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.