Wardah wants to narrow gap between rich and poor

JAKARTA (JP): Noted activist Wardah Hafidz seems to be everywhere, protesting alongside workers, the urban poor or pedicab drivers. But for the 47-year-old woman there is no such thing as giving up.

Her line of work touches almost every aspect of the poor, making her less and less popular among the authorities. Sometimes she goes through difficult times, such as being threatened or even arrested.

"My mother, my husband, my entire family have given me their full support," said Wardah, the fourth of 10 children.

Coming from a religious family, the native of Jombang, East Java, decided to take a different path in her life.

Her late father was an informal leader in his community. She inherited his compassion and love of reading. Her 74-year old mother is healthy and energetic.

Instead of attending an Islamic institute in Yogyakarta as requested by her parents, Wardah decided to study English at the Teachers Training Institute in Malang, where she later took up a teaching career.

But after only about three years, Wardah, who received her master's degree from Ball State University in Munchie, Indiana, in 1983, quit lecturing and moved to the capital to follow her conscience, to empower the poor. She is now the coordinator of the Urban Poor Consortium (UPC).

She married fellow activist Wiladi Budiharga in l989. The couple, who decided not to have children, have been busy with their social welfare and have dedicated their lives to people's movements.

Here is an excerpt of an e-mail interview with her:

Question: What made you decide to fight for the poor in the first place?

Answer: My entire life has been framed by experiences and values.

I have to admit I cannot discard my background. I was born to an upper middle-class family. In my opinion, middle-class people have created their own living mechanism, standard of values and symbolic environment that have shaped their personalities and ways of life. There is no other window to view things from a different perspective.

In the past, I always saw the poor from my own mind-set. At first, I felt astonished to see their simple and naive lives, something very exotic and alien to me.

Sometimes it was a shock to witness their coarseness, their dilapidated and dirty houses, smelly bathrooms or their glasses and plates. But once I plunged deep into their lives, I learned a lot of valuable things in life.

When I was a child, I lived in a small village in Jombang, East Java. My grandparents and my parents possessed a large tract of paddy fields. I often saw poor farmers wearing dirty clothes working very hard in our rice fields. I am a Muslim. I was wondering how these farmers practiced their obligatory religious rites, like praying five times a day, while they had to work all day. They could not pray because they had to work.

Q: Did you see a lot of unfairness in your life?

A: I have seen so much injustice and unfairness. It is humiliating to humankind. Being poor is humiliating. However, we cannot view poverty only from the physical prospective. The poor have actually done a lot for the welfare of more fortunate groups. They are the ones who have sacrificed their land and property for development projects which benefit urban society. They are the low-paid construction workers who build roads, office buildings and other facilities to spoil urbanites. They are the farmers who cultivate fields and grow rice and vegetables.

Q: What has been the biggest challenge in your line of work, mainly as UPC coordinator?

A: My biggest challenge is myself and the people with similar social backgrounds -- the middle-class group who are proud of their exclusivity, their broad minds.

We have to work extremely hard to narrow the social gap between us and our poor friends. We want to always hear and learn from them. Our friends have long been fooled, terrorized and humiliated. They bear the ugly stigma of being rioters, thieves and stupid people. One of our biggest objectives is to free them from such a social stigma. We want to empower them, to increase their self-esteem and to arouse their awareness on their basic rights as human beings and citizens.

Q: How do you cope -- personally and professionally -- with your problems, including threats?

A: So far, I feel unperturbed by all the terrorization and the threats because we regard our actions as public discourse. Such acts will likely stop with strict and close control from the public and the media.

When problems come, I always try to find a solution and discuss them with my husband and close friends. The more people I involve, the more alternatives I get to solve the problems.

Q: What do you see in store for Indonesia's poor?

A: In this transitional period, I view that the poor group is one of the determining factors in creating a more democratic and new Indonesia. We cannot give the country to the small elite group. The poor group have no power or money, but they are the majority. These people are beginning to understand their civil and political rights. They no longer want to be belittled by the government. Moreover, they have a very strong network. In the next five years, there will be significant changes among the poor and they will likely play greater roles in the country's democratization process.

Q: What or who do you think should be blamed for poverty?

A: Poverty is the worst cultural, economic and political product there is. It manifests unfair distribution of resources in the widest sense. Poverty reflects a capitalistic system, exploitation of human beings, nature and the powerless.

In other words, we have to blame the way we view things. The way we look at people, justice, togetherness. It is the social, economic, cultural and political systems and values that should be condemned for causing poverty.

Q: What's your plan for the poor?

A: In short, UPC is trying to improve their welfare by giving them wide access to education, skills, capital. We want to also increase their bargaining position, political awareness, their freedom of expression and participation in any decision-making process.

Q: Regarding the scraping of the Ministry of Social Services, do you think the government's decision was correct?

A: In my opinion, the government made the right decision to close this ministry in line with its policy to give wide autonomy to provincial authorities in the year 2001. When the time comes, we will no longer need an agency on a national-scale, let alone a ministry, to deal with people's welfare. It will be handled by regional governments and local organizations.

The central government will only need to become a facilitator and to make the necessary policies to support social welfare activities. The government, for instance, could give tax exemptions on all donations and alms given to the needy.

The government could also regulate public accountability of every social and charitable foundation which deals with social welfare activities.

I have very little information on the ministry's activities during the New Order period. I think the ministry was renowned for being the operator and keeper of the (now defunct) government-sponsored lottery (SDSB) in which the money generated was reportedly used in money politics to support the ruling Golkar party's activities.

During the crisis (l998-l999), the ministry also dealt with the social safety net program. Based on information from the field, there were apparently a lot of irregularities in the distribution of funds which benefited ministry employees and their cronies.

Q: What do you think of the ministry's responsibilities so far? Did it meet people expectations or fail them?

A: Like other ministries in the New Order period, the Ministry of Social Services did very little to help the needy. For example, during the crisis, there were thousands of children roaming the streets. The police caught them and sent them to unhealthy shelters. They were beaten and chased like criminals, I do not know whether the ministry did its job to help these kids.

Q: In your activities, do you ever get in touch with the ministry?

A: Never. Up until the middle of this year, UPC had been active in monitoring the social safety net program. We had been informed that the Ministry of Social Services was involved in corruption and collusion in the implementation of the program. We were asked by some friends to register with the ministry as a monitoring agency, but we refused because we did not want to be trapped in bureaucracy. We did it together with the community.

Q: What do you think of the ministry's relations with NGO's so far?

A: Like other ministries and government institutions, the Ministry of Social Services always regards NGOs as implementers of its programs. They never consider us equal partners in the planning, designing, implementation, monitoring or evaluation of a program. Up to the present, NGOs that closely cooperate with the ministry are those which can tolerate the corruption and collusion.

Q: If the ministry is completely abolished, can NGOs and the community take over its duties?

A: As I have mentioned before, social work should be done by the people. In reality, they have already done it. (ste/raw)