From the people to Mr Wolfensohn

From the people to Mr Wolfensohn

By Lea Jellinek and Bambang Rustanto

JAKARTA (JP): We feel we have met you, know you and dream the
same things as you and many of us have faith in you. We have
waited for your coming. We have sent letters to you but the
response has been that you are too busy. We have wanted to meet
you to discuss our problems and explain what you can do for us,
but we are confronted by a wall. Every minute of your time has
been organized for you and there is no space left for us.

Many important people will meet you and tell you how our
economy can recover, how our government and banks can be
restructured, how our democracy can be made to work, how our
society can become "civil", how you can help the poor with
programs like the social safety net. We feel that your money and
programs with their sophisticated technology, instruments and
international and local experts impose new ways on us. We are
scared that your money and programs, even with all your good
intentions, will harm us.

Let us explain. You try to reach us but fail. You fail because
you use the government, private consultants and companies as
channels of communication to us. They do not really care about
us. We think you have now understood this and are now trying to
work through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and academic
institutes. Some of these care for us, but many still do not.
They never ask us what we want. They come to us with programs
that they themselves have prepared or programs which have been
designed for them by you and other international and national
agencies. These programs have little relevance to our needs.

Applying programs to every subdistrict at great speed with set
targets are unlikely to succeed. Encouraging the development of
new institutions instead of building on traditional ones means
that we lose control and do not feel we own these institutions.
We have many of our own traditional institutions which are never
noticed and have been emasculated by the New Order. We do not
need constant training courses, research surveys, consultants'
reports and program proposals. Who benefits from these
activities? We do not.

Your focus on numbers and concrete structures is not always
useful for measuring the success and happiness of our lives. The
benefits we receive often cannot be seen or measured. Ultimately,
our joy and success comes not from the accumulation of wealth or
material possessions but from working together in a good
environment and sharing and caring for each other. The mass
accumulation of capital and concrete structures is destroying our
environment and our caring and sharing. Only we can tell you how
we can live better and happier lives.

So how can you help? You could make life easier for us (and
yourself) if you listened to us and encouraged our way of doing
things instead of listening to others and letting them impose
institutions, programs and funds upon us.

What we need is trust and small pilot programs -- one per
district -- which will show what we can do and the success of
them will spread like fire to the rest of Indonesia. At the
kampung level we can plan, implement and control and success will
spread naturally. This is already happening only 20 minutes from
your hotel. In only eight months, our lives have transformed
through an innovative community driven savings and lending
program which is starting to address our health, education and
other needs.

Many people think that our political and economic crisis can
be overcome by more international investment, more growth of big
business and by using your money for the government,
restructuring of banks, building democracy, decentralization,
human rights and civil society. All these opportunities for
political reform and economic growth are only given to the rich
and powerful and the middle class. It is assumed that these
benefits will penetrate -- "trickle down" to us, but they do not.

We believe that you will give us a chance. Thank you for
reading our letter. We know you are busy but if you could come
and see our program for yourself, we would welcome you.

The writers are NGO activists based in Jakarta.