The 5000 Project

Jakarta is a city of mass low economic areas providing for an extreme upper crust, most probably many cities fit the same structure, but from my extreme perspective influences during my stay I could see it very plainly – in a totally biased way, due to staying 3 nights in extreme upper class and 3 nights in relativity lower class, I had no real experience of the middle.

When taking the train to Jakarta from the east you are greeted with the sight of suburbs literally living on garbage. The reason for this is that dumping waste costs money, only the wealthy can afford the privilege of not living in their own plastic shit (not including molded to materialistic ornaments, shit). Some areas of south east Asia are similar, but not to this extent, I have been told Indonesia is closer to India in regards to overpopulation and waste. In saying this, there is a paid recycling system for water bottles, at least.

The struggling lower are non-alcohol non-pork Islamic living under the Islamic/nationals coalition party in power. They are the drivers, maids, gardeners and security guards for the cocktail swigging, upper.

Jakarta seems to be the only exception to the no alcohol no pork rule compared with the rest of Indonesia – I can only assume this is due to money, many cops and government officials can be bought, according to what I have been told by many different people. Any foreigner can own property or business through a number of well known loopholes. Any traffic violation can be waived with a few blue 50,000rp notes. In fact there is pretty much a loophole for every single law in Indonesia, especially where money to grease the wheels runs so freely in Jakarta. Corruption is such a huge issue that every day there is a well sized protest against it in the main city square (or, round-about). Well, at least there is good healthy freedom of expression.

My relatively poor friend that I stayed with used to have a thriving printing business, sometimes he would even get orders for books that would be sold in the US, however suddenly there was an influx of competition introducing the latest printing technology backed by foreign investments; this, partnered with the financial crisis, forced him to sell his house and car and live in a small house in the ghettos that leaks when it rains and brown outs whenever a plug is swapped.

The progression of this ‘developing’ country all seems to point to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer in a large and hasty way. The gap is immense and quite visible. This could possibly breed more anger, frustration and jealousy amongst the lower class as they try to climb the impossible ladder; like an Escher drawing.

The traffic in Jakarta is insanely bad, every second day seems to be a 45-60min late-for-work day, legitimately with traffic to blame.

To have any kind of semi-accurate prediction for arriving to work on-time you should take the three tier public transport system:
– First, take a transjakarta bus from a inner city suburb (these buses have their own lanes and the stops are enclosed booths, its like a metro train system except its a collection of buses)
– Once the buslanes end, which is fairly soon, take an Angkot (short for ANGutan KOTa, which means City Transport) or Mikrolet which is a small blue minivan customized to fit ~9-10 Indonesian sized people, each collection of angkot has a number representing an outer suburb area, pretty much small buses.
– Once you run out of angkot, hail a motorbike for the last leg
– hurrah! you survived a 2hr trip home from the city (squished like a sardine for most of it) which could have taken longer if you drove yourself with the lack of skill to drive through the congested roads of chaotic and dangerous drivers, hey why not exploit this ridiculously cheap country and get yourself a personal driver for as little as $100/month!

*Note* Thanks to my jakarta contact for fact checking and minor edits, post delay due to this; and the fact that I have been out of internet range for the last few days