Low salaries force teachers to moonlight

Low salaries force teachers to moonlight

Yuli Tri Suwarni, The Jakarta Post/Bandung

Mohamad Subur, 46, starts his day by riding his motorcycle to a
nearby market at 3:30 a.m. He mingles with food vendors and
housewives at the market. The darkness before dawn has not
revealed Subur's true persona.

Upon returning from the market, he conducts his dawn prayers
and then starts to prepare the ingredients for the various kinds
of traditional snacks he will make.

With his wife Nani Yani Maryani, he effortlessly blends
tapioca flour into cireng (a traditional snack), mixes flour with
slices of vegetables to make bakwan and shapes mashed cassava
into comro (snacks filled with oncom or fermented soybean).

He hurriedly puts on his safari suit and prepares the bag full
of traditional snacks and delivers it to the canteen at Bandung
State Senior High School No. 16 managed by his wife. Subur then
goes straight to the teacher's room to fill out his attendance
roster and walks to the classroom to teach book-keeping.

He goes home at 1 p.m. after school, then rests for a while
and later returns to school to teach extra classes for final year
students facing examinations. He goes home at about 4 p.m. to
prepare ingredients for his fried noodle business which he sets
up on the sidewalk of Jl. Mekarsari in Kiaracondong. After saying
his dusk prayer at about 6 p.m., he goes out to sell fried
noodles from his cart until 10 p.m. and occasionally up to 11
p.m.

"Everyone wishes to own a house and a car, as well as send
their children to university, but the salary of a civil servant
isn't enough to pay for all that," he said.

For Subur, seeking additional sources of income by taking a
side job is the only ticket to a better life. The father of three
children, who is used to working hard, said that he first started
his small business before he became a teacher in 1987. Subur, the
eldest of nine, graduated from the school of accountancy at
Bandung Teacher's Training Institute in 1982 and then began
teaching. He earned very little when he started his career, and
after years as a dedicated government teacher earns a monthly
salary of Rp 1.7 million (US$188).

For Subur, moonlighting as a fried noodle vendor is quite
lucrative and he is not ashamed of it. From his additional
earnings, Subur gets an extra income of Rp 2.5 million a month,
from which he has been able to buy three houses (one has been
rented out, and another one is an eight-room boarding house) and
pay for his three children's education. One of them had graduated
from Padjadjaran University with a degree in accountancy, the
second one is still in first year university and the youngest one
is a sixth grader at elementary school. "It is better to seek
side jobs, rather than resorting to illegal ways to supplement
our income," said Subur.

Another teacher from Arcamanik state elementary school in
Bandung regency, Wawan, 38, moonlights as a minibus driver. He
plies the Cicaheum-Cileunyi route after he has finishes teaching
at 12 noon. He has been driving the minibus ever since he became
a teacher in 1986. He has lunch at home, then picks up passengers
in the eastern part of Bandung from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m. at night
only to get an extra income of around Rp 10,000 to Rp 15,000 a
day. Besides being able to spend on his wife and two children, he
also advanced his education to get a second diploma at the
Bandung Teacher's Training Institution in 1996 to fulfill new
requirements for elementary school teachers.

Subur and Wawan are two of millions of teachers in the
country, who have to take side jobs to make ends meet. Some say
it is noble. However, others blame their side jobs for the
increasing absenteeism among teachers in the country. A recent
study by the SMERU Research Institute for the World Development
Report in 2004 showed that Indonesia was placed third (19
percent) on the list of absentee teachers, after Uganda and
India, with 39 and 25 percent respectively.

The two teachers rejected the charges that their students
suffered as a result of their side jobs. "I moonlight after
school hours. It would be shameful to skip classes because we
always remind students not to play truant," said Wawan.