DOKO -SHOWING THE POSSIBILITIES

 

It takes a village

Community development programs usually start with handshaking, flag-waving and smiles all round.  But how do they end when the bunting has faded and the politicians retreated to the cities?  Duncan Graham reports from Blitar, East Java where one project hasn’t turned to mud.

In the late 1980s three men from the backblocks arrived at the Malang office of Made Dharsama Polak’s business consultancy, PT Dayapertiwi Mukti.  

The men represented 22 households and their quest was basic and universal: They wanted a better life for their families and friends.

They also knew that worthy goal would never be achieved if they continued as casual farm laborers, forever tilling other men’s soil, hoping that one day the government might recognize their plight.

As an offshoot to his company, Made ran an NGO specializing in community based economic development programs.  He put together some ideas and the men went home to ponder their next move.

The problems were significant and the barriers high. Many people lived in bamboo shacks in the forest.  There was no village center, no services, and no government interest. 

With no security or collateral the banks were equally indifferent.  The people were just surviving.

Made’s plan required them to raise cash and apply for an interest-free loan.  Each household tossed in Rp 200 (then about 10 US cents) and the group borrowed Rp 300,000 (about US $15).

They used this to buy coconuts, shred the flesh and process it to make cooking oil.

“We couldn’t eat the coconuts, even though we were hungry,” said Roesmiati, whose late husband Sutrisno was one of the trio that approached Made Polak.  “Were we poor? Very! Everything had to be sold and the loan repaid.”

It was, so another was taken out, this time for Rp 750,000.  Chickens were bought and a machine purchased to grate the coconuts. 

An international conference of aid agencies held in Batu, near Malang and organized by Made Polak attracted NGOs from Southeast Asia, Europe and Japan. Dutch and German groups visited the project and offered more loans. Churches in the Dutch province of Friesland also helped.

Later Made helped negotiate with a local farmer for the group to buy 210 square meter blocks on time payment.  From serfs to landlords – it was a significant psychological and economic shift.

The European agencies have since moved on, reckoning the project has gathered its own momentum and achieved its goals.

These are substantial.  About 200 people now live in a village called Doko that never existed 23 years ago.

Doko squats on a hillside flanking a teak forest and a river that runs year round. The soil is fertile and the climate benign. It has electricity and tolerable roads.  Most houses are brick or concrete with tiled floors.  Some have satellite dishes.  One looks grand. 

This isn’t a snapshot of the new Indonesian middle class, but is a sketch of small scale and low-level rural prosperity. Although growing rice, corn, and other crops remains the core industry, the villagers have diversified.

Some residents have gone overseas or to other provinces, remitting money.  Roesmiati is fattening three cows destined for slaughter and tends her peanut crop.  Gita Iswantari makes kripik mbothe (cassava crisps) and sells these locally.   

Jarni bought a motorbike and uses this as an ojek (taxi) ferrying people and goods around the district.  The farmers prepare their own organic fertilisers and work their fields using local knowledge, not instructions from Jakarta.

Irwan Wahyu Saputro and Mohamad Prawoto (left)  the village coordinator, were the other two members of the trio that decided life had to be more than labouring for others. They went on training programs in Central Java and saw how other villages were using their initiative to get ahead.

Despite their success they still can’t access bank loans.  The houses stand on community-owned ground and the families don’t have the certificates banks demand for security.

“We still need access to money to build our stock,” said Roesmiati. “There have been many stops in our journey. When you walk fast and slow than it can be painful.”

“This isn’t a special village,” said Made, “but it has some special people, determined, smart and hard working. I feel proud of what’s been accomplished.”

The poor are bankable

Despite Indonesia now playing in the big league there’s still a big gap between traditional and modern economies, according to Made Polak (right).

“Banks continue to ask for collateral but are becoming more flexible in providing loans,” he said.  “Poor people are bankable if treated properly.  I’ve only had four per cent default on loans.

“This country faces many challenges, but poverty reduction remains the most important.

“All other reforms, like education, the civil service and political liberalization will be judged by the extent to which they contribute to the raising of standards for all Indonesians, particularly the poorest.”

Made’s CV is impressive.  His academic father, Major Polak was prominent in the Hindu community. He founded the Malang College of Economics, now a faculty of Brawijaya University.

Although trained as a lawyer Made Polak became concerned with environmental issues and poverty reduction. He got a scholarship to study enterprise development in Germany and later studied in Holland.

Since 1987 he has worked on water supply programs, agribusinesses, rice production, housing and small industry development.  These projects in Java, Bali and West Timor have involved the World Bank and agencies in Europe, Canada and Australia.

In an address to directors of his company he said: “Political and economic space should be enhanced for civil society groups and other actors to improve the existing situation and work towards a more egalitarian and democratic society.”

First published in The Jakarta Post 16 Jan 2013

(Captions: View of Doko; Jarni on motorbike; Gita Iswantari makes kripik mbothe: Roesmiati with cows; Mohamad Prawoto; village stroll; Made Polak (blue shirt).)

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NUGROHO WIJAYATMO

Buy local – before it goes global       

                       

Next time you’re shopping for something to cover plaster blisters on the wall consider contemporary Indonesian art.

Prints of stallions pounding through the surf (much beloved by a certain class of businessman) and the inevitable pale-skinned nymphs cheerfully harvesting rice under a furnace sun may be risk-free choices because they’re everywhere.

To really stand out take a look at where the young palettes are pointing.

Like Nugroho Wijayatmo, whose powerful and enigmatic portraits of women’s faces will attract more attention than any clichéd picture of a pool of colorful koi.

Diligently enquiry is needed to find his work.  Try Singapore, then Taiwan, even Europe.  If that’s too difficult, seek a simple furniture-free house down a gang on the outskirts of Yogya, narrower than a cab.

Not that many try because few know where he lives and works, or, sadly, care.

”Indonesians find it difficult to interpret paintings,” Nugroho said.  “Overseas it’s easier to value and appreciate art.  One reason is because it’s not a topic taught in our schools.

“I’ve had few exhibitions in Indonesia, though one in Jakarta next year is being planned.  There are so many good artists here (in Yogya) but they are not getting the publicity.  My agents are all overseas.”

Originally from Bengkulu in Sumatra, Nugroho’s early life mirrored that of so many creative young people battling common perceptions that archipelagic artists may not starve in garrets, but they’re likely to go hungry in a bamboo shack.

His mother taught Indonesian, his father was a public servant; their son didn’t want to his Dad into uniformed oblivion or become a lawyer or doctor.  Status and money were not the issue.

“I just wanted to draw,” he said.  “So did my father who used to copy images from diorama of Indonesian revolutionaries defeating Dutch colonialists.  I was more interested in features, emotions and character.”

In 1999, aged 19 and alone, he moved to Yogya with a bag full of his self-taught art.  It took only two examinations of the lad and his portfolio by the admissions committee of the prestigious Institut Seni Indonesia (ISI) (Indonesian Institute of Fine Arts) to be convinced the man had the spark that might ignite. 

Most candidates undergo five tough trials to test their worth.

“At that time it was very difficult to get into ISI,” he said. “My work was mainly still life and sketches.  In class I was inspired by my teacher, Edi Sunaryo. 

“I  discovered artists like Salavor Dali (the surrealist Spanish artist) and the poetry of Chairil Anwar.”  A large portrait of Dali by Nugroho has just been sold to a Singapore couple where it dominates their flat.

Anwar was a prominent and prolific writer of Generation 1945.  His work stressed individualism and was often bleak. 

Yet these influences aren’t apparent in Nugroho’s work where inquiry trumps anger.  It’s exploratory and analytical, inviting rather than confronting, more like the work of another unlikely hero -  the 19^th Century Pre-Raphaelite English painter of wistful women, John William Waterhouse.  He also featured large canvases.

Nugroho is friendly, low key – and cautious.  For the past two years he’s been a full-time professional artist earning serious money abroad but asked that figures not be quoted for fear of arousing jealousy.  A recent Taiwan auction would have helped pay for his motorbike and much of a new house. 

He got into the overseas galleries through introductions from another accomplished Yogya portraitist with a realistic pop-art style,  Dani ‘King’ Heriyanto.

But Singapore agent Watson Tan, who handles the work of both men, warned that the market was tough and crowded  and “only the fittest will survive.”

“Some artists are too demanding with prices even when they are young,” he said. “They need collectors to start their careers. Collectors or art agents these days are not naive about pricing.”  To tell it straight, greed kills.

Nugroho’s  only social comment was to deplore the anti-pornography laws which he claimed are curbing creativity.

The more significant impact on his style came from Sunaryo, a hard- edge painter and teacher at ISI, this year (2012) awarded a doctorate for his contribution and scholarship. His art has been widely sold overseas, though Nugroho’s work has yet to venture into the abstract world of his teacher.

“There are two types of artist,” said Nugroho.  “Those who copy and those who use their imagination.   I can copy, but I’m not very good.  Sometimes I use a model, other times not.  The inspiration can come from anywhere.”

Although unmarried he seems to understand some of the complex emotional inter-twinings of intimate relations.

“I like to paint the faces of women, they show so many conflicting moods,” he said.  “Her face may be sad but her heart happy.  It’s very complicated.  The  emotions of men  can be read more clearly.

“I sketch the original idea on the floor (he has no easel), then start to fill in with acrylic and water, layer by layer, sometimes up to seven, and then at times finishing in oil.  I think my technique is unique.”

In his village studio he’s still struggling to get two three-square meter canvases just right.  Both are of strong women, perhaps in their 30s whose faces seem to tell stories of experience and regret, yet tinged with remembered happiness.

A veil of horizontal lines, as though raining in one portrait, and a light horizontal mesh of twigs on the other, adds impact.  There’s sex aplenty, but not the sort that would arouse fundamentalists more concerned with body parts than soul.

“I want my work to be realistic, but decorative,” he said. “I’m still developing.  I fear getting stagnant if I stick to one technique.  I want the viewer to experience the emotion.”

Commented Watson Tan: “I do see Nugroho as a young emerging young artist on the Indonesian contemporary art scene.  I would love to see his work having deeper emotions which Nugroho will develop throughout the years.” (First published in The Jakarta Post 15 January 2013)

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THE BULL WHISPERER

Takim Priyono

The Bull Whisperer                                     

Anytime before Independence Day 1993, Takim Priyono was just another seemingly feckless ill-educated hanger-on, one more pair of hands for hire among the millions.

You might have caught the 22-year old with his mates sucking smokes at the crossroads of Tumpang, a village on the flanks of Java’s highest volcano, Mount Semeru.

Once the flag raising and marching is over 17 August celebrations usually turn into an afternoon of do-it-yourself jolliness.  Kids bang plastic water drums and parade in fun costumes.

Also there on that day were older men performing kuda lumping, the East Java trance dance involving flat-sided hobby horses.

Takim had seen them before because Tumpang, 22 kilometers east of Malang, is a center for East Java culture. But this time something else happened.

“When the procession passed I heard a voice whisper in my ear,” he said.  “It was an old man speaking in ngoko (Javanese used by superiors to inferiors, or to intimates).  He told me I had to make seven heads of banteng (the wild ox of Java).   So I did.”

With no knowledge of carving other than idly watching a few artisans chop away at blocks of wood, like an Old Testament figure he set out to obey the command.

The first bull head was called Sampar Keling. “I had to ask in a special ritual,” he said – but doesn’t elaborate.  Apparently the name came in another whisper and no meaning was forthcoming.

He still hangs in a dark nook of Takim’s cavernous workshop, his nose draped in hide, a rope around his horns as though ready to be led, or perhaps to lead.  On the surrounding walls are scores of other banteng.  Later versions, almost all life-sized, have painted faces and are more decorative.  Not all are intimidating.

Also there are the gaudy clacking-jawed demons used in dances, masks and more kuda lumping with broomstick tails like flying witches from European mythology.

On the floor is a slab of what Takim called dadap or cangkring, a solid but workable local timber often used for shade trees.  The ones he uses come from a border with a graveyard, adding another spirit layer.

The wood has been only partly carved. The outline is there, but not the soul. No horns either, which come from slaughtered animals. “I’m waiting for inspiration,” he said. “I haven’t had the calling.  When can it come?  Anytime and anywhere.”

Do the bulls talk?  He hesitates, smiles, scrutinises the questioner and thinks awhile.  “No.”

And the old man?  Is there a conversation?  The reluctance returns, jarring an otherwise fluid and open conversation.  Another pause and a glance into the darkness.  “No.”

Many people are reluctant to be near such objects because they fear the creator can infuse the heads with spells and black magic, known as jampi-jampi.  Is this the situation with his artefacts?  Smiling again.  “Yes.  All of them.”

Fear of spooks wasn’t the only hazard to be confronted.  At the time President Soeharto’s authoritarian government was facing other demons, the ghost of the man he deposed reincarnated as a rival politician in the shape of the first President’s daughter.

Megawati Sukarnoputri’s star was rising and her Partai Demokrasi Indonesia, later to add Perjuangan (struggle) to its title, had chosen a horned beast as its symbol.

Obviously a man making such splendid models must also be a political activist, maybe even a provocateur.

Then there were the religious worries.  Many modern Muslims strongly oppose Javanese mysticism. Directly opposite his driveway is a mosque, its speakers strong enough to blast away any malevolence, whatever its source.

Takim was tolerated. “I was brought up here, everyone knew I wasn’t political,” he said.  “Fortunately by then the government had more serious concerns.  I was never visited by Intel

“This area is rich in Javanese culture and Nahdlatu Ulama (a major traditional Muslim organisation in East Java) accepts this.”

So how did a man who says he had no formal training become not just an overnight skilled technician able to carve symmetrically but also a creative artist?

The theory of his friend, artist and author Bambang Adrian Wenzel – who verified Takim’s epiphany - is that his origins are with the Tenggerese who live on the slopes of nearby Mount Bromo.  They are believed to the remnants of the 15^th century Majapahit people who fled (or were driven out) from East Java and into Bali.

The number seven features in mythologies across the world.

Takim says he won’t sell his art because the prices are too high for locals.  Pushed he refused to name a figure, though later revealed his work can now be found in 22 overseas countries.

Three years ago he built a separate workshop with sculptures of bulls and other symbols on the walls.

His wife Sri Hardayani is a professional traditional dancer who performs at weddings.  Their son Agung Wahudi, 11, spends time watching his Dad cut and chop and drill.

Just down the road, squashed among the tiny houses is the 14-meter high Candi Jagu, a temple believed built in 1268 during the Singosari period when Java was still Hindu-Buddhist. Weathering on the andesite walls are complex 3D scenes from life and the after life.

Two bulls feature among the many animals, ferocious and assertive, ready to gore, fighting tigers, at the gateway to hell.

Although the temple is classified as a heritage site visitors scramble over its stones unchecked.  Local children use it as a playground, couples court in its shadows.  It’s been a stage for traditional theater and is part of the village.

“There’s been a long close relationship between cattle and people,” Takim said.  “They give us milk and meat and skin. Banteng are symbols of energy and action.

“I don’t want to hold exhibitions or move from Tumpang.  I do not want the younger generation to loose our culture.  I feel grateful that God has given me this opportunity – it’s the calling of my life.”

(First published in The Jakarta Post, Monday 7 Jan 2013)

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SIGNS OF ECONOMIC PROGRESS

Who’d want to marry an economist?

Breakfast conversation would be a diet of fiscal responsibility, lunch the balance of trade and supper a downturn in the marginal rate.

You’d ask for pie and get a pie chart.  Every analysis would be based on aged and elastic figures.  Particularly those with PhDs.

Better to live with a soothsayer.  You get to eat the goat so there’s a skull for the rituals and all those candles come in handy when there’s another PLN blackout.

Former President Megawati Soekarnoputri once revealed that she didn’t trust the statistics served up by her ministers.  So why should we ordinary folk believe the boosters now claiming Indonesia is booming and that more investors than surfers are heading for the archipelago?

Better to have faith in what we see. We may not know how to roll over a bill on maturity (unless the ageing spouse is called William) but we know when things are looking up in our suburb, and not just because the sidewalk potholes have been sealed.

The becak driver who used to park his pedicab under the mango tree at the intersection waiting for residents to clap for service now sits with his mates, a block away in a fancy shelter.

If you want him you need to know his mobile number or Blackberry PIN.

It’s the same with the baker and milkman.  Once breakfast might have been put off an hour or more, deliveries delayed by gossiping and indecisive customers.  Now we just jump the queue by phoning for a loaf or a liter.

How can homeowners enhance their status in society when even drab folk carry smart phones? How to distinguish between the refined rice and the husks? The new way to show off is to have the house tarted up.

Traditionally this happened only in early August ahead of Independence Day celebrations.  Then street-facing walls were given a wash and maybe even a tickle with the paintbrush.
Now the renovations are 7 / 31 as neighbors try to keep up with the Johannes. Even casual laborers shovelling out the rubble after knocking down last year’s feature wall  arrive on motorbikes.  For lunch they expect chocolate pastries from the new bakery rather than instant noodles.
Builders’ supplies, blokes’ sheds where nails are bought by the kilo and you have to know the difference between a centimetre and a centipede to shout an order, are yielding to airy home improvement stores.
Here knowledgeable staff don’t sneer at your ignorance (well, not to your face) just as long as they can polish your plastic.
Many stock quality goods from Europe and the US, competing against lower price but shoddy materials from China.
Consumer protection laws may be a joke, but customers who have seen how responsible retailing works overseas are starting to set the pace in demanding accountability
Want a hot water system?  Your choice, Italian or German, three-year guarantee.  If this goes on the refreshing routine of splashing buckets of cold water scooped from a concrete tank will soon be a pastime of the past.
I’ve even seen costly Australian solar panels on the roofs of homes where the owners wear khaki and drive red-plated cars.  Maybe they work in ‘wet’ departments like the police, immigration or taxation.  They’d need hot water to wash the stickiness off their fingers.
No cash, no worries. Interest rates have tumbled and the banks hustle to lend.  Price tags seldom promote the real cost, only the monthly payments. 
If the 6.3 per cent growth rate does a U turn it could be 1998 all over again.  But this is Sunday morning, so let’s be positive
Economists could explain it all in historical terms, blame Keynes or the rise in the rimbali,  and fit the spending into a graph.  Not having their dexterity with data we’ll just report that things seem to be looking good where we live, and to search for an appropriate metaphor.
A car wash has just been installed.  So a bubble perhaps?


(First published in The Sunday Post 6 January 2012)

CANDI BANGKAL

So much to see – and lose  

                          

Of the 2.5 million tourists who visit Borobudur every year, only six per cent are foreigners.  Yet the spectacular Central Java Buddhist monument is internationally known as Indonesia’s premier attraction.

Could more be done to promote the nation’s cultural jewels?  Duncan Graham reports from East Java in the heartland of decaying monuments:

The threats are clear. No need to kneel, no magnifier required.

 The ground is spongy and in places waterlogged. 

An exposed web of tree roots thrusting under the structure threatens to undermine the soggy foundations of sun-dried bricks.  Above, wind and rain have fretted the waist of an already top-heavy building.

A barbed wire fence makes the place look like an internment camp, though offset by manicured lawns and geometric shrubs better suited to a villa.

Nearby high voltage powerlines and smokestacks show this isn’t a pastoral plain. Close, too close, is the 450 hectare Ngoro Industrial Park (NIP).

Candi (temple) Bangkal is 50 kilometers south of Surabaya, the nation’s second biggest city, yet the caretaker cannot recall any visits by foreigners and few by locals.

It is one of the Republic’s treasures, a precious irreplaceable link to a splendid past and it’s suffering from such neglect that its existence is in jeopardy.  It’s officially protected but the care is passive.

Its history is a mystery.  “You won’t find Bangkal in the guide books and there’s little information about it elsewhere,” said environmental activist and conservationist Suryo Prawiroatmodjo (below)

“However we can be sure of one thing.  It’s definitely from the Majapahit era.”

The proof is hard to spot but seems decisive, though whether early or late is another question.  First scramble across the loose bricks and up an uneven staircase to enter the inner chamber through a narrow doorway.  The grotesque kala (guardians) puff their eyeballs at each entrance.

Strange symbols on the walls challenge the visitor.  What do they mean?  The puzzles add to the charm.

Here and there are niches where statues probably stood.  Where now?  In museums and private collections here and overseas, for East Java’s much admired antiquities have been brutally plundered.

Inside a gloomy cone of flat bricks steeples to a central plate high above.  Look, there, peering down! The eight-pointed Majapahit sun symbol with a galloping horse and flogging rider at the center, straddling what appears to be a mound – or dragon

Perhaps it’s something else – a rider triumphant carrying a banner-topped spear? Or, more likely, the sun god Surya.

Universitas Indonesia student Nurmulia Rekso Purnomo has researched Candi Bangkal but found nothing that confirms its purpose.

So assumptions have been made on architectural styles similar to those used in dated relics.  His work claims the temple shape is similar to those built during ‘the golden ages of Majapahit, when ruled by Hayam Wuruk’ (1334-1389) the fourth king.

References to a glorious Hindu-Buddhist past with expectations of a return worry the superstitious, and are considered a barrier to preservation.  Suryo, who serves guests with meals known to have been prepared in the era on Majapahit-style pottery, doesn’t shout his enthusiasm but works to promote wider interest.

Apart from Majapahit meals and music he’s also recreating the wayang (puppets) of the time.

There are at least 32 known temples and scores of other royal shrines of the Singosari (1222 – 1292) and Majapahit (1293 – 1527) eras in central East Java. Not all are as bad as Candi Bangkal.  Some are worse.

Most are clustered around the 320 kilometer serpentine Brantas River that heads south, turns west and then north.

The watercourse was once so navigable and the floodplains so rich the people who nurtured its volcanic soils had time to create and advance. This wasn’t subsistence living.  Ceremony, art, expansion and innovation were exercised before the kingdoms mysteriously crumbled.

Now toxic Brantas is silted and vile, one of the world’s worst polluted waterways, carrying sickness, not life.  This sad, black mess once brought sea-faring craft deep into the hinterland to trade with the rest of Asia.

On Mount Penanggungan near Trawas (seen, below, from Suryo's house)  remnants of the holy Indian Mount Mahameru magically flown to Java to keep the island intact, are at least 81 recorded sites spanning five centuries.  

Only those on the lower levels of the 1,650 meter mountain can be easily accessed.  Others, yet to be revealed, lie smothered by vegetation, alive and dead. Local villager Tri, who has climbed the mountain several times with his children, said he’d seen signs of previously unknown sites near the summit.

On the other side of the NIP, past a smoldering rubbish tip and dozers ripping up more forest, is Gapura Jedong where inscriptions indicate it may have been built at the close of the 10^th century. 

This site has been given a make-over including  shaved lawns and pretty bushes, fading and boring information - but no indications of the lives of the people who built the monument.

We know the names of the kings and generals, little of the folk who worshipped, worked here and built a powerful nation state that dominated Southeast Asia.

Also missing is a third gateway.  It was there early last century – it isn’t now.  In this area you have to be quick:  If the pollutants and developers don’t get you, the vandals will.

Too late to fix?

So maybe Candi Bangkal is only 650 years old.  Hardly worth the worry or expense of preserving.

Yohannes Somawiharja (pictured, right) doesn’t agree.  He’s the academic director of Universitas Ciputra and an engineer by training so should be getting his kicks sucking diesel fumes while dozing down the past.

Instead he’s turned cultural historian and trying to decide how this fits with his Surabaya campus’ vision of ‘creating world class entrepreneurs’.  Can innovative thinking turn the past into profit?

“Just feel the peace of it all,” Yohannes said squatting in the shade of an Ixora. “This is where my heart lies.

“Look around and experience the magnificence of the culture that built this.  The Javanese are very spiritual and out of this has come great beauty.”

Ixora is normally a shrub.  Its red flowers are used in Hindu worship. Here it’s a full tree, big enough to hide a man as in a story in the Sanskrit epic, the Ramayana.  Could the tree be as old as the temple it seems trying to undermine?

“Almost all historical sites in East Java are not well preserved,” Yohannes said as the academic team he brought to the site pondered the possibilities.

  “Perhaps it’s time for the private sector got involved, perhaps through corporate social responsibility.  Let’s start with something small, maybe involving the performing arts and tourism.”

While studying in the US, where he led student protests against the Soeharto regime late last century, Yohannes was impressed with the way the possibly prehistoric Serpent Mound site in Ohio had been preserved and developed, though far less spectacular than Bangkal.

“They made history live,” he said. “It had a gift shop, museum and regular school visits.

“This site is good because it’s so close to Surabaya and accessible. Perhaps it could be adopted and developed.

“But first there has to be a plan. We need the right approach with Hindus and Muslims.  We don’t want our intentions misunderstood.”

(First published in The Sunday Post 6 January 2013)

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