the Real World

Well, it is official – I can no longer say I am studying abroad. No, no, don’t get your hopes up, I am not back in the U S of A just yet. Simply stated I am living abroad. In Australia I was studying abroad – being enrolled at a University, taking classes, doing homework all while soaking up the culture and living my life down under. But you know all about that. Here in Indonesia my life resembles something more out of MTV’s the Real World – not with as much drama…or alcohol…actually, yeah, maybe this isn’t the best metaphor.

We all joke (here’s where I make the connection), “here’s the true story of eight strangers…picked as FINIP fellows to live in Jakarta...work and learn together and to find out what happens... when people start getting real...The Real World Jakarta.” Seriously though, I have a real life here. Wake up at 6:45am, class from 8:00-10:00am work until 4:00pm or 5:00pm, gym, dinner plus whatever time is spent in traffic. I am very happy to have been given this experience to really learn what it is like to truly live and function in another country and not just be a tourist or a student. But I can’t help but wonder, as I think about the real world, what other aspects of my life here in Indonesia represent the “real world”.

Here I am exposed to so much in my day-to-day life. I see extreme poverty and I see extreme wealth. I see the shanty shops and houses and the mega-shopping malls and luxurious hotels. I see pollution and I see what development can do to the environment. More than anything else, however, I see the rift between the developing world and the developed world: the majority versus the minority. Here we experience random black outs where the government decides that for a certain amount of time one section of the city will not have electricity. In some places they don’t have electricity during the day, only at night and still yet, some people don’t have electricity at all. The people of the slums bathe in the rivers and streams – strengthening the realness of environmental issues here.

I have started to think a lot about the environment, my chosen area of study and what I want to spend the rest of my life working with. Unlike in America where we worry ourselves with oil, natural gases, alternative energy sources, and greenhouse gas emissions, here in Jakarta their environmental state is visibly in a very critical condition. I saw a map a few weeks ago showing the amount of forest covering the island of Java, where I am living. In the past fifty years the island has gone from being almost entirely green to being sporadically dotted and consumed by development. The sewage system runs parallel to the streets and is clogged with garbage; the rivers and streams are stagnant and covered with a film of rubbish and trash. When people clean their shops at night they sweep everything into the streets – the ocean is their dumping ground. We worry about composting and recycling, they don’t. We worry about having twenty different kinds of cereal to choose from, they think about feeding their families. We complain about a minimum wage of $7.50, they could change their lives with that much money.

In my “real life” here in Jakarta I am finding more and more that I am far from real in this very real world. There is a disconnect between me and my surroundings. I cannot fully say that I have stepped out of my protected bubble that the Western world has provided me; rather, the majority world has broken through and opened my eyes yet has not accepted me - I am different and will always be different. Even though I feel a separation from the nation I reside, I couldn’t be more thankful to Indonesia for helping me realize what the real world even is.