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| English: Slum life, Jakarta Indonesia. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Jakarta slumlife34 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Jakarta has long been a destination for rural poor, many of whom end up living in slums. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| A young boy living on an East Cipinang garbage dump, Jakarta Indonesia. Picture taken by Jonathan McIntosh, 2004. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
Much of the commentary about poverty that passes for
wisdom in the information outlets of the Western world (most of them controlled
by big capitalist firms) seems to be based on a vague assumption that poverty
is something essential to human life that just, sort of, exists…. An attitude that was summed up in a statement
of Mother Teresa that “we would be lost without the poor…. What would we do
without them?” Or words to that effect.
It has long been my contention, based on having visited
the poorest of human habitations in countries such as India, China, Kenya,
Ecuador, Jamaica and other Latin American countries, that poverty is, first and
last, man-made; and being so, it could also be man-fixed. In other words, men
create poverty, and men can abolish it.
These reflections were stimulated by a BBC TV programme I
saw today which, apparently, is part of a long series the BBC as been running
in Britain under the generic title “The Toughest Place to be a….” The
particular episode was about the toughest place to be a binman. The idea was that a binman (or garbage man,
as he is more usually called) from London was chosen to visit Jakarta,
Indonesia, where he would undertake exactly the same work he does in London,
allowing the network to film the results.
The man chosen, Wilbur Ramirez, turned out to be a gregarious,
thoughtful, cheerful, and hard-working fellow who was tailor-made for this job.
He arrived in the district of Gantur in the immense metropolis that is now
Jakarta, with its population of 28 million people, who generate some 6,000
tonnes of waste every day, which is deposited in a huge landfill site, with
another 20 per cent simply dumped into
rivers, thus despoiling them for human use.
Wilbur’s contact was to be with a small binman called Iman
Syaffi who had a contract with the residents’ association for 100 palatial
homes, who paid him $22 for a six-day working week that seemed to go on from
morning to night. The father of a small child, he was born in a long line of
improvised wooden shacks lining an alleyway, and now lives nearby in a tiny house the rent for
which is just covered by his weekly earnings, meaning that in the evenings Imam
and his wife have to pick over the garbage he has collected, so that they can
sell for recycling anything that might
be of use, for which work they receive $3, after working into the night for
three nights.
The alleyway in which Wilbur found Imam working was strewn
with garbage when he arrived, and when he set out with Imam to pull his
hand-drawn cart he embarked on a task that he certainly had never envisaged when
operating his air-conditioned high-technology truck in London. The people in
the houses simply threw their garbage into the alleyway through a hole in the
wall at the bottom of their garden, allowing it to clog the drainage channels,
into which Imam had to plunge in bare feet as he tried to clear a way for the
water and effluent to escape. “He’s down in there with bare feet,”Wilbur said,
admiringly. “He has no idea what’s down there. It could be glass….It could be
anything.”
To make matters worse other garbage men, having collected their
rubbish elsewhere, had gotten into the habit of throwing bags of garbage over
the wall into Imam’s alleyway, whose garbage collectors never protested for
fear that if they did, a complaint would be made to the residents’ association
and they could be fired with countless other people ready to take their job at
any time.
Wilbur, however, had no such inhibitions: he yelled at the
miscreants as they were getting rid of their surplus garbage in this way, and
eventually they slunk off.
This show of defiance inspired the local collectors into
becoming more vocal in their own defence.
Towards the end of his 10 days Wilbur undertook to make Imam’s total
round to pick up the garbage by hand. He said he had no idea the job was so
tough, he was beaten long before he finished, and indeed he didn’t get the
round finished that day.
So, amid protestations of undying affection on both
sides, Wilbur left his new friends, and went home. Back at his old job, he and
his wife tried to raise money that could possibly make the Jakarta workers’
lives somewhat easier, and when he returned after a year he did so with 3000 pounds so collected. But he returned to a transformed alleyway.
The local council, embarrassed by the negative publicity
generated from Wilbur’s visit, had bought Imam a small power-driven cart capable
of pulling two large bins. This had transformed his working day to the extent
that he now sometimes had an afternoon free to go and do some fishing. All of
the garbage collectors, also inspired by Wilbur’s visit, had had the first
meeting in their history as workers, and had so banded together as to demand
and receive better treatment from their employers. Wilbur, working with a local agency, decided that some of his money should be spent
on educational materials for a primary school. But some more of it he decided
should go to providing the binmen with uniforms, a decision that gave them immediate
pride in their work and how they went about it. At last they felt they were in
a position to demand some respect.
As the camera swung along the alleyway, once so untidy and clogged with
garbage, now so clean and rubbish-free, one could not help but be impressed
with the power of example, and of persuasion.
It may be true that the transfer of resources from the
richer countries to the poorer in this way can be interpreted as an act of
charity, and therefore hardly a good example of how to overcome the problems
caused by intense poverty. But in this case there was an essential difference:
Wilbur did not arrive as a social worker flaunting a high salary and superior
technology: not at all, he arrived as a binman, did the work on the ground as
it was done locally, and so established such an intimate relationship with the
local binmen as to have set about the beginnings of a social change.
This result confirms something that I have observed
repeatedly from visiting places of extreme poverty in different parts of the
world. I have written it many times: the
poorest place in terms of income that I was ever in was a Chinese commune that
we filmed in 1978. On the basis of six weeks of intensive research, asking
questions of everyone I met, I arrived at the conclusion that the average
income in that place was the equivalent of a mere $60 a year per capita. Yet
with that income, matters had been so organized that every one of the 15,000
who lived in the four villages of that commune had a house, everyone had a job,
every child was in school, and every citizen had consistent availability to
medical treatment from men known as “barefoot doctors” whose entire training
consisted of a six-months course. The
health standards in these villages appeared
to be about equivalent to our own. Put it like that, and what was being
achieved there was close to a miracle.
A few years later I visited Kibera, the immense slum alongside
Nairobi in Kenya. Here the garbage was piled so high along the streets, which
were pitted also with immense holes, that it took a four-wheel drive jeep even
to negotiate the road. I talked to
people working with the citizens of this town and was told they had every
social problem known to man. Many huts
were occupied by women with their small children, usually with a mother, her
daughters and grandchildren, but with no men in sight, the mother trying to
keep things going by selling matches on the street in Nairobi downtown, and
many of the daughters selling themselves into prostitution.
I couldn’t help asking myself: what kind of society allows
such conditions to fester without making a serious effort to improve them?
W.hat kind of political party occupies this place and has been unable even to
organize to pick up the garbage? The
experience made me question seriously the meaning of the freedom we so often
prate about in the Western world. Which were the freer in their lives and their
prospects in life: the citizens of the Chinese commune, obedient to the
dictates of their Communist bosses; or the deprived, unemployed homeless, impoverished
citizens of the African slum, whose total income, if it were possible to
calculate it, was almost certainly slightly higher than that in the commune?
Wilbur’s example lay not so much in the 3000 pounds he
collected for distribution among his friends in Jakarta, as in the 10 days of
back-breaking work he did with them, work that transformed not only their
attitudes, but his own view of life.
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