Michael Vatikiotis: Death in Jakarta
Michael Vatikiotis International Herald Tribune


WEDNESDAY, JULY 27, 2005
JAKARTA It's easy to be optimistic about Indonesia these days. The economy 
is growing at a decent clip, and foreign investors are at last showing real 
interest in the country. The seven-month old government of President Susilo 
Bambang Yudhoyono has inspired real confidence in the future and sentiment 
is bullish.

But it would be wrong to assume that everything is getting better in the 
republic. For many people in Jakarta, the government's incapacity to fix 
things was brought home to them by the heart-wrenching story of a poor 
garbage collector called Supriono.

Like countless tens of thousands living on the margins in Jakarta, 
Supriono's only real possession in life was the plywood trolley that he 
bought for five dollars and used to collect plastic bottles and cardboard 
for recycling. So when his three-year old daughter, Nur Hairunisa, fell sick 
with diarrhea, he was at a loss over what to do.

Supriono's average daily wage is a little over a dollar, while a visit to 
the local clinic cost him 50 cents. Poor and uneducated, he did not 
understand what he needed to do for his dehydrated girl, nor could he afford 
another visit to the clinic. Hairnusia died as he carried her fever-wracked 
body in the back of his filthy plywood cart early in the morning on June 
5th.

Desperate to bury his daughter, he had no money to pay for an ambulance to 
take her to a nearby cemetery. So he decided to carry her several kilometers 
in his cart to a Jakarta train station to reach the town of Bogor, outside 
the city, where he had friends who could help him. It was while he waited at 
the city's Tebet station, carrying his daughters body in a sheet of cloth in 
his arms and still with less than a dollar to his name, that local vendors 
grew suspicious and called the police.

The police questioned Supriono for hours. They took his daughter's body to a 
nearby hospital and wanted to do an autopsy. Supriono, a Muslim, was 
distraught and anxious to bury little Hairnusia before sundown, in 
accordance with Islamic custom. No one thought to give him the money to pay 
for an ambulance to take her to a graveyard, which is all he wanted. 
Questioned later by the media, hospital officials said that they had no 
choice - if they helped Supriono, they would have to help everyone. There 
simply wasn't the budget for this kind of aid.

In the end, a group of neighbors from a city district where Supriono had 
once rented a cardboard shack pooled the money to pay for the ambulance that 
eventually took her for burial at a city cemetery. It cost about 50 dollars.

A tabloid newspaper that reported Supriono's plight found that the story 
struck a chord. The tabloid Warta Kota told Supriono's life story; Supriono 
himself, a wiry man looking much older than his 38 years, was interviewed on 
the radio, and became the hot topic on Web sites and Internet blogs. The 
following week dozens of demonstrators carrying dummy corpses wrapped in 
white sheets appeared outside the presidential palace to highlight the 
desperate conditions of Jakarta's poor.

The tragedy of Supriono is one played out daily in this city of more than 12 
million, where middle class Indonesians who ride the tree-lined boulevards 
in brand new SUVs were recently shocked to hear that more than 8,000 
children in the city were suffering from malnutrition. There are thought to 
be more than 1.5 million malnourished children across the country; 
Indonesia's rate of infant and maternity mortality is the highest in 
Southeast Asia. An outbreak of polio, a disease the world is thought to have 
beaten, indicates just how bad things are for the poor.

Sadly political reform and economic recovery has barely touched the 
country's poor, who have only gotten poorer since the economic crisis and 
the downfall of Suharto in 1998.

The government's capacity to help has, if anything, deteriorated. The old 
network of rural clinics and logistical food depots Suharto created to feed 
people and keep them reasonably healthy have fallen into decline since 
budgets were trimmed and government functions were devolved to the regions, 
where they lack the funds to keep these critical outposts of welfare going. 
Patients at city hospitals in Jakarta are usually asked to make cash down 
payments before being treated.

No one in government could help Supriono. He simply fell through the cracks. 
It fell to his neighbors, the media and civil society to support him. Now 
this formerly anonymous garbage collector has become something of a minor 
celebrity, an emblem of the poor. Even the private sector has weighed in to 
help. Indonesia's largest flour miller, Bogasari, has tracked down Supriono 
and plans to buy him a new cart, one he can sell noodles from. Presumably 
noodles made with Bogasari flour.

(Michael Vatikiotis is a visiting research fellow at the Institute of 
Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.) 



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