I figured a good place to start with this blog would be at
home. Clearly, “home” is a fairly nebulous concept in our family. For me, home
will always be the UK- the place I was born and bred. However, things are less
clear cut for the other three. Soma is a Bengali, born in Cambridge but bred in
various parts of West India and with an accent straight out of the "upstairs" bit of Downton Abbey.
If you ask Kieran or Rohan about “home”, you get a rather long pause. Well to be fair, it’s all a bit tenuous
for boys born in the UK to a Brit and an Indian; who have spent almost all
their lives living in Egypt, Tanzania and Indonesia; who have been educated in
a Cairo church playgroup run by an Egyptian, a
Tanzanian kindergarten run by a Maharastran, French schools in both Dar es Salaam
and Jakarta and are currently going through the Australian system. Anyway, for
the sake of simplicity, we've decided that home is wherever Soma’s chicken curry appears on the
table and therefore we are currently talking about South Jakarta, or more
specifically Cipete.
Our Home (for now!)
We were lucky enough to find a great place to live within a month
or so of arriving here. Actually, since we plumped for a decently sized place in a small compound of five houses, the move to Jakarta hadn't resulted in a significant change in our living quarters! As with Tanzania, we were taking a bit of a risk though. The problem with
small compounds is that they can be heaven or hell, depending on who your
neighbours are. However, once again we got very lucky, finding a collection of
neighbours all of whom like each other and, more importantly, seem to like
us. Given that this was our third
attempt at moving overseas, Soma had got the list of requirements fairly well
established, so the search was conducted with military efficiency. Top of the list was location- here, geography is crucial. The one thing Jakarta is famous for is “macet”- the unrelentingly
awful traffic. To combat this, you make sure that house, office and school are
as close together as possible. We thought we’d got it nailed- a house five
minutes drive from the office and a two minute walk from the school- perfect!
Well it would have been perfect if the school wasn’t so bad we pulled the boys
out within two months. So, instead, we’ve settled for almost perfect- close to the office and a
short drive from school.
So what about our host city? Well, the city was named Jaya Karta (or “great victory”) by its founder, a
conquering prince of Cirebon some 500 years ago. The name was short lived, with
the Dutch renaming the city Batavia upon their arrival not long later. This
name stuck more or less until independence after World War 2, when the city
took on its current name, Jakarta.
Jakarta is in fact part of a major conurbation- the name
Jabodetabek is derived from the constituent cities- JAkarta, BOgor, DEpok, TAngerang
and BEKasi . It’s a pretty large place too- most recent population is over 28
million, so a population more than half of England lives here!
So what is it like to live here? Well this is very much a
city of contrasts. If you drive through Sudirman or Kuningan you see the kind
of gleaming 21st Century office blocks and wide roads found in Dubai
or Singapore. However, take a short ride into South Jakarta and things, while certainly greener and more picturesque, feel
decidedly less modern. Here you have smaller buildings crowded around narrow,
winding roads. This is not surprising. Until quite recently, a lot of South
Jakarta was kampung (Indonesian term for shanty town). Even now, when you visit
neighbouring Kemang (now so full of expats it is known by locals as “Kampung
Bule” or “White man’s Kampung”) you can still see evidence of these older, more ramshackle buildings
without too much effort. This part of town wasn’t designed- it
kind of evolved over time. One thing it did not evolve to handle is traffic. Even the macet is different therefore. In the
city centre, you have grinding, long traffic jams where the main problem is
simply the volume of cars on the road. Come to South Jakarta and the problem is
basically one of getting more than one Kijang- the expat vehicle of choice- on
a narrow, winding road the width of the average ruler. Here, a journey will consist of
your driver somehow maneuvering your car into whichever odd position it takes
to navigate its way between an oncoming car and the slow moving carts pulled by mobile street food vendors, while at the same time trying not to
hit the twenty or so scooters whizzing their way between you.
Whether you live in Cairo, Tanzania or Jakarta, the one
thing that distinguishes emerging cities is the sheer variety of modes of
transport. Singapore has virtually no traffic jams- 15 minutes to the airport
is the norm. However, traffic there consists of cars and buses, all of which are travelling, if not equally fast, at least in the same ballpark with regards speed. Here, the car
is a minority participant on the roads, competing with hand- pulled street food carts,
motorbikes (either private or ojeks for hire), buses and bajais (the same old foe as the noisy but painfully slow bajajis I frequently almost crashed into back in Tanzania). All of these take different
trajectories at different speeds and result in one almighty mess on the roads.
However, much as we sometimes wish they could all disappear, it is just this
variety that gives Jakarta its charm. Singapore is perfect and everything runs well. However, to feel truly like home (I am British after all!) a place needs a slight dash of incompetence- the basic humanity of people trying their best in life but occasionally not quite getting it right. This is just such a place- a
city of people doing their best but not always getting it right. That suits us just fine!
