Balinese NGO workers cope under pressure

Balinese NGO workers cope under pressure

By Degung Santikarma

DENPASAR, Bali (JP): At a small seaside hotel in Kuta a
barefoot parade of sarong-and-bikini clad tourists wandered
through the hotel lobby in search of the beach beyond. But the
mixed group of Indonesians and Westerners, dressed in long pants,
neatly ironed shirts and shiny shoes, who were gathering in the
hotel's open air meeting pavilion, barely turned a glance toward
the colorful crowd spread out on the sands only meters away from
them. This group, after all, came to Bali in pursuit of more
serious goals than pub crawls or perfect tans. Dozens of
representatives from international development agencies have
descended on the "enchanted isle" not to luxuriate in its fabled
charms but to discuss with Balinese NGOs (non-governmental
organizations) the best ways to try and heal the hurts of this
island that has been hard hit by rising social tensions,
increasing environmental degradation and the loss of fertile land
and traditional livelihoods to the tourist industry.

In the hotel, they listened to papers outlining plans for
action and watched the overhead projectors display of tables and
graphs that break down the pains of the Balinese population into
easy to manage portions. But as modern as the scene might seem,
with the attendees busy taking calls from their ringing
handphones and checking their electronic notebooks to set up
appointments, there was also a distinctly neocolonial feel in the
air.

During the coffee break, the Western participants were
enjoying a level of service never before seen in this one-star
hotel. Members of the Balinese NGOs rushed to find the most
comfortable chairs to ease the tired feet of their foreign
counterparts, and then lined up in nervous rows, hoping to have a
chance to hand out a business card, a project proposal or score
the ultimate goal of a private meeting. Using the most polite and
respectful language they could muster, these local activists told
stories of the sufferings in their communities with all the
passion of salesmen hoping to entice a buyer into making a
deposit on a prime piece of Bali's beachfront land. And as the
drive to attract funding dollars became more heated, cracks in
the united local front start to become visible.

"I know everyone in Jakarta," one activist boasted. "Just give
me your proposal and I'll see that it gets funded," he claimed
with the confidence of an old-style feudal lord offering his
patronage to peasant clients.

Before there were NGOs in Bali, there were traditional groups
called sekehe which, without outside funding, government permits
or expert consultants, worked to address social problems. When
pestilence threatened the crops, there were sekehe bikul or rat-
catching societies that would roam through the fields in search
of vermin. When roofs sprung leaks during the rainy season, the
sekehe ikat or roofweaving society would travel from house to
house offering its services. There were even sekehe tuak,
societies for the making and drinking of palm wine, and sekehe
tari, dance societies, who would ensure the island never went
without entertainment.

But with the rise to power of the New Order, these local
organizations hardly seemed able to achieve the grand goals the
new government had set for development. Compared to plans for
reorganizing Balinese agriculture through the so-called "Green
Revolution" or making Bali a world center for five star tourism,
forming a sekehe semal society to catch the squirrels which
threatened the coconut harvest began to seem rather quaint and
old-fashioned, the kind of thing useful mainly for attracting the
attention of curiosity-seeking cultural tourists.

New Order developmentalism brought its own problems to Bali.
Rampant tourist development led not to the promised prosperity
for all but to increasing social problems for many, while other
government-sponsored programs were plagued by epidemics of
collusion, corruption and nepotism. Formed to provide a space for
critical thinking and to turn idealism into action, Balinese NGOs
began working to address important issues such as poverty, AIDS,
the destruction of the environment, tourism, and political
repression.

Yet the problems faced by Balinese NGOs today are numerous.
They range from the administrative difficulties of having to
produce funding proposals and project reports without the
necessary writing skills, computer knowledge or, especially,
English language abilities, to family pressure to get a "real
job" that pays more than, at the most, a few hundred thousand
rupiah a month. Frequently, resentment towards foreign
consultants who earn up to a hundred times the salary of their
local counterparts troubles relationships between local NGOs and
international aid agencies. And there are also the inevitable
obstacles that arise from trying to turn abstract concepts like
"civil society," "environmental awareness" or "sustainable
resource management" into actual working programs.

"We're trying to encourage people to conserve the environment
and protect it from the damage caused by uncontrolled tourism
development, but most people in Bali think that animals are only
good for eating and trees only good for chopping down," said
Kadek, an activist who works for a local environmentalist NGO.

He told a story of meeting with a group of villagers on the
dry and rocky coastline of eastern Bali where persistent drought
conditions combined with poverty had led to the deforestation of
nearby mountain slopes as people scoured the hills for firewood
and grass to feed their cows. In the aftermath of rainy season
landslides that killed several villagers, a government agency had
designated the mountain a reforestation zone and barred villagers
from accessing it.

"We tried to talk with them about how conserving the mountain
ecosystem would benefit them, but the local people just saw the
project as another example of the government taking away their
land and denying them needed resources," Kadek recounted.

Another similar story was told by Agung Alit, director of
Mitra Bali, an NGO active in the arena of fair trade, which works
to help local craftspeople who have been marginalized from the
economic benefits of tourism develop markets for their products
and to encourage safe working conditions, gender equality and
environmental awareness.

Participatory

Two weeks after passing an order from an overseas buyer for
ten carved wooden dinosaurs on to one of the craftsmen involved
in the organization's programs, Alit returned home one night to
find two hundred of the beasts in a box on his front porch. The
next day, the craftsman showed up at Alit's house asking to be
paid for his work, explaining that he had made the extra goods
because he needed enough money to pay for a ceremony to marry a
second wife. "I'm not sure sometimes if the message we are trying
to send in our small business management and gender sensitivity
workshops is getting across," worried Alit.

Indeed, perhaps the biggest problem faced by Balinese NGOs is
the pressure to create programs that are, in development lingo,
"participatory". To create meaningful social change, activists
must act as mediators between international funding agencies
which are advocating particular issues and local communities
whose cultural and historical backgrounds and practical concerns
may differ substantially from those who are setting these agendas
from their offices in the West.

Trying to create open dialogs and encourage the input of local
communities in programs can be a difficult task when the very
meaning of "participation" itself is locally variable.

"The hardest thing is when we hold a workshop or a training
seminar and when we ask for people's opinions nobody wants to
speak," said Agung Alit. "They have been trained by the New Order
that expressing your opinion openly can be a dangerous thing."

In a cultural and political milieu where speech itself is the
privilege of those with power, such as government officials and
local leaders, most of whom are educated males, trying to
encourage open communication can be a difficult and frustrating
process. And even community activists express fear of speaking
bluntly about the difficulties they face.

"Many times projects fail because of problems translating them
into practice, but we're afraid to talk about this with the
agencies in Jakarta because it is only success that brings more
funding. It's also hard when the Western experts they send don't
speak our language and can't understand the cultural setting that
we're working in. They might be experts about the environment,
for instance, but they can't understand that Balinese often see
things differently," said one NGO member who did not wish to be
named for fear that the international funders of his organization
would interpret his words negatively. "We're stuck in the
middle," he concluded.

The author is an antropologist.