Bekasi – Idris strokes his grey, straggly moustache apologetically and says he would like to offer the three small pink cakes that have seen better days – but they came from the rubbish. Agus, his seven-year-old son, eyes the cakes jealously. They are for supper.
The rubbish the meal comes from is a huge landfill about 50 kilometres (30 miles) southeast of Jakarta and stretching as far as the eye can see. It is a grey, steaming repository of garbage from the Indonesian capital's 11 million people and home to Idris and a swelling number – some 15,000, but no one is quite sure – refugees from poverty.
"They come from everywhere, from Sumatra, from Jakarta, from Java. I am one of them," laughs 25-year-old Narman, who invites a reporter to sit on a strip of cardboard covering the sludge underfoot and its buzzing carpet of black, lazy flies.
Narman, his wife Watni, their five-year-old daughter Narwati and Watni's mother came to Bekasi with four other families from a village in Karawang 60 kilometers (40 miles) further east a month ago. They were farmers. But there was no money for pesticide and the rice crop was eaten by insects. There was no money for food either, and someone told them of the Bekasi dump.
Here, Watni says, fanning the flies from her daugher's face, a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of paper will fetch 300 rupiah, (2.7 cents), plastic or plastic bottles 300 rupiah, and cardboard boxes 400 rupiah. If the whole family works, they can make 7,000 rupiah (63 cents) a day.
Narman works without a "boss", meaning he can get the full pay from the travelling recyclers who turn up every four days to buy the trash, which is painfully separated by the pickers with a hook-ended spike called a "ganchuk". But it is never enough, they say. Rice prices have doubled, while trash prices stay almost the same, fluctuating only slightly with demand.
"We need 10,000 (rupiah) a day but we can never make more than 7,000," Watni says, adding that they pay 10,000 a month for a small patch of land on which they have built a two-by-eight meter (6.6 foot-by-26.4 foot) house out of scrap for three families. Narman holds up a "trash-trophy", a one-liter can that once held baby formula and points to it. "One liter of rice – 2,700 rupiah," he says ruefully. "It used to be half the price, but now, we eat rice only once a day."
"Beras", mening rice – the word is taken up by small boys and old women sorting the muck from tattered plastic bags nearby, as pickers 100 meters (yards) away swarm aboard a new convoy of dump trucks dropping their putrid loads on the grey mountain. "That's what it's all about. Beras," chimes in Nyonya Upiah from a pit full of slimy plastic delineated as her "spot" by old chicken crates.
"I have a 13-year-old boy. This is for him. I am alone. I can make 20,000 or 30,000 a week if I work seven days, but he is in school." Upiah says she eats mostly Singkong (cassava) so that she can make her son's school fees.
She has no shoes, and nails, glass and sharp tin cans are a problem, as are the flash fires from the gas in the dump. But the rubber boots that some have managed to buy cost 15,000 rupiah.
A six-year-old boy, too shy to give his name, says his family is sending him back to his hometown in Banten where he will live with his grandfather and attend a pesantren, a Moslem boarding school. But until he is seven he will work the dump with his parents. Narman says he too will send Narwati and Wanti back to Karawang if he can so that his daughter can go to school. If things get better he might be able to join them, he adds.
Idris, who once worked for the Red Cross, makes a speciality out of the hospital dumpsters, cleaning old blood off IV bags. He says he nets quite a few nice white doctors' coats, and suggests the journalist might take Agus back to Jakarta where he could go to school. He works for a boss – meaning he doesn't pay for the patch of landfill where he built his shack, but earns 100 rupiah less per kilogram of trash.
"We live like animals, like dogs here – this bread, those vegetables are all from the dump. The doctors in Jakarta would have a fit," Idris says. "I cry sometimes when I think of what would happen to Agus if I die here, like some of the people run over by the bulldozer, the others who get sick," he says. "But I looked and looked in Jakarta for work – at the port, selling brooms, selling vegetables, but there was no work, and someone told me about Bekasi."
More and more people arrive daily, he says, but adds philosophically: "I hear things are very bad in Russia too."