The dark side of Jakarta

Does a dead body need money? Surely not. The relatives of the deceased usually made do for the burial. It is, then, a serious matter if a father has no money for the funeral of his child.

A scavenger named Supriono was questioned by South Jakarta's Tebet police officers for carrying the body of his three-year-old daughter around the city because he had no money for the burial. The officers were suspicious of Supriono's explanation -- that his daughter had died of diarrhea and vomiting. Ordered to go to the Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital for an autopsy, Supriono, who hails from the small town of Muntilan, Central Java, balked at the charge and insisted to health officials that he take his daughter home to Bogor for burial. He argued that he had many fellow scavengers in Bogor. But he didn't know how he could bring his child home as he had no money to rent an ambulance.

Supriono's apprehension about the hospital fees drew the attention of several good samaritans, who spontaneously collected money for him. However, the scavenger found the money donated to him was still too small to rent an ambulance.

So Supriono left the hospital with the dead body of his second child and followed by his first child, a six-year old, he decided to go to Bogor on foot.

The drama ended when Supriono remembered Sri Suwarni, a woman he had once rented lodgings from. He went to Manggarai, South Jakarta, to meet Sri. Shocked by the presence of Supriono and his daughters, the generous woman sought help from her neighbors to arrange the funeral.

Five days after Supriono's drama was over we were again surprised by another report -- this time of a 61-year-old woman who was found dead, apparently from hunger, in her home in Cakung, East Jakarta. The neighbors said they had frequently given food to the elderly woman before. Her death shocked the community after it emerged the old woman had been locked in her room by her son, Sidik, who said later that he had kept her there while he was looking for job to pay back his debts. Sidik, a percussion teacher at a nearby mosque, explained he had locked his mother inside because she was senile. But he didn't explain why he had left her without food.

It a kind of irony that both these tales of poverty and woe took place in Jakarta, famous throughout the archipelago for its big-city glamor and tales of riches made. It's not hard to understand where these ideas come from. Luxury cars worth billions of rupiah regularly speed past on Jakarta streets and glittering high-rise buildings fill the capital's skies. In the green, moneyed areas, loud spaghetti mansions boast of untold wealth, their gardens full of micturating lions and cherubs, while their less ostentatious kin, exclusive apartments housing the upper-middle classes, peer coldly out of gated complexes.

Jakarta, a magnet for job seekers in the archipelago, has unfortunately become a jigsaw puzzle at the same time. But this is not a diversion for children, but a dangerous challenge for adults, a game with sharp edges. If you do not fit, like Supriono and Sidik, you or your kin risk being cut to shreds. As the popular song Siapa suruh datang Jakarta (who asks you to come to Jakarta?) tells people like Supriono and Sidik, the capital city is most likely the wrong place for you to live, despite your all- out efforts to survive.

But while the stories of Supriono and Sidik and his mother Mardiah are the dark side of Jakarta, they are also showcases of official, if not public, indifference. They beg the questions, do we still pay good attention to what is going on around us? And do we care?

According to a senior sociologist, Paulus Wirutomo, what people did for Supriono and Mardiah, while it was admirable, was actually a demonstration of social minimalism.

For Paulus, that people gave money to help Supriono so his toddler could have a decent burial was not a mistake, but it was not enough.

The police seemed to do the right thing when, after four hours of questioning Supriono, they ordered the scavenger to go to the Cipto Mangunkusumo Hospital for a child's autopsy. However, the police, as a state institution, should have done more to help Supriono. They could have contacted an official institution in charge of public funerals to help Supriono, but they did not.

The hospital, too, as a government institution in charge of human welfare did absolutely nothing to help Supriono after he refused an autopsy for his child on financial grounds.

Why was it that a good-hearted woman, Sri Suwarni, initiated and arranged the funeral of Supriono's child. Why did "public servants" have nothing to do with it?

Neighbors were generous to the elderly Mardiah when they gave her meals but it was not enough to ease the burden she was becoming on her son, or the maltreatment she suffered at his hands. It would have been better for them to have exhorted the neighborhood unit chief to seek institutional help for Mardiah.

While we Jakartans are commemorating the 478th anniversary of the capital city, which falls on June 22, it might be a good time to reflect on what we have done for our neighbors.

If government institutions that are supposed to care for the poor, prove to be useless, then it is time for us, the citizens, to do something -- to reach out and lend a hand when officials fail.

Otherwise, we will be sickened by the same "urban disease" that seems to afflict our social institutions -- a malady of ignorance, indifference, and selfishness.