Poor go without all year round
Muninggar Sri Saraswati and Annastashya Emmanuelle, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
Ramadhan is coming. And in the next few days, millions of Indonesians, like their Muslim brethren around the world, will start fasting. From dawn till dusk, they will refrain from eating, drinking and other worldly pleasures.
Rahmat, 45, however, does not have to wait until this weekend to start fasting.
Like many other poor traditional fishermen in Kepulauan Seribu (Thousand Islands), Rahmat and his family may be forced to go without food at anytime, when they earn nothing despite working hard for hours.
"Sometimes I get Rp 5,000 (less than 50 U.S. cents) a day, but other times I don't even bring home a penny," he told The Jakarta Post.
"If that happens, we don't eat for the whole day," said the father of six.
"I usually ask my youngest boy, 4, to sleep or drink a lot to forget his hunger," Rahmat's wife added.
How could Rahmat, a fisherman, go home empty handed without even one fish to eat?
"Even if you stir the sea, you won't be able to get one fish if you do it at the wrong moment," said Rahmat, who lives in a simple house with bamboo walls and an earth floor.
In Kampung Bandar, North Jakarta, the Hidayat family shares the same plight. They occupy a makeshift 2x3 square-meter room next to a railway.
Hidayat, 60, who used to be a construction worker, has three daughters, all married, four sons and four grandchildren. The 13 of them live together in the same place, while his sons-in-law, who are construction workers, visit their wives and spend the night there once in a while.
All of the daughters work at small food stalls in the Ancol area, each earning around Rp 100,000 a month, while the sons take any odd jobs they are able to find.
"When we have some extra money, we buy vegetables or some tempeh to have with our meal. Most of the time, we eat rice sprinkled with salt," said Hidayat's wife, Gertrudis Patriawati.
According to Hidayat, they require at least Rp 10,000 a day to buy their daily needs, such as food and drinking water.
But most of the time, they have to borrow from neighbors for rice, salt or other items, as they don't have enough money every day.
Officially, the poverty rate in Indonesia declined to 15.2 percent from 27 percent in 1999, thanks to the modest economic recovery and falling rice prices, bringing the condition back to where it was before the 1997 financial crisis. Similarly the poverty rate in urban and rural areas is back to the pre-crisis levels of 20.7 percent and 7.3 percent respectively.
In terms of people, however, the 15.2 percent poverty rate still translates into nearly 32 million.
The World Bank, in a report presented to a meeting between the Indonesian government and its main aid donors in Jakarta this week, cautioned that as many as 121 million people of the population are living on less than US$2 a day (at 1993 prices) and are therefore considered as "near poor" and very vulnerable should another economic crisis hit Indonesia.
This is a more widely used measurement of poverty worldwide compared to the Indonesian government's definition of poverty, which is based on calorie intake.
The World Bank and other donor countries and agencies pledged to provide Indonesia with another $3.14 billion in fresh soft loans and $586 million in grants after the government agreed to launch a new campaign to tackle poverty.
Will the lives of Rahmat and Hidayat, and the millions of others like them, really improve, or was Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dorodjatun Kuntjoro-Jakti simply making another promise the government cannot keep?
"I want to improve my life if it is possible, but I don't know how," Rahmat said.
Rachmat, who is an elementary school graduate, works 12 hours a day, six days a week, fishing with 14 other people in a traditional boat.
If the sea is generous, Rahmat could earn Rp 20,000 in a day, but he only takes home Rp 5,000 because most of the money pays for the boat rental, which is Rp 300,000 a day. Unfortunately, the sea is not always that generous, he added.
His eldest child is an 18-year-old girl, an unemployed junior high school graduate, while the youngest is four years old.
Like other Pramuka island residents, he only has access to electricity for 12 hours a day. Each house has to pay Rp 2,000 a day for the electricity and if they fail to pay for 10 days, the subdistrict officers will cut off the power.
But Rahmat, whose name literally means blessing, said he did not complain.
Hidayat's family accepts poverty as fate and do not try to evade reality. They said that they are still able to live happily in their makeshift home, which is only two meters away from the railway line, and always shakes when a train passes.
"Well, at least as happy as a poor man can be," Hidayat, whose name means God's guidance, said with a grin.
"This is our home, as pitiful as it is. We're poor people, but we don't envy others who are better off than we are. That is why we are able to accept our condition quite gracefully," he remarked.