Ten minutes to landing and all I could see below was a vast expanse of sea. I imagined landing there amongst the ships casting themselves at all angles, completely tangled up in blue. I could float from one ship to the next until it took me to my landing site, in the great, big city of Jakarta. This is Indonesia, I thought -- 17,000 islands scattered between the Indian Ocean and the Java Sea. I saw one, maybe two of the islands, which looked like pin pricks, barely bigger than the boats surrounding them. Twenty-six hours of flying time later, I landed within this archipelago of natural wonders, and tried to begin defining what I would see.
I departed the jet with maybe 500 pilgrims returning from their holy journey to Mecca. Dressed in white and light bluish green, with comfy shoes and green pins reading "Safari Sebu," I imagined these pilgrims reflecting on their great journey to honor Allah, Mohammed, the chosen one. They had probably waited all their lives for that journey, many saving up for what would be the ultimate pledge of devotion in this lifetime, which would only be a testament for the next. As I read through the final chapters of "Infidel," I kept the cover hidden and bound to my lap. I wouldn't want the man in white to have any idea I might be reading this controversial book about one Somalian woman's journey from her devotion to Islam to her position as an atheist and parlaimentarian in Holland, who dedicated her later years to renouncing Islam and its damaging repression and abuse of the world's women. Ayaan's story definitely made me rethink feminist ambitions and Western cultural sensitivities and how far those sensitivities should carry us.
Getting through the airport was remarkably easy. Unlike my landing in Niamey a few months before, the airport was well organized, air conditioned, and had people from all over the world, dressed in in an array of fashions from short mini skirts to a full black covering, with only face exposure. Anyone could feel at home here. I immediately began getting smiles, the ones I had read about. The small amount of Indonesia I had seen reflected a friendly, lively place, accustomed to Western tourists.
The drive from the airport to our hotel in Jakarta could have been the drive from LAX to its suburbs. The highways were well-groomed, and billboards loomed among red, spanish roofs and what I think of when I imagine a hacienda. There were little peaks of poverty, shacks with tin roofs, among the haciendas. But the poverty was certainly less overt than anything I had seen driving passed South Africa's townships or through the Swazi mountains, and certainly back from Niamey's airport at 2 am this past January. Everything was lush, the antithesis to the Saharan desert. A tropical breeze blew the green grasses from side to side, while we waited in my first Jakartan traffic jam -- something that will probably come to define my stay in Jarkarta this week.
A black smog lays low in the air among the downtrodden buses, overblown mercedes and thousands of mopeds weaving in and out of their larger four-wheeled comrades. Westerners stay locked up in air conditioned cars, as their drivers meander patiently among the aggression of the other drivers around them. It could take 90 minutes to go to 10 miles, at an off-peak hour on an average day. Because I am sheltered here, in this grand hotel with hi-speed internet, I haven't felt how this sort of pollution can consume your lungs and make your stomach twist. In Niamey, the pollution and the oppressive heat, on many days, had me lying down by 1 p.m. awaiting the sun to drop. I imagine that I would feel the same way here. I imagine the young adopt asthma at when they are just babies, riding on modeps sitting atop the laps of their fathers. The old probably cough violently, and succumb to emphysema. Or maybe they adapt. I'll have to see, to notice, in this financial bastion of hi-rises and smoke.
On my first drive away from the sterility of the hotel to the outskirts of Tangerang, to our destination hospital, I began to get a peak of destitution outside Jakarta's financial powerhouse. Children ran barefoot on the side of the road. Little, unhappy girls strum their fiddles trying to earn maybe 10,000 Rupiah ($1) from us outsiders. Although it wasn't the same desperation I witnessed in parts of Niger, people scrambling for single cheerios in the sand, it said something about the vast inequities between rich and poor within just a few miles. While the wealthiest families held weddings at our luxurious hotels, with sponsorships from mercedes benz, and dresses that could have been the cover of Vogue, others just a few miles away run barefoot into the street. In a country of 255 million, I am sure during my two weeks here, I will only get the most artifical glimpse of this inequity. I would have to hop from island to island for year after year to get a real feel for this sprawling country in the sea.
Pulling into Tangerang Hospital, I was amazed at its beauty. It stood out amongst lush bushes filled with colorful flowers, patients waited for services on outdoor brown tile porches. This scenery masks the 3o out of 3,000 women who had died due to complications experienced during labor last year. By improving emergency obstetric care, an initiative in a large part led by the organization I am working with -- Pathfinder International's Extending Service Delivery Project (www.esdproj.org) -- that number was cut by two-thirds in a period of just one year. By giving community midwives the skills they need to stabilize and refer patients and by giving providers the skills they need to save lives, many less women have been bleeding to death, simply for becoming pregnant.
Over the next week, I will work with a video team to document the success at Tangerang Hospital, and the Indonesian Ministry of Health's plan to scale up the improvements in emergency care to other hospitals throughout the country. It is our hope that this video will help to convince USAID, and, as a result, Congress, to give more money to similar initiatives that will help to better the health care situation for poor women living in the most vulnerable conditions around the world.
During my first short visit, I already met characters who will inevitably bring this film to life. Dr. Herman, the head of obstetric services, will talk about how they saved so many women at Tangerang. He will laugh infectiously as he explains the intervention in Bahasa. Decision makers will remember him, as I will. Women, like the one Salwa (the ESD manager of this project) approached in the delivery room will become a symbol of why vulnerable women are important, essential, vital to the state of the world. They will smile from ear to ear, and like Salwa's new friend, tell us that the care at Tangerang saved their lives. After a botched abortion, Tangerang was this woman's saving grace. It is our hope that Tangerang, and, eventually all of Indonesia's other hospitals, will be the same saving grace for many more.
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