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.