Sumbanese at mercy of weather, loan sharks

Sumba island, which forms part of East Nusa Tenggara province in eastern Indonesia, tends to be one of the less reported locations in the country. Indeed, many confuse it with another island with a similar-sounding name, Sumbawa, which lies further to the west, in West Nusa Tenggara province. The Jakarta Post's Evi Mariani traveled to Sumba recently and reports below on two aspects of poverty there.

From an altitude of 3,000 meters, Sumba island looked more like a huge brown chunk of land rather than a place where people actually live.

Nevertheless, almost 600,000 people, mostly skinny or slender at best, live in the 11,450 square kilometers of the hilly, brown, barren savanna, which turns green in the brief wet season.

On this land of horses, the sky almost always looks vastly blue and the sun shines brilliantly so that visitors come toting tubes of factor-50 sunblock cream.

Normally, both greener western Sumba and the utterly barren eastern part usually experience a brief rainy season from around January to March.

However, even in the wet season, rain pours only intermittently about four times a week.

This year, the wet season was even shorter, causing this year's one and only rice harvest in May to fail in rice-growing areas in eastern Sumba, where a third of Sumba's population have a tough existence.

"In February, which was supposed to be the height of the wet season when rain should have fallen morning and night, it rained hardly at all," K.H. Primang, 40, a farmer in kampung Tanarara, Lewa district, East Sumba, told The Jakarta Post in front of his traditional Sumba house.

To make matters worse, this year rats attacked paddy fields in Lewa, where most of the plants are dependent on rain.

In some fields, the rats did not give the seedlings a chance to grow into paddy, Primang's wife added.

"Only 25 percent of fields were productive this year. The yields were from fields that receive irrigation from a nearby dam," Primang said, adding that in East Sumba irrigated fields also yielded crops only once a year.

Lewa district is the most densely populated area in sparse East Sumba regency. The district is also known as the rice and corn belt and the livestock zone for the regency.

Aridity

"Sumbanese have a custom known as mandara, in which, during the harvest season, people from more arid areas like Haharu come carrying anything they have to be bartered with rice from the more fertile region. Lewa is usually on top of their food contingency plans," Joseph Renleuw, a community organizer from the Pikul Foundation, said.

In the 7,060-kilometer-square regency, there is another barren kampung called Tanarara in Matawai Lapau district, 110 kilometers from Lewa.

That Tanarara may be considered more fortunate because this May, the harvest season produced a 40 percent yield, also due to a shorter wet season.

"Our land is indeed dry -- dry," Rambu Hamu, 35, a schoolteacher said, her smiling mouth emitted a sound -- something between chuckling and a sigh of bitterness -- while looking away over her right shoulder.

Even in good times, Sumbanese, most of whom are farmers and shepherds, stock up on rice harvested in May to provide four to five months of basic food supply, Rambu Hamu said.

Later on, they depend on corn and resilient sweet potatoes or raskin (subsidized rice for poor people), which is not always available.

From shepherding their own or other people's cattle like horses, pigs, goats and cows, Sumbanese earn a meager income, which they use to buy rice from the market.

Often, though, they are left with no means to subsist.

"The last resort is to borrow money or rice from loan sharks. If we borrow 100 kilograms of rice, we have to pay 200 kilograms in the next harvest season," Primang said. The same rule applied to borrowed money, he added.

The worst period usually occurs from September to February when the crop stock has dwindled, while the rainy season has not yet arrived to allow fast-yielding plants to grow.

Cattle-rustling

That is also a time of increased livestock theft.

"The stealing of livestock here is not petty crime perpetrated by desperate people but rather a well-orchestrated activity. We believe that police and big businesspeople here are behind it," Primang said.

Primang's statement was substantiated by his brother, Ferly Kondameha, or Mbabu, 38, who gave a long explanation of how thieves could make off with dozens of pigs and horses in a single swoop on a village.

"The livestock would be put onto a truck, which would deliver the beasts to middlemen," Mbabu, who was more emotional than his stoical brother, said in frustration. "Reporting the crime to the police proves to be useless, as they usually ask for money before they are prepared to do anything about it."

As irritating as this might be, livestock theft, however, is not an everyday problem for Sumbanese.

The lingering problem of access to potable water is a hardship they have to face on a daily basis.

However, Primang, a father of two, managed to make the adversity seemed like a mere challenge.

"Villagers have sunk wells along the irrigation channel here. Our village probably has 10 wells. We walk hundreds of meters carrying buckets to provide the day's drinking water," Primang, who is also a government trainer on livestock affairs in the village, said.

"Getting drinking water here is easy," he said lightly, while encouraging his guests to drink the hot tea his wife served.

Primang, who lost his right arm and leg in a traffic accident in 1996, appeared to rely on a different definition of "easy" because he compared his fate to that of more isolated Sumbanese who have to walk as far as 20 kilometers purely to access drinking water.

Compared with other families, though, Primang's is probably better off. While most of the villagers do not have their own cattle and only shepherd rich people's cattle, he has 10 horses and five cows of his own.

His house also has electricity at night -- enough for the family and neighbors to watch TV, currently airing government campaigns to save energy.

In spite all the afflictions (perhaps, for them, merely challenges) the family survives; Primang generously offered his guests supper.

"From this year's harvest I produced a ton of unhulled rice to feed seven people in this household. We gave 300 kilograms to the loan sharks to pay for 150 kilograms we had borrowed," Primang said.

"We shall manage; if not, we'll borrow some more this year."