A children's school teaches its community enviromental agriculture

In one community near Yogyakarta, a partner has worked with the school, rebuilt after a 2006 earthquake, to reintroduce traditional foods like yams, arrowroot and cassava to the students and community. The Green Revolution had made such foods "old-fashioned". One teacher told us how a government officer told him to pull up his root crops and plant mangos, a cash crop, instead.

With the example of the school and teachers, the community is now eager to grow these traditional foods. They have chosen ones that will grow beneath the existing trees so as not to contribute to global warming.

Local food is now integrated into every part of the students' day -- they use local beans for counting games, have a physics lesson on why adding citrus to a locally-produced herbal drink makes it change colour, and play schoolyard games with coconut hulls. Local foods replace foreign foods (like apples) in texts. The method of teaching has also moved from book learning to active learning for at least half of each day.

Meetings, numbers and traffic jams

Monday and Tuesday:  Java is full of wonderful people; crowded in fact. Getting to meetings in Jakarta means sitting in traffic for way too long. And then hearing mind-boggling stories and statistics of a country and its resources being sold from under them, as if the people didn't exist. And often the World Bank or other "development" banks are involved.

On Monday, SPI staff at Via Campesina headquarters mentioned that Indonesia plans to have 8,500,000 hectares of land turned over to palm oil plantations (for agrofuels for China and ...). What does that look like? Begin with Indonesia being as wide, end-to-end, as Canada. And Haiti's land mass being about 2.something million hectares. That's huge. Among other things, SPI helps farmers reclaim unused land.

On Tuesday, we met some staff at KPI, D&P's largest partner in Asia with 28,000 members, mostly at the village level. They casually mentioned that 80% of Indonesia lives in the rural areas. KPI is a women's organization. They've been involved in challenging some of the assumptions of the water laws, including that people shouldn't collect rain water because it's dirty, and that anyway the water companies will provide it to them. Can't help thinking of the Jakarta community we met on Saturday where the women look forward to the rain as a source of free water.

Fences around water

Sunday, February 14 saw us visiting a couple of villages in the area of Sukubumi, West Java, which are losing access to their traditional sources of water: springs. Water bottling companies buy the land on which the springs are located, then build fences around them so that local people, who have traditionally used the springs when their own wells dry up, can no longer access them. In one case, the company has hired a guard and built a guardhouse inside the fence. The guard grows rice on the surrounding land to supplement his income. In this picture, one of the Kruha staff stands in front of the fence and the guardhouse.

Water, water everywhere... and not a (clean) drop to drink

Gung Hay Fat Choy! On this first day of Chinese New Year, Jakarta is flooding. With 13 rivers and torrential rainfalls during rainy season, Jakarta has abundant water. But as the staff of our partner Kruha point out, many people in Jakarta suffer from water scarcity, especially the poor. They estimate that 6,000,000 of the city’s population of 9,000,000 do not have access to clean water. “When the water system was first turned over to a private operator in 1998, they promised that after 10 years of privatization everyone would have potable water.” We are driving through the flooded streets to meet a community of 900 people that has been struggling to get the company to keep that promise. The pipes and water meters exist on their streets, and the families have been receiving water bills. But the pipes have yet to deliver water.

Leaving the car, we start wading down a narrow street of simple homes, curious children, families on porches, women washing clothing and dishes. And many, many buckets, pans and vessels collecting the rainfall. Soon we are struggling through knee-high muddy water, trying to find footholds in the broken pavement deep below.

As we reach the community hall, the rain stops. Duirng the next two hours we meet with about 8 women. Over bananas, coffee and cake they tell us of their efforts to get the water company to deliver on its promise, and the expense of buying bottled water. They talk of how even today’s torrential rain is a blessing. “Because then we can collect free water to bathe in, to wash our clothes and do our dishes. Even if we’re sleeping and we hear the rain we’ll get up to collect water in the middle of the night!” They tell us of family arguments about water leading to divorce. How the cost of water can sometimes add up to more than the monthly rent.

One also tells us that her life has been threatened due to her activism on this issue. “But I will continue this struggle. The struggle for water is my whole life. I’ve even known people to die because of water problems.”

Batiks and Javanese dancing at the mall

Much of Friday was spent getting oriented to simple things: the different food, setting up internet access, downloading Skype. I also spent way too much time looking at batiks, which take up the entire fourth floor of the neighbouring shopping centre. While there a peculiar thing happened: the gentle, repetitive gamelan music of the batik section was suddenly overpowered by a loud shrieking and crashing on the floor above. I went to explore. And bumped into two exquisitely-costumed classical Javanese dancers telling their story in precise gestures and expressions. At the top of the escalator. The sound I had heard was recorded Javanese classical singing, accompanied by gamelan, and amplified. It was music that demanded you pay attention. I found it unsettling to watch these highly-skilled dancers performing in the household goods section. But this was not a feeling anyone else seemed to share. After the performance the organizers graciously invited us tourists to have our photos taken with the dancers, asked us where we were from, praised NGOs and told us they did this every Friday afternoon. One way of keeping traditional Javanese culture alive. Certainly they made sure of reaching a new audience every week. I can't wait to hear this music live.

I've arrived

32 hours of travel, spread over 3 planes and 4 airports and half the world, and finally Jakarta. The last 5 hours of travel (in daylight!) was the most interesting, as I was able to see the mountains, beaches, rivers and valleys of the Philippines and Borneo, and the small plots of cultivated land between the ocean and the Jakarta airfield. So many things we've written about came to mind: the disappearing rice terraces of the Philippines, the impact of the pollution caused by a copper mine on the people of Marinduque, the productivity of small plots of land. I've looked at the maps before, but the interrelationship of the islands is now burned into my brain in that 3-dimensional way only air travel can help with.

Getting closer...

Sumatra, Java, Bali, Borneo, Kalimantan, Jakarta, Solo, Papua, Irian Jaya, Molucca  ... reading Lonely Planet, studying maps, trying to imagine how the words will actually sound when spoken in their context.

Getting a sense of the waves of former colonization triggered by trade routes between China and India; to control precious spices; followed by plantations. Arab traders, Portuguese and Dutch colonists, this just scrapes the surface. And it continues in new forms. Nearly 1,800 islands in the archipelago. Close to 260 million people. Islands with very different histories, pulled into one fairly new country.

My preparations are continuing... some reading, a lot of technical preparation... agendas, making sure I have the technical equipment I'll need.