In Uncharted Waters

I'm standing knee deep in flood water in the middle of an Indonesian village. The water is a dark brown and moves alarmingly quick. Plastic bags stick to my legs as other bits of trash and debris float past, including a whole watermelon. Two Indonesian women sit in their flooded homes holding a magazine over their heads, staring out the window, not surprised or fretful, but resigned. This happens every year. But it's new and confronting for me. What the hell am I doing here? 

Contrary to popular belief, I am not wearing Kylie Minogue style hot pants.

I'm here on a research trip for work, trying to gain a more complete understanding of the 'banjir' (floods) that hit Jakarta every rainy season. Is it an infrastructure problem? Is it the rain? Is it the trash that clogs up the river? Or did they just build a city in the wrong geographical spot? It's a combination of these things, but this project, PetaJakarta.org, is about resilience. PetaJakarta.org is a community-based web platform to map the floods in Jakarta using geo-located tweets. Citizens tweet #banjir to report instances of flooding, and their report is placed on a real-time evolving map which can help increase the capacity of Jakarta's disaster response teams. I'm here in Jakarta for two weeks with a team of nine University students to see first-hand how the city evolves during this rainy season - and also to make sure that the students don't die.

This tree marks the height the river reaches every time it floods. The sign with the red border marks where the flood hit two days before this photo was taken. 

Many hotels and malls in Jakarta have signs at their entrance that strictly forbid anyone from bringing a fruit called 'durian' onto their property. Durian is a large, thorny fruit that emits a notoriously awful, rotten odour. Ironically, Jakarta's nickname is 'Big Durian' and I can see the similarities. Jakarta is big and intimidating, with a strong smell but on the inside it can be really sweet. The Big Durian does have its charms.

Yes, the traffic is infuriating and the air pollution is intense but the moped drivers perform such feats of balance and dexterity in transporting their goods that it has to be admired. It's not uncommon to see a family of four huddled up together on a moped, with a cage of chickens strapped on the back and a gas bottle between the driver's legs. The taxi drivers consistently get lost or try and scam you - for example, pulling over on the side of the road and telling us we need to wait ten minutes because the road was closed until 11am, as other cars flagrantly streamed past us on the clearly open road - but the meter starts at 75 cents and the fare only ever rises to about $2.

Most of all, the people are gracious hosts, and over the past two weeks we have met people from the disaster management agency, members of local NGOs, and other researchers tackling the problem of Jakarta's floods, and they were all committed to sharing their knowledge, sharing their city, and ensuring that we were safe, happy, and well fed. However, we had to adapt to being racially profiled every time we walked down the street. The nickname the locals have for foreigners is 'bule' which translates to 'ghost' or 'albino.' I don't think it is intended to be offensive, and indeed we did find it hilarious when village children would spot us, shout 'bule', and giggle. Sometimes they would follow us down the street and try and sneak a few photos of the bules. However, there were times when we would visit busy local markets and the vendors would shout 'hey bule' in not-so-welcoming voices and we couldn't help but feel a little vilified. And then I remember that the Oscars completely snubbed black actors this year and I feel like a privileged white boy again.

A slum area affected by flood

Our days have been busy and unpredictable, often jumping between visiting evacuation shelters in the field, to meetings at the local government offices to discuss flood modelling, to attending community meetings in a slum, to inspecting flood infrastructure. For example, the other day we spent the morning listening to a presentation from the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team and the Indonesian branch of Wikimedia. We then grabbed some lunch and caught the train to Condet to visit a branch of the Ciliwung Institute, a collection of activists who live by the flood-prone and trash-filled Ciliwung river. We trekked through the muddy and mosquito filled riverbed which had flooded earlier in the week and saw the remnants of a recent landslide. We then hiked back to the train station, got lost, saw a cat get run over by a moped, eventually found the station, and caught the train back into town to go straight to the premiere of a film about flooding funded by the Australian and Indonesian governments. As we were there as guests of the Australian Embassy and we wanted to look nice, we quickly got changed into some formal clothes in the bathroom and carpark, praying that the deodorant would cover up all traces of mud and sweat. Following the film, we managed to snag a few group selfies with some of the cast, and they were gracious enough not to visibly recoil from our collective stench.

The Indonesian Cate Blanchett (maybe?)

Snapped from the red carpet 

Thankfully, not all days are this hectic and we have had the possibility to engage in some non-flood related cultural activities. My favourite is karaoke. Asian karaoke is the best. They do that thing where you just rent out a private room and sing in front of each other. Let me tell you something, Indonesian people can SING. They did justice to power ballads from Beyonce, Whitney, and Mariah - meanwhile, I made a semi-passable attempt at Fergie. The songs that were on offer, however, were a bit confusing. For example, they didn't have Jesse's Girl or Don't Stop Believing - two classic karaoke hits, staples of The Harp on a Sunday night - but they did have Paris Hilton's 2006 runaway hit Stars Are Blind. The Indonesian taste in music may not be up to par.

With Yantri, colleague and karaoke partner

We were also lucky enough to visit Jakarta' sixth district, the Thousand Islands,  a tropical paradise just north of the city. Two facts about the Thousand Islands:

1) There are actually only 128 islands but that doesn't sound as impressive.
2) The dressing did not come from here.

Here, we got to have one glorious day away from Jakarta's intense madness, snorkelling, swimming, and sunsetting. However, to get there we had to leave from a port that doubled as a pungent fish market and board what I can only assume was a repurposed refugee boat. This boat had two crowded levels, both about 1 metre in height. To fit, most of the Indonesian passengers lied down next to each-other. We were packed in like a tin of sardines, if a tin of sardines were trying to seek asylum. But it was worth it.

Thousand Islands, Jakarta (Not The Refugee Boat)

I'm very thankful that I was able to go on this work trip and it has definitely expanded my understanding of the intricacies of this project. Whether I'm in the mud, the ocean, or a traffic jam, being in the field is undoubtedly much more exciting than being in the office. If only I could get paid to travel more often. Somebody set that up.