Indonesia, Etc.: Exploring the Improbable Nation (30 page)

The possibilities for a short-haired white woman with a face battered by months of boat travel, dressed in long-sleeved cottons, sensible shoes and a black photographer’s waistcoat, a woman who spoke with a Jakarta accent and was always scribbling in a notebook were: in Sumba, a researcher on a malaria study; in Tanimbar and Kei, an anthropologist. In Flores, a nun (!) When I got over to post-tsunami, pre-ballot Aceh, I was either an aid worker or an election monitor. In Kalimantan, I must be from an environmental NGO. In the smaller regional cities of Indonesia, an English teacher. Here in Weda they assumed I was an engineer.

I retrieved my bag from the company boat and sat in the public boat with Tesi, who was on her way home to Lelilef after the Bupati’s twin weddings. I had been handed into Tesi’s care by her cousin Vera, the owner of the guest house I had stayed at in Weda. ‘That’s what family is for!’ insisted Vera. Tesi didn’t say a word; she just made room for me in the boat.

In less than two hours, the speedboat deposited us on a squonky wooden dock and we made for land. We piled all of Tesi’s city purchases into a flatbed truck, and drove past a one-room infirmary. Then a market, which consisted of two wooden kiosks, closed, and three ladies sitting on the ground behind little pyramids of sago and cassava. I saw two churches and a mosque. There were several new houses with multi-coloured porticoes, but not much else. Either the short drive from the dock to Tesi’s place did not take us through town, or Pak Piter, who had painted pictures of a boom town in my mind, led a rich fantasy life.

Tesi’s house was much bigger than I’d expected. The front entrance, with obligatory portico, led into a sitting room dominated by a sofa set – one big leatherette sofa, two matching armchairs and a smoked-glass and aluminium coffee table; the sort of room you have to have for negotiating dowries and entertaining census enumerators but that is otherwise never used. In a cavernous central room with a cool, tiled floor sat a giant flat-screen TV, a big karaoke machine, and nothing else. Off that were a couple of bedrooms. I was assigned one furnished with a foam mattress on the floor and a Hello Kitty poster on the wall.

By the side entrance there was another sofa set; this is where friends are received, palm wine is poured and many cigarettes are smoked. Unusually, there was a room with a big dining table and a fridge, the latter used as a cupboard because the generator only runs in the evenings. The kitchen was a concrete cavern out the back. In every room, snakes of wires writhed down walls and across the floor, slithered over doorjambs and under sofas and chairs. This whole house had been built, just in the last few years, without any internal wiring.

Along all four roads that make up this town, wooden and palm-leaf huts are being elbowed aside by concrete and tile confections. Some have glazed windows and many have creative paint-jobs: fake marbling on the columns, variegated panelling on shutters and doors. Though it was not the boom town I had imagined, it was all very
gengsi
. Gengsi is showing off, keeping up with the Joneses – a habit that most Indonesians say they despise, and many engage in with great enthusiasm.

I wandered the town looking for something to eat, and stopped to chat with a woman washing vegetables on a boardwalk that tottered over the bay. At the sound of my Jakarta accent, two young men appeared. They were from Ternate, had been in Lelilef for two months, and were taut with boredom and frustration. Hired to train staff at Weda Bay Nickel in English and computer skills, they had given their first lesson only that day. ‘I took this job because I didn’t want to deal with all the bureaucracy that you get in government,’ said the English teacher. ‘But this is worse. The Japanese guy doesn’t want to do it the French way, and the French guy won’t talk to the Australian, and no one will talk to the Batak. If this work unit wants it, that sub-division will try to block it. It’s mind-blowing.’

In 2007 Indonesia became the first country to pass a law obliging companies extracting natural resources to invest in the local community, but the habit is not yet entrenched. Over the next day or two, I heard all sorts of tales of well-intentioned Corporate Social Responsibility programmes gone horribly wrong. Early on, the community liaison officers had encouraged locals to grow vegetables for the workforce. The cabbages appeared, the workers didn’t – construction had been delayed for the umpteenth time. The company let the vegetables, and their own reputation, rot in the hands of the farmers.

Once the workers did start to arrive and the canteen opened, the CSR officers asked the locals to raise chickens. When the birds were squawking around ready for the pot, the international catering franchise which ran the mine’s canteen refused to buy them, saying they didn’t meet the standards set by bosses in Geneva or Turin. A private-sector version of the Fuckwit Factor, I imagine, though locals saw something more sinister in the company’s incompetence. ‘It has to be deliberate, they couldn’t be that stupid,’ smarted the chicken-farmer who told me of the fiasco.

My quest for a plate of rice was thwarted: neither of Lelilef’s food stalls opened after noon. I found a plastic bin of freshly baked buns on the side of the road. I took all twelve buns, left 12,000 rupiah in the bin, and wolfed one down on the way back to Tesi’s. There was no one at home; I put the buns on a plate and set them on the table for when Tesi and her husband Frilax came back. Then I went to have a shower, scooping cool water over myself out of the big concrete tank, trying to wash the dust of progress out of my hair.

I emerged to see an empty plate. A crowd of small boys had swooped on the bun-mountain and demolished it; they raced around squealing until Tesi’s daughter, with all the authority of an eleven-year-old, charged in the door and chased them off. She and her friend went to cook supper. There was rice and cassava, and because the family had just got back from Weda, there were some eggs too.

They had barely finished cooking when the next swarm of locusts descended, these ones in their late teens, pie-eyed with drink. They took turns in the bathroom; in Indonesia even the louts are impeccably clean. Then they attacked the kitchen, taking hostage all the food the girls had just produced. Who are these guys, who just storm in, use the bathroom, clean out the larder, with not a please or thank you between them? ‘
Saudara
,’ shrugs Tesi’s daughter: ‘Relatives’. Tesi’s younger brother was to be married the following day, it turned out, and the clan had turned up from villages all around.

When I went into my designated room that evening I found the daughter and her friend already bedded down on the one mattress. I pushed them over and made room for myself, wondering whether I wouldn’t be better off just laying my sleeping mat on the floor of the big, empty central room. I was glad I hadn’t. When I emerged the next morning, I found seven or eight of the louts strewn across the floor, felled by alcohol and exhaustion while still fully dressed.

As they downed their supper, these boys had vented about the mining project. In an earlier age a nod from Jakarta was enough to guarantee that a large mining company could just get on with its business, whatever boys like this thought. Most villagers would not have conceived of protesting; any that did would find themselves quickly under an army boot. Now, however, locals are encouraged to express their frustrations by a domestic and international protest industry with access to a free press and the Twittersphere. These activists hope that more local engagement will put pressure on mining companies to do less harm to the environment, pay fairer prices for land and labour, and invest more in communities around mine sites.

The boys at the dinner table were certainly engaged. The drunkest of the bunch, a lad with a weaselly face and leering eyes, complained that only the grunt work went to locals, all the good jobs, ejining, architing (he broke down on the multisyllabic words of the engineering professions) were going to outsiders. ‘That’s why I was right in there with the demos, burning the speedboats and that. We got to show them who’s boss.’ I asked what skills he had. ‘Getting drunk!’ replied another of the louts. A third young man, a softly spoken lad who had been to school in Java, looked embarrassed. ‘You want good jobs and you burn speedboats. It’s just a way of shooting yourself in the foot.’

Proud though he was of his demo record, Weasel-face was happy enough to roar off after dinner on a brand-new motorbike bought with money that Weda Bay Nickel had paid his family for land. Later that night he drove the bike into the sea. It was found at low tide the following morning, marooned in the sand and lapped by the waves. There was no sign of the key.

Over breakfast, I tried to hatch a plan that would get me past the security post and into the mine. A good-looking young man from western Indonesia came into the coffee shop where I sat mulling. He was wearing a smart, dark-blue uniform that I couldn’t immediately identify. ‘You’re from Jakarta,’ he observed, and we started to chat. Amir was a policeman from Java, stationed in Weda and currently on loan to the Weda Bay Nickel security team. He was bright, he was bored and he was friends with the doctor at the mine. Minutes later I was on the back of his motorbike, driving out past the company airstrip, through the pit of orange earth where the port and the smelter will be, and up to the mine site. There was a bit of walkie-talking back and forth at the security post, and then I was through the gate.

It was like stepping into a different world.

The medical centre was in temporary housing, basically a series of converted containers, yet it was the cleanest and best-equipped health facility I’d seen in rural Indonesia.

Amir’s friend, a doctor who works for the private contractor SOS Medika which runs the mine clinic, invited me to lunch. She put on her steel-capped boots, and we both put on hard hats, then we walked across fifty metres of open courtyard to the canteen. There was not a piece of construction equipment for miles around, but hard hats are part of the protocol. In a country where one regularly sees people hanging off electricity pylons splicing wires together with their bare hands, that alone was astonishing.

The canteen, air-conditioned to within an inch of its life, looked much like any other canteen I’ve eaten in: the one at the World Health Organization in Geneva, or the World Bank in Washington, or the BBC in London. It doesn’t have the decent wine selection of the International Monetary Fund or the competitive array of national olive oils of the European Commission, but there’s a salad bar, a soup station, and fresh cold-climate fruits. A cheese selection, even. Cheese! I wished we hadn’t come in just as they were starting to clear up.

Everyone else in the canteen was either white or had the straight-haired, light-skinned look that signals Java and the western islands. They lived in a hermetically sealed environment for several weeks at a time, then got flown out on company planes for R&R in Java, Bali or some other ‘civilized’ part of the country. Soon, their environment would be even better sealed; as Amir and I drove back to town we passed workmen putting up the skeleton of a cavernous building, several times larger than anything in Lelilef. It was the new security post. Giant security posts rising from the jungle, soldiers and police where they’ve never been seen before; these surely add to the tension between mining conglomerates and the locals who live off the land in mineral-rich areas. And yet I found myself sympathizing slightly with Weda Bay Nickel. They have invested a lot in trying to figure out how to get maximum ore with minimum damage to the environment. They are at least
trying
to fund local doctors, install village generators and improve education and training opportunities for locals. It may be largely tokenistic, hamstrung by the profit-seeking habits embedded in the DNA of mining companies, but it is a start.

The same can’t be said for the other two nickel miners in the area, both Chinese owned. They dumped tailings upriver so that five villages lost their drinking water and the turquoise corals of Weda Bay were threatened with brown sludge. While Franco-Japanese Weda Bay Nickel invested billions in a nickel processing plant which will create hundreds of jobs locally and allow Indonesia to get more for its minerals, Chinese cargo ships sat in the bay coughing out toxic fumes for just long enough to load up and ship off. Their goal was to get as much nickel ore out of Indonesia as they could before the ban on raw metal exports came into force. The locals refer to them as ‘scratch and runs’.

People complained about Tekindo, the largest of the Chinese miners, all the time. They are skinflints, they break promises, they treat the locals like dirt. And yet no one burned
their
speedboats, no one demonstrated against
them
. I asked why not. ‘What’s the point?’ said Tesi’s husband Frilax. ‘Chinese companies, they’re all shits.’

When I got back to Lelilef from the mine, I was swept into the preparations for yet another wedding. Tesi’s brother was getting married and the dirt-floor and sago-palm-walled kitchen of their mother’s house had been turned into an industrial bakery. Little tin box ovens were heating over wood fires or gas rings. From these boxes appeared loaves of chocolate-swirl bread and pound cakes in ring moulds, flavoured and tinted green with pandan leaves. In the yard a woman used a wooden oar to stir sticky rice, brown palm sugar and coconut milk together in a giant wok suspended over an open fire. When it was done, she paddled it into flowery enamelled trays to set.