Poverty

Based on the photo “Poverty” by James Nachtwey (if anyone knows how to set up a link to it, that would be sincerely appreciated by this techno-novice).

I am in Jakarta on vacation with my friends. We’re pausing in this enormous city on the Indonesian leg of our trek through Southeast Asia. I woke up in the hotel but couldn’t drag any of the rest of the gang out with me to come meet a friend of mine from graduate school. Abdul had always said if I was ever in his part of the world to give him a call. So I did. He lives out in the suburbs and suggested the commuter train would be the cheapest, fastest, and easiest way to get out there. Luckily, the central train station was on the same downtown block as the hotel. I slipped unnoticed out of the hotel into the surprisingly windy Jakarta morning and before I knew it, I was inside the train station, ticket in hand, all ready to find my gate and hop on the train to Abdul’s. My feet began to traverse the floor of this newly constructed ultramodern station, which reminded me of some of the nicer redeveloped downtown train stations in North America – clean, well-lit, heated, filled with pedestrians and passersby poking their heads into the many stores, complete with food court.
And then I saw them. Perched in a clump on the floor, plopped down beyond the Indonesian version of McDonalds, were several motionless figures. They were just … What was this? A crime scene? Performance art? People kept walking right past the lying bodies, paying no attention to them. These bodies were clearly breathing – their chests rose and fell. They looked just like kids – barefoot and clad in old clothing. But people were ignoring them, as if their presence was as normal as the food court tables or as integral to the station (but as unremarkable) as the signs hanging from the ceiling that list train arrivals and destinations. How could people just ignore these kids? It wasn’t like they were out on the street. This would be like finding kids asleep on the floor of a suburban shopping mall. All the passersby were well-dressed seemingly middle-class folk – so how could they tolerate this? How could they be so callous or disengaged when confronted with the humanity of others?
Maybe there existed sort of arrangement between the mall owners, poor kids, and security guards. In the States someone would’ve called security or the police to “do something” about the interlopers in their nice secure space. Is this just an accepted part of culture and life here?
And these kids – who were they? Didn’t their families miss them? Did they even have families or folks who wondered where they were? Were they local or had they come to the big city from the country, somehow fallen through the cracks of society and ended up here on the well-serviced floor of a modern train station. And how could they sleep unimpaired through the loud morning rush hour hubbub? Folks were running by to make their trains to get to work out in the suburbs in one direction while constant flows of humanity exited into this corridor, headed for destinations in the big city. It was a loud, public place, not to mention brightly lit. I was amazed.
Isn’t anyone going to do anything?
Well, what can I do or should I do? Give them a few bucks? I can’t speak their language. Would be an intervention be out of place? Would I be crossing a cultural barrier or making a major cultural faux pas here? I feel as out of my element as an Iowa family in the seedy Old NYC Times Square. Is it wrong to voyeuristically to take a picture to remember this? Wouldn’t it make great art? Is it wrong of me to think that? Maybe the best gift is just to grant them some more sleeping time.
CLICK.
I’ll have to ask Abdul about all this.