When I first announced that I was moving to Indonesia in late 2007, one friend looked puzzled. “Indonesia…is that in Bali?” he asked. Interestingly, living in Jakarta is a lot like Houston, without the Cajun food.
I stepped off the plane onto the tarmax on 14 February 2008, having boarded on a crisp winter’s monring in Houston, and into a swampy moldy morning in Jakarta. The arrival area was thick with clove cigarette smoke, and I didn’t encounter air conditioning — such as it was — until I was deep inside the terminal.
I fumbled my way to baggage claim, and after collectng my only bag, I turned to find 10 tiny brown men in blue shirts ready to usher my burden on their carts. Seeing that I would not escape unschathed, I selected one to take my bag.
On the way out, I stopped to exchange two of my six one-hundred dollar bills — my only surviving savings. The exchange rate was 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar, and I became an instant millionaire. The problem was that my new-found fortune was all in 100,000 rupiah notes, and most Indonesians had never even seen one, much less could make change for one.
At that time, there were few Indonesians who had travelled outside their home town, much less out of the counrty. The average day wage was $2, and a fresh college grad could expect to make $300 a month. There were a very select few in the upper class (earning more than $4,000/month), and everyone else was among the working poor.
Over the next 10 years, I watched the economy explode. Almost overnight, there was a vibrant middle class. People were buying their first cars. Younger generations were buying their own homes, leaving the previous two or three generations in the ancient family homestead. Foreign franchises, like Burger King, Subway, 7-11, Carrefour, and many others, were opening on a weekly basis.
Suddenly, Indonesians were travelling overseas and parents were sending their brood to univeristy in Australia, England, Taiwan, and the US. The city centre was on a building spree, the likes of which I hadn’t seen since the 1970s oil boom in Houston. New suburbs of semi-detached Euro-style housing were appearing everywhere, complete with (gasp) yards front and rear.
The government, giddy with the boom, started increasing taxes on everything, mostly to make up for all the losses due to corruption in the state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Indonesia dropped out of OPEC the year I got here, primarily due to the government demanding more and more slices of the oil and gas pie. There is no local oil industry, and the big internationals left rather than put up with the ever-increasing greed of the political types, and the constantly shifting regulatory quagmire.
Meanwhile, the rupiah had been sliding against the dollar, standing at about 15,000 and change to $1. That’s a 50% depreciation in less than 20 years. Prices began ballooning, after the government succumbed to IMF pressure to cut fuel subsidies. Taxes kept rising to pay for the loss of foreign investment compoumded by cancerous corruption and gross mismanagement in the SOEs.
NGOs were pushing the government to install more mass transit systems — high-speed trains, busways, MRT/LRT, etc., — primarily for the benefit of Chinese and European companies and “development” banks. The Indonesian sense of inadequacy and inferiority, inflamed by boundless political greed and corruption, led to outlandish borrowing to build the showroom transit systems that had no master plan or purpose, other than to look shiny and new for political photo ops.
Ultimately, this Me Too building boom culminated the last president declaring he would build a new capital city in the jungles of Borneo — all shiny, and spiffy, and “green,” and outrageously expensive (and riddled with corruption).
And then the Frankenvirus hit.
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