Rainy Season brings out the worst in me

Sometimes I can’t tell if I love Indonesia so much that it hurts, or if actually, deep down the place depresses my spirits so much that it goes full-circle and starts to resemble love.

I can’t explain it.

It’s rainy season now. What I thought was rainy season, back in October, November, and December, was just a teaser. Sort of like an appetizer that disappoints, only to be overshadowed by a far more thoroughly disappointing main course. You know what I mean. This is rain that begins at 11 a.m. and doesn’t stop until 9 or 10 p.m. And while sometimes the rain might be moderate-to-moderately heavy, more often than not it’s an all-out downpour that floods the streets, causes people to be impaled by 2x4s that have blown off construction sites, drowns kittens, crashes cars, ruins lives.

Well, when my anger and seasonal affective disorder (doesn’t every American have it?) get the best of me, it certainly seems this way. But what I can say for certain—puce-colored glasses aside—is that rainy season makes the lives of the worst-off in Indonesia, well, worse. I would say that at least 60% of the jobs worked by the poor Indonesians (here I’ll define poor as living on less than a dollar a day and not owning a motorbike), and when the rain strikes (and boy, does it strike at any moment, usually without much notice), guess who has to bear the brunt of it? Those who make their living selling balloons from a bicycle, those who push around nasi goreng carts or bakso carts or es (various iced drinks; difficult to explain) carts, those who stand around with baskets of fruit or tempeh or veggies, those who peddle around becaks (human-powered pedi-cabs), those who stand on the corner and sell liters of gasoline. You get the picture. The entire underbelly of the Indonesian economy, and even the culture, I think, is composed of poor people who work outside, who, if they decide to escape the rain (which often lasts all day) actually won’t be able to have dinner or pay the rent or get to the other side of town by public transportation. I have become so depressed by this weather; so frequently confined to my house because I am unwilling to ride my motorbike through flooded streets, and I am near the top, the absolute best-off, in this society. What right do I have to complain that my 6 dollar rain jacket and pants aren’t completely water-proof, when I make FIVE TIMES AS MUCH money as the BEST PAID teacher in my school?

And what in hell am I doing in this country if I’m not doing something to help the lowest echelon rise to something approaching bearable (and I do not think working bare-foot on a construction site for 50 cents a day is bearable)? I just don’t know how I can justify my being here when I am living like royalty, disappointed that I lost $280 during my traveling because I missed a flight (that lost money is what many people in Indonesia earn in a YEAR!). What am I supposed to do? And I complain that the wireless internet connection I’ve been stealing inside my house is now password protected and I have to wait until I’m in my beautiful 10-year old school building which has its own wireless network to check email that, if I wanted, I could read in three different languages?

I just can’t figure out where my perspective is supposed to be right now.

Especially because, despite the hardships that being poor in Indonesia throws at people, they don’t seem too upset by it. I’d guess that part of this is just not knowing a different life, part is being member of a society that has always had and assumes it always will have a poor, traditional, laboring underclass, and part of it is probably religion. Do your work and be honest, get married, have some kids, and your life will be okay. It’s not so much complacency as it seems to me a sunny optimism. Hey, life isn’t so bad. So in that case, who am I to think that Indonesia needs me and people like me to step in and make things right? What if this is the way things are supposed to be?