children Pemulung - photo Melanie wood
I do not know about others, but for me the one of the joys of life in Indonesia is its people. Not thoughtless drivers who do not know basic route label or Ibus triggers capped around the end of the high shopping centers, but the people you come in contact with such individuals.
Yes, there are beautiful beaches and mountains to enjoy, but going nowhere is so much time and a chore, like many others, I end up thinking that it is just not worth the 'effort. Anyway, there's so much fun to be on the threshold.
Serials here tend to follow the same old tired mantra of white skin, the rich people themselves involved in any end of the drama, often with a piano or drum kit as accompaniment. Real life proves to be much more fun and, best of all, no false eyelashes.
Take one of the pilots of my wife. She had many, but this one stands out for its ability to invent an imaginary world that even the top shelf magazines would have avoided. We pick up at the airport once, and he certainly looked in a bad mood. First impressions were confirmed as we sailed past our exit and happily in Jakarta. I had a go at him, but it was nothing compared to the ear bashing my wife gave him.
He left. It told us, he said to the maid who over the years has become almost a matriarch in our small unit force we have survived so long. He had left things with us and so our maid went around to where he lived - a place that my wife had helped find for him after he had been driven from his former place to bring at home too ladies for the night. When she reached her house she found he did a bunk midnight and nobody knew where he had gone. She sat and talked with local residents and it was then we came to discover the feverish imagination of our former driver.
In his own words, he had slept with our maid, the nanny of my son and my wife. A full house!
It was mostly a fantasy world. Another pilot had lived the dream! He had a wife in Sukabumi, with children and moved to the big city and soon fell under the spell of another, the first divorced and settled down with number two. The number would occasionally come round asking where his old man had not disappeared; she did not know she had divorced!
The soon tired driver number two and after a polite pause for a few days decided it was time to find number three. He started hanging around some local factories and of course, he hit pay dirt, moving with a worker who owned his own property. He was on number three in less than three years and who did not understand the flings he had with nannies and maids working locally. And still number would lap time to time looking for him!
There are no courses that drivers who have their little fun. Maids and nannies are eager to float their eyelashes at any construction worker or satpam (security guard) who smiled their way. We had a nanny who had spent time in Saudi Arabia and certainly considered herself a religious person. She kept her head covered all day, inside and outside, and made the round of his company in a fairly efficient manner. She had been forced into marriage when she was younger by her parents, but she had never been keen on the relationship and finally got a divorce, leaving the poor guy in East Java while it is came to smoke. She told my wife her first husband was gay and they had never consummated the marriage and now she had a new boyfriend, but that did not stop her having an affair with another of our short-term drivers before to get a job at the local supermarket level and down our radar.
The park is more like a dating agency that recreation ground for children
Then there's the nanny of all - the Alpha nanny. Bigger, older and wiser, she holds the youngest in her slave as she meets them at the gates of the school. She later (ish) phone, her clothes are more stylish and of course, she earns more money. And boy, she loves to tell others how naïve boors she wins.
The younger look to it, they see it as worldly wise - it has been there, done that and is the Lionel Messi of nannies. And they believe. They lap up his words, go back and tell their employers how much they feel they should be winning and then become unemployed. During this time nanny Alpha gets a new race to titillate.
In a city of 12 million people, there will of course 12 million stories waiting to be told. But you can not help to think the TV channels say bad because of course, the real life stories of street prove the truth is stranger than fiction.