Week 1: "Hello Mister"

I have been in Jakarta for nearly a week now and I don't really know how to begin describing it. I remember when I first moved to London I found the crowds and noise perpetually exhausting. Jakarta has a similar effect, but multiplied by 10. The noise, the people, the constant stream of cars and motorbikes, makes Oxford street appear serene. The area I live and work in, Tebet, has hundreds of little streets packed with back-to-back houses, roaming street sellers and little cafes. Street sellers walk the streets with their carts, advertising their wares with distinctive calls or sounds. You eat under a makeshift tarpaulin, sometimes for as little as 6,000 Rupiah (around 40p). The traffic here has to be seen to be believed; the transport system is a sort of organised chaos, with few rules and no pedestrian crossings. The only way to cross the road is to simply walk out into the traffic, holding your hand out to apologise to the drivers. As you can imagine, this is somewhat daunting task, but seems to be no less safe than walking on the pavement (where there is one), where impatient motorcyclists sometimes drive.

I have spent this week getting to know the NGO and exploring the city. My colleagues at work have been incredibly welcoming, inviting me to visit all the regional offices, visit their village, meet their grandmother etc. There are about 20 people who work in the office, but this is variable and people come and go. The working environment is extraordinarily relaxed; each employee is nominally allocated a desk but in reality people just work where they want. Most people who work here speak pretty good English, but my pitiful efforts to speak Bahasa (Indonesian) are always met with wide grins and raptuous applause. I have been learning more about what the NGO do and most of it seems to be orientated towards minimising corruption in public services. I have been working on a project sponsored by the EU to do with researching spending in education, in order to improve transparency and accountability. The government budget for education in Indonesia is massive but a large proportion of it ends up lining people's pockets. I have been doing a bit of research on this project, and I have also been asked to prepare a presentation on how the NGO could incorporate anthropological research methods into their work.

I am living in a basic but comfortable boarding house which is a short walk from the office. The other UK volunteer Kamran lives here too, and so will another UK volunteer Hannah, when she arrives next weekend. The other volunteer, Jenna, an Ameircan girl, lives in a high-rise apartment building in a more affluent area of the city. Yesterday Kamran, Adhe (one of the NGO workers) and I went to Kota, the old town, to look around and visit some museums. Kota is the old colonial centre of Jakarta and is quite pretty compared with other parts of the city. The highlight was the shadow puppet museum where we had our own brief shadow puppet performance. We then wandered down to the harbour where we were offered a boat ride round the harbour by an old fisherman which we (somewhat tentatively) accepted. It was a fantastic experience, great to get out of the hustle and bustle of the city and see a different side of Jakarta. It was an entirely different kind of harbour to those I have visited in the past; big, industrial fishing boats, polluted waters piled high with rubbish, and children everwhere, some of them showing off by jumping into the murky water. It seemed to sum up my experience of Jakarta so far; not appealing in a traditional sense, and far from aethetically appealing, but exhilerating, different and with its own unique charm.

I am beginning to understand why I was advised against living in Jakarta. To put it simply, Jakarta is not an easy place to live. When I was planning this trip I was keen to see the 'real' Indonesia, but what I did not appreciate was quite how interested the 'real' Indonesia would be in me. Knowing that Jakarta was a diverse and cosmopolitan city, I expected that my presence here would be entirely unremarkable. I could not have been more wrong. I seem to be the only Westerner living in Tebet and people cannot help but stare at me in the streets. Everywhere I go I am greeted by shouts of "hello", "Inggris?" (English?), "hello mister" (apparently in Indonesia I look like a man), but more often then not they simply shout "bule" (white person). It's only harmless curiosity, and people are absolutely delighted when I say hello back, but it has been difficult. I dislike being the centre of attention and it has been hard to get used to being the outsider for the first time in my life. It might sound like a strange thing to say but I have never really given my racial background much thought before (a very privilaged sort of ignorence I think). It seems that in Indonesia I will be defined by my race whether I like it or not.