about faith in order to understand this country; without religion, life here is confronting and confounding. Faith is everywhere, operating in tandem with every life experience, informing so much of everything that happens. Every day, no matter where you are, you can hear the sound of a nation of believers as they are called to pray. The faith of this country wakes you up in the morning with devoted humming that creeps through the crevices of your apartment.

Five things I have learnt about faith, from the faithful and the faithless:

1. Faith needs nothing earthly. Mosques are great empty spaces with shiny marble surfaces, where the faithful join together to bounce their prayers off the walls and hear them back again. Here, the faithful don’t require anything to help them believe. Their belief is bottomless and nebulous in its expansiveness; but hard-surfaced in its strength.

2. Faith is about being grateful and expressing hope and asking for help and saying you’re sorry. These are the things that people have trouble doing every day of their lives.

3. Faith finds meaning in the things that happen to you and gives reasons for the moments that bring joy or distress and provides comfort when the world is loud and unhearing. These are the things that people want from the moment they’re born.

4. Faith requires trust in the intangible, belief in the unfathomable and loyalty to something that is everywhere and nowhere. These are the struggles of life and have nothing and everything to do with a God or Gods. These things are hard for everyone, every moment, every day, no matter where they live or who they love or what they believe.

5. Sometimes it’s sad not to believe, but you can’t just choose to have faith. Sometimes it’s just too difficult to believe in things that you can’t hold in your fists or prove with facts.

I recently edited a report for the Indonesian Commission on Violence Against Women, about horrific human rights abuses against women in May 1998, when riots raged across Jakarta and other cities of Indonesia. Amid the chaos, mass rapes and other appallingly violent acts were carried out, predominantly against Chinese Indonesian women.

Editing the report was excruciating not just because of its content but also because it was so poorly translated – words had been changed from Indonesian into muddled English that tripped over itself often nonsensically. Every so often while editing the report I came across an indecipherable paragraph of translated English, and would have to refer back to the original text in Indonesian. Using dictionaries and online translation tools I constructed paragraphs – bundling words together like hellish building blocks to form awful sentences. Finally emerging with meaningful sentences like: the research indicated that mass rapes were conducted almost simultaneously, in a manner that was organised and widespread across a number of different riot locations. Going over and over the translation and hoping that I somehow got it wrong.

Almost at the end of the editing, I was finally presented with a gift. So Indonesian this is: to receive a small piece of clarity and beauty at the end of a dismal journey.

The final appendix of the report: the prayers. It was a strange thing, after wading through the report’s jumble of lost meanings, to find that suddenly everything makes sense in verses of prayer. Reading the lines of the prayers was like discovering the code for understanding the report – there it was tucked away at the back, only to be found by those who persevere to the end. This elusiveness of meaning is so typical of Indonesia.

It’s a simple truth: you will never understand anything about this pocket of the world until you listen to its people pray. In this land where everyone believes in something, it makes no sense to attempt to comprehend it without grasping the way its people believe.

In prayer, the translated phrases about May 1998 are achingly poetic.

The prayers speak of immaculate flesh with blood gushing all over; of sacred wombs, torn and tattered; of lives, dying and exhausted; of brutal, foul grips of anonymous villains. The prayers speak of tears that wither; they appeal for help to show truth as truth, and to give strength to Indonesia’s leaders who must scale their way righteously. The prayers ask that the souls of their loved ones may rest in Your Most Consoling Gardens.

And then, making the most sense of all:

We could not sigh our pains to anyone but You
... this misery is beyond our possibility

Indonesia is a collection of thousands of islands with lots of dark corners where unspeakable things are often left unspoken, where issues that might cause offence or distress are rarely confronted, where - only if absolutely necessary - hushed tones are employed to tenderly dab at awful things. In this world, there are countless souls who could not sigh their pains to anyone.

And from another world, the faithless are left to peer across the divide, struggling to deal with the miseries that are beyond our possibility.

Hope, Faith, Found - Padang, one month on.

“You can’t fight with nature. You have to try to be friendly with it,” says Abi as we look out the car windows at the buildings in Padang, Sumatra, which have been made crooked by the temperamental earth. We are both strangers here; he is from Bandung in Java (another island just across from Sumatra) and I am from Sydney in Australia (another island, down a little and to the right).

We are looking around us and trying to work out how concrete turns to cardboard and caves and crumbles and warps and twists and zigzags. Here, we pass a house that has reared up and speared itself through a white van parked in front. There, steel reinforced columns, now ruined, leer serrated teeth at us.

“People talk about making buildings earthquake-proof. It’s not possible. Maybe earthquake friendly,” says Abi with a serious laugh.

I remember someone in a UN coordination meeting a couple of weeks earlier saying that this earthquake behaved oddly, with the tectonic plates moving up and down against each other, rather than side by side. Cheeky earth behaviour.

“I guess it’s hard to make something earthquake proof, because you never know which way the earth is going to move,” I say, feeling incredibly inadequate and unlearned, but for some reason still compelled to fill the air with words.

It has been a month since the earth here heaved and wrenched open, killing an estimated 1,117 people, injuring many more and leaving hundreds of thousands of buildings in Padang and surrounding regions ruined. (The government estimates over 200,000 houses are moderately or severely damaged).

And everywhere around us, life goes on. Young men transport televisions on their laps on scooters, streets carts roll and make fried treats and fresh juices, school girls in pure white jilbabs giggle and look at their phones and talk behind their hands and yell out to the white girl “hello mister” and laugh hysterically.

The organisation I’ve been working with in Jakarta is funding the installation of some water filtration units in some of the worst-hit villages around Padang; I’m here to oversee the project. Abi is our project manager here, doing an amazing job of organising everything.

I can’t help feeling entirely irrelevant and screamingly white as I inspect our third location. We follow a hand-drawn map to a kampung (village) and then we’re led down dirt tracks through to a family and their filthy well. It has been made more filthy by the recent earthquake, but I can’t help thinking it wouldn’t have been too clean to start with. Miya, a Padang local who is also helping to supervise the project, speaks to members of the community in Bahasa Indonesia, as I try to understand what they’re talking about. It is the family’s well, but it can serve the community and they are happy to share the water.

A naked boy of about 5 bounds around me, climbing trees and falling sideways, giggling and gazing with wide quizzical eyes at the strange white bulk towering over him.

“Are you happy with this location?” Miya asks me after a little while.

I think it’s important to be rational about it, so I start asking questions about how many families live in this village; will everyone be able to easily access the clean water? Are we sure it’s not contaminated by salt (this is one of the few things these particular filtration units cannot filter)? Is the community willing to work together to maintain it? And what is the water supply like currently – how do they use the water from the well as it is now? (Apparently they use rocks and other materials to filter it. Gazing down at the swirly brown water in the well, I don’t have the brain machinery to comprehend this). Eventually I just nod and tell them that yes, I am happy with this location.

The questions were something of a charade because as soon as I saw the stagnant brown well water and felt the curious eyes of the children living there, there was no way I could suggest another location.

I’m shamed by the thrill I seem to have supplied to the people in the kampung, and as we leave one of the women puts her hands on mine and rubs my white arms and I feel an acute sense of unbelonging.

Over the next few days I am continually struck by the incredible resilience of the people here. I peer at them through my white eyelids and try to imagine how it would feel if this place was my home; if the mosque where I worshiped and believed cracked and buckled to the ground; if I was homeless and living in a tent while mourning the loss of friends and neighbours and family. Or even if I had escaped harm or direct effects – still, how would it feel to have my friends and neighbours suffer, to have my city so callously ravaged?

Everywhere there is hope and energy for the future – people are rebuilding, standing tall on ruined buildings and making plans for new ones; teaching children in tents while schools are repaired or rebuilt from nothing; worshipping and believing as they have done every day of their lives. Of course there is sadness and devastation and there must be despair, but there are also so many signs of joy and forward-looking hope and pride; like snapshots of lessons in how to have faith and be happy:

The teenager walking across a bridge on her way home, caught in flashing rains and leisurely twirling an umbrella as if performing singin’ in the rain on stage.

The friendly faces greeting us along the sides of the village streets, waving at us as we drive past.

The leathery man lazing on his broken porch, gesturing to me to indicate I am welcome to come and look closer at his ruined home.

The principal of the school who pops his head over a broken fence and tells me that his school was crushed so now he is teaching somewhere else - just over there, do you see it; my school is in the white tent that says UNICEF.

The group of schoolgirls sending reams of giggles across the ruins of the Ambacang hotel, where so many souls were lost just weeks ago.

Looking across this fractured landscape with pale eyes and white skin it’s easy to feel despair creep along your arms, lifting your hair into goosebumps. But if you concentrate on watching the people, digging and carrying and constructing, straight-backed with faith and busy with plans, it becomes easier to smile with them and understand how they will survive.

Lassoing the stars from the gutter - the unraveling of Jakarta

Jakarta is the lover I picked up in a club in one of those crooked back alleys with hidden nooks and grimy doors that open into dark rooms full of dodgy characters with everywhere eyes. Jakarta and I did tequila shots together and woke up with pasty mouths and sketchy night recollections. She is the lover I’m ashamed of, the one I’m most seduced by, the one I hate the most and love the most. She’s the one I keep in secret, meeting in shadowy laneways along broken bricked footpaths, in the gutter next to sewers, and sometimes - when we’re feeling decadent and daring - in the looming shiny malls, where we watch each other’s reflections in the windows of shops containing items we can never dream of affording.

My lover will often flash about millions of Rupiah but the gifts remain undelivered.

My parents have expressed interest in coming to visit me in Jakarta and I’ve coaxed them down from their excitement, managing their expectations and making excuses for my lover.

“But you won’t like Jakarta,” I say pleadingly, “I mean, I don’t mind living here, but I don’t even know what you would do here…”

The divide is so great that I can’t even imagine my parents and my new secret lover in the same room together.

“But it’s your home,” they respond patiently. “We want to know what your life is like.”

What they really mean is: “We want to know who you’re spending all your time with, and whether we approve.”

“Maybe I can meet you somewhere else?” I suggest hopefully, shamed by my own shame but still trying to change their minds. I make a few half-hearted suggestions - like sunshiny Bali, or straight footpathed Singapore - somewhere that’s a little more husbandly material??

Everyone has a lover like Jakarta at least once in their lives: the lover nobody else understands. You know the one I’m talking about, because you’ve had one too. Your parents don’t approve, your friends wonder why you keep going back, and everyone tells you over and over that you’re just too good for it.

But you’ll hear none of it! You’re too far in it. Your lover seduces you with grand plans and glances of greatness amid the squalor. (My lover, Jakarta, is a shameless slut and seduces many this way – it’s famous for bringing the young and ambitious from all over the Indonesian archipelago to its heaving bosom on the promise of unimagined richness). This lover beckons you close and with an arm around your shoulders and says - LOOK! Look up through the smog and see the stars! We can lasso them together; I can show you how – do you trust me? No one knows what really goes on between lovers, and who could understand the sacred bond shared between two souls who plot to capture the stars together?

The unravelling of Jakarta is a forever entertaining journey. This city always feels as if she’s holding back beauty; always holding the promise of more – if only I love her a little more! If only I make her feel secure that I won’t leave her, then she will stop running around and showing her beauty to others (she’s always ugliest with me). She only wants me to believe in her!

And I do believe, I really do… this particular quest for beauty is just taking a little longer than I thought.

Next time my parents ask if they can come visit Jakarta, I just might say yes…. Perhaps the four of us can sit in the gutter together with the sewer stench in our nostrils, and my lover can show us all how to lasso the stars.  

Unhappy neighbours

Bodies are washing up on beaches.

I read that in a newspaper article about the tsunami in Samoa. I wondered about the person who wrote that. Bodies.

For me, the saddest thing that happens when there’s a natural disaster is that beating hearts - living breathing people - become bodies in just a few catastrophic moments ... bloated bodies washing up on beaches, bodies with a foot peeking out of building rubble in newspaper photos, bodies floating along on a magic carpet of debris on floodwaters through villages. People who love and are loved somehow morph from being single souls and instead become part of rising death tolls and statistics and numbers unaccounted for and people-shaped mounds in yellow body bags.  

It happens when death makes sweeping movements. When the deaths come in piles – when people die in the hundreds and thousands. All of a sudden the process becomes business like and emotionless. And people wash up on beaches like pieces of driftwood.  

Perhaps the language is supposed to desensitise us to the shocking calamity that has ravaged our world, perhaps without this we would have trouble processing the enormity of thousands of lives (thousands!) lost all at once, all in a moment. Is it even possible, as a fellow soul on the earth, to comprehend the horrifying reality that sometimes the ground beneath our feet betrays us and rears ferociously, bringing utter devastation to our world? It’s far too sad and scary a concept to consider.

When people aren’t numbers, then they might be me or you.  

Imagine the ground shaking so strongly that you need to sit on it to keep yourself from toppling over. This is what people in Padang, West Sumatra, had to do a few days ago. Imagine your home collapsing in on you while the world lurches and shoves in all directions.  Imagine the panicked screams of your friends and family members as your world crashes and falls around you. Or the ferocious sound of the sea rushing in from all directions and snatching your voice away so you can’t yell out to your husband or wife who is being swept away on great bulky waves.

"I don't know how to describe it, it was like a mountain coming out of the sea," a chief in one of the worst hit villages in Samoa told AFP.

These are the scenes of childhood nightmares; of Armageddon and cataclysmic planetary episodes. In the midst of all that, you would think the whole world was ending.   

Imagine that your father, or mother, or babies, or brothers and sisters – are somewhere in all that madness, in amongst the crashing and the jolting and the collapsing and the flooding and the screaming and panic, and you can’t contact them because all the communications are down. Imagine searching through hospital corridors, or worse, along rows of yellow body bags, for a hint that somewhere in there is a familiar somebody.

The transition from alive to an approximated number in a death toll comes quickly.  

The tectonic plates of this region are unhappy neighbours. It’s an odd thought to ponder, that beneath our feet, the very crust of the earth is rumbling, shifting and colliding, mostly without warning and sometimes with calamitous consequences.

In Australia (the lucky country) we have our very own plate. Which I guess is kind of like living out in the countryside where your neighbours’ fences are somewhere out on the horizon, so that when they’re screaming out for help, you can barely hear them. But they’re still your neighbours, and if they were in trouble you’d still do everything you could. And you’d still mourn with them in their sorrow, because it could easily have been you.