A love letter upon leaving
When I moved to Indonesia is 2009, it wasn’t because I loved the country. In fact, I didn’t even like it. But I sensed an opportunity, and like every classic tale based on the unexpected it turned out so much differently than I had anticipated.
I gave myself a year to make a go as a reporter. In those days Jakarta to me was the smell of burning rubbish and poverty. It was meeting elites in hotel coffee shops and conference rooms, days of tea and small talk in search of a story and nights locked behind the walls of a shared house in a desolate part of this frantic metropolis. It was fight to report about a place I didn’t care that much about. Until suddenly I did.
I got to know some filmmakers and academics who introduced me to human rights activists and well-known participants of the late 1990s reformasi movement. I traveled to far flung parts of the country and I met real people and started listening to their stories. Families shared tales of the suffering they endured after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, of continuing to search for lost wives and children years after they went missing. I met farmers struggling to protect onion and garlic crops when prices skyrocketed due to misplaced trade caps and young teachers posted in remote villages in an effort to shake up the education system.
I sat in on the blasphemy trial of a Muslim cleric accused of insulting his own religion and tried to comfort his wife when he was convicted. I drank Slurpees at my neighbourhood 7-Eleven in pursuit of a story about what made the downmarket convenience store such a hit among youths in Jakarta. I often made poor decisions, heading up an erupting volcano to interview families in a evacuation camp riddled by boredom, coughs and eye infections. When a freak 9.0-magnitude earthquake hit Aceh, the province destroyed in the 2004 tsunami, I drove with my fixer not away from the coast but towards it.
I walked away battered and bruised after fighting off petty thieves in Medan only to bandage my legs and feet and head off into the jungle for a story on local government efforts to destroy one of Sumatra’s last remaining biodiversity hotspots and, then later, to visit a village trying to combat stunningly high rates of maternal mortality. I watched women prepare to leave their families for work as maids overseas where they’re at risk of abuse or worse.
More recently I joined rallies led by Islamist hardliners seeking the ouster of Jakarta’s Christian, ethnic Chinese governor and talked with families in the Chinese Indonesian community who fear a return of the persecution that for decades made them the targets of often violent discrimination.
These are all the rousing tales of life lived as a reporter. And while they’ve ended in rich news reports and features about the struggles facing Indonesia, they are only part of what has made this country home to me.
It has also been the late-night debates and conversations. The rides on public buses, the strolls through Jakarta’s myriad neighborhoods. It has been the friendships that have challenged my assumptions and pushed me to look beyond what I’m seeing — or think I am — in Indonesia’s chaotic alleyways and backwaters. Outsiders scoff when I tell them I’ve lived in Jakarta for nearly eight years. How is it possible? they wonder. Indeed, there is plenty not to like about living here. But I’ve also found enrichment and kindness and wonder. I’ve found friends who’ve become my family, who indulge my eccentricities and eagerly join in my adventures.
And so many, many years after I landed and far, far longer than I ever expected, I bid farewell to this land of thousands of islands, to this “impossible country.” I’ve met some rotten people but am honoured to have known the many more inspiring ones.
Am I leaving forever? That's a question I got a lot in the lead up to my departure, and I answered it by saying no one leaves Indonesia forever. Call it a spell, call it black magic but something about the country gets inside you. And the people I’ve met here will continue to impact my life in ways that have no borders.
