Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (25 page)

After the initial burst of excitement, which probably centred more on curiosity about the young Javanese wife than on respect for Jacob’s position, the villagers were certainly not fawning. True, it brought honour to Ohoiwait when one of its sons made good. But villagers were displeased that Jacob had spent the last two decades taking care of a different clan – the smaller fish in his political party, the members of his congregation, everyone that made up his political machine over there in Jayapura, 1,000 kilometres away. ‘As if we’re not good enough for him,’ sniffed one of the wedding dancers.

Even schoolchildren expect their Big Man to deliver. At an exhibition showcasing the writing skills of primary-school children in one small island group, I saw a letter which read:

LETTER for Pak BuPaTi, sangihe iSland DIstrict

HELLO HOW ARE YOU Pak Bupati? I’m happy to meet you PAK BUPATI. BEcauSE I want to ASk for something, but I MUST think first How so Pak Bipati Will HeLp us. We want Electricity And we want a football Field and we also want to Fix our motorboat which is Broken, but How can it be FiXed? nobody can make it work again, eVen the bosses can’t fix it. HopeFully you Pak Bupati can help us in Kalama Kola. So these are our Requests for Pak BuPati, hopefully you are in good health paK buPati oh yes happy birthday to sangihe iSland diStrIct.

SWEET WISHES AdammI MENDOME

Each line of this slightly erratic letter-to-Santa was in a different colour. More sober in hue if not hope are the readers’ letters (or rather text messages) that appear in every local newspaper in the land. ‘Dear Bupati of South Buru,’ wrote one reader. ‘What’s going on with payments for certified teachers from July to December. When will we be paid, Pak? Please share out the money, because that’s our right as certified teachers. If possible, please pay us immediately. Don’t keep putting it off. +628524934XXX’

These days, Indonesians have rather a low tolerance for real corruption, for pure, self-serving greed: the private mansion built to house the bupati’s mistress, the official visits to Jakarta spent taking drugs with starlets in five-star hotels. That’s corruption, and for that the voters of Indonesia will throw you out on your ear.

That other type of ‘corruption’ – the one that leads to bad appointments and bad roads – is complained about endlessly. And yet no one gets voted out of power for that kind of patronage.
*
That’s because everyone continues to expect
their
Big Men to deliver to
their
clan. These days, there’s so much democracy around that almost everyone has someone somewhere in the system delivering for them.

In Tual, main city in the Kei islands and just a couple of hours’ travel from Ohoiwait, I met a young man who had done a degree in marketing and then worked for thirteen years as a broker at the now defunct Surabaya Stock Exchange. He got tired of working for other people, and came home to Kei to look for business opportunities. He started a shop selling perfume concentrates. He said it was a struggle. Not on the business side; that was fine. The difficulty was with his parents, who were adamant that he should get a government job. When he was out of sight in Java, the fact that he was in business wasn’t so bad. But now he was home, his determination not to don the uniform of a civil servant and bathe his parents in its reflected prestige was almost shameful. ‘People here educate their kids to be civil servants, not businessmen,’ he said.

Poking fun at the bureaucracy is a national sport in Indonesia. Civil servants are lazy, self-serving blockheads out to fill their own pockets and throw obstacles in the way of upstanding citizens, everyone agrees. And yet everyone wants their child to become a civil servant, especially outside of Java, where there are relatively few opportunities in the private sector.

It’s another hangover from Dutch times. At the turn of the twentieth century, a full century after the VOC trading company had been taken over by the Dutch state, there were just twenty-five ‘natives’ in secondary school. But the bureaucracy was growing; its appetite could no longer be satisfied by adventurers shipped out from the Netherlands. Over the next three decades the colonial government deigned to give 6,500 locals some secondary education. It then employed almost all of them. The perfume-seller’s parents were just extrapolating something that had long been true: education leads to a uniform. But the reverse is definitely not true. Rather, an over-abundance of uniforms is undermining good education.

Given the geographical challenges of this scattered nation, it’s something of a miracle that Indonesia actually manages to educate 55 million children a year. Nine out of ten children get through junior high school, and almost everyone aged between fifteen and twenty-four is functionally literate. More impressive still, Indonesia has the smallest number of pupils per teacher of any country in its income bracket. Indeed if you look at international league tables, class sizes in Indonesia are smaller than they are in the United States or Britain. And yet Indonesian kids consistently come close to the bottom in international tests of reading comprehension, science and maths. In the internationally standardized TIMSS tests in maths, just 0.4 per cent of Indonesian fifteen-year-olds reached the ‘advanced’ benchmark score indicating that they could organize information, analyse it and draw conclusions from it. More than half did not even make it to the ‘low’ benchmark, indicating that they ‘have some knowledge of whole numbers and decimals, operations and basic graphs’. Of 65 countries included in the PISA international tests for fifteen-year-olds in 2012, Indonesia came 60th in reading and 64th in maths and science, a performance more dismal even than three years previously. Just 0.3 per cent of Indonesian students made it past the advanced benchmark in that maths test. Not one of the universities in the world’s fourth most populous nation is rated as among the 100 best in Asia.

The dismal results are a result of dismal teaching, and that is in turn the result of patronage. A teaching job is the easiest way to squeeze into the coveted beige uniform of the civil servant; local politicians give jobs in schools to their political supporters all the time. That means the schools are rammed with people whose goal is to be a bureaucrat, not an educator. And they behave just like other bureaucrats in Indonesia: they see working hours as a movable feast and take time off more or less at will. It wasn’t until a few months after my conversation with the stockbroker-turned-perfume-seller in Tual that I first saw the effects of this. By then I had reached the Banggai islands, which sit in the giant bay below the top arm of Sulawesi’s distorted K. The landscape is watery even by Indonesian standards; until recently, Bajo fishing communities used to rise on stilts from the sea like a posse of daddy longlegs all huddled together in a web of raised boardwalks, far offshore. I had been invited to stay by Pak Zunaidi, a Bajo fisherman whom I had met in a guest house in Salakan, the brand-new capital of Banggai Islands district. He had delivered a petition for a new dock for his village, Popisi, and was on his way home.

In 2000 a tsunami swept away most of the Banggai Bajo’s leggy off-shore communities, and the government had pressed the ‘sea gypsies’ to settle onshore. Zunaidi’s house was still built on stilts over the water, Bajo-style, but it was joined to the land by a wide wooden boardwalk. Out the back of the house was a veranda which doubled as the kitchen. At the far end, behind some threadbare bamboo matting, was an oblong hole cut in the planks above the sea. This was the toilet; it afforded a stunning view of the aquamarine bay, criss-crossed by dugouts paddled by small children looking for shrimp and crabs.

As we sat on a bench in the veranda-kitchen staring out to sea, a young man in a well-worn dugout canoe paddled silently up to the offshore hut in front of us. He climbed the steps and began to dismantle the peripheral parts of the structure. I asked what he was up to. ‘Moving house,’ said Pak Zunaidi. Once the owner had stripped anything that might come loose, the hut would get lifted down from its stilts and floated off to its new location.

In the light of the setting sun I helped Zunaidi’s wife, a schoolteacher, prepare supper. She motioned me first to the coconut-grater. The oblong stool was raised just a couple of inches off the floor. From one end, a metal arm curved upwards, swelling into a bulbous tip covered with steel bristles. My task was to squat astride the stool and, using the grater-blob rising from between my legs, to grind half a coconut around until its flesh lay shredded in a fragrant pile between my feet. Then, as Ibu Guru peeled onions and chopped garlic, I started squashing them together with chilli and lime into a
sambal
that would spice up our chunks of grilled fish. But I’ve never quite mastered the outward roll of the wrist that grinds the hooked pestles used by Indonesians evenly across the concave granite surface of the mortar. My sambal was forever a work in progress, lumpy, embarrassing. I offered to swap places with Ibu Guru and let her smooth things out, but she was aghast. Untold disasters will befall anyone who eats sambal started by one person and finished by someone else.

After supper, she showed me her teacher’s union card. I realized, as intended, that she was a proper civil servant, not an ‘
honorer
’.
Guru honorer
(or
honor
, as they are more commonly called) are locally appointed contract teachers, often unqualified. Though they make up around a third of the teaching force, they don’t really count in the Indonesian world view because they are not civil servants, they have not been dignified with a job-for-life and a guaranteed pension. In this tiny town-on-stilts, the headmistress and four of the primary schoolteachers are civil servants; the other five are
honorer
. Ten teachers for a school with 120 children – about average for Indonesia.

At about 6.30 the following morning, Ibu Guru stood over a vat of hot oil frying up breakfast. Her youngest son came in wearing his school uniform and she told him not to be late; all over Indonesia, primary school starts at seven. Then a neighbour came in to chat. Ibu Guru put some more plantains in the oil, made another cup of coffee. By now it was ten to seven, and still she hadn’t bathed or dressed. At about 7.15, I asked what time school started in Popisi. She looked sheepish, gestured at me, the neighbour, the fried plantains. ‘It’s okay. Everyone knows I’ve got guests.’

So it was my fault that she wasn’t at work. I asked if I could come with her to school; perhaps I could help with the English classes? She looked hugely relieved; she bathed and washed in record time and by 7.30 we were at school.

It was mayhem. A hundred and twenty children were running around, screaming with joyous abandon. Half an hour after the start of the five-hour school day, there was not a teacher to be seen. Ibu Guru went and got a stick from the office and handed it to a child who, with great self-importance, struck a bell. Instantly, order was imposed and the kids fell into formation by class. One child stepped forward and barked. Everyone straightened up. Ibu Guru bid them good morning, and there was a polite chorus in reply. A girl led the school in singing the ‘Merah Putih’, a patriotic song about the national flag.

I took Classes 4 and 6 for English. Ibu Guru taught her own class, Class 1. Classes 2, 3 and 5 – aged seven, eight and ten respectively – were instructed to go into their classrooms and work through their textbooks ‘until your teachers come’. The kids went into their classrooms. The teachers never came.

So there I was, faced with about thirty kids under the age of twelve, crammed into half a classroom (there aren’t enough rooms in the school for all six classes so they use plywood dividers to make rooms). ‘Good morning everyone!’ A lusty response: ‘Good morning, miss!’ ‘My name is Eliz; what is your name?’ I addressed the question to one of the older boys who was sitting close to me. He had been learning English for three years. He was stunned to have been asked to answer something as an individual, rather than as part of a scripted chorus. Indeed he was speechless. The other kids quickly averted their eyes, lest I pick on them. I was grateful when one girl raised her hand. ‘What is his name?’ I asked her, pointing elaborately to the boy in the front row. ‘My name is Fifi!’ she declared, triumphant.

Pak Zunaidi’s wife had called the headmistress to say that the school had a visitor. The head turned up at 9.30, and invited me into her cavernous office. High atop a bookshelf, well out of reach of curious children, stood three large globes, each carefully wrapped in plastic. There were anatomical models, too, one male and one female, both swathed in bubble-wrap, and a thicket of wall maps rolled around poles; they had never been opened. The headmistress explained that hers was not a teaching job; she was just supposed to keep the school going administratively. ‘But sometimes I have to teach,’ she sighed. ‘We’ve got so few staff. What can you do?’