Jennifer Lin, Bantar Gebang – Nine-year-old Wasmin beamed with pride when he came home from school one recent day lugging a big bag of rice, cooking oil, and an armful of secondhand clothes.
The boy knew his family was hungry. Wasmin and his family lived in the middle of Jakarta's biggest dump, and even though his father earned money selling noodles, they never had enough to eat. So Wasmin did what he could to help: He traded his blood for food.
His skinny right arm had a bandage covering the spot where the needle had pricked him. He gave a small vial of blood, getting enough rice to feed the family for a few days. "If I knew, I wouldn't have allowed it," his father, Udin, said, lowering his eyes.
These are hard times for Indonesia's shrinking middle class, and desperate times for Indonesia's poor. The collapse of the "Asian Miracle" has mushroomed into a frightening human disaster. The currency, the rupiah, has lost almost 80 percent of its value against the dollar; workers are losing their jobs; and inflation is making rice, oil and flour unaffordable. Across East Asia, more than 100 million people are so strapped for money that they do not eat enough to get them through the day, according to the International Labor Organization.
Indonesia, the world's fourth-most-populous nation, is the worst case. A year ago, the Indonesian government could boast that it was winning the war against poverty. But the gains have evaporated, and for the first time in years, the government is warning of famine.
The UN labor agency has estimated that 132 million people – 66 percent of Indonesia's population – will be living in poverty by next year, unable to buy the 2,100 calories worth of food a day needed for a minimum Asian diet. In Java, the most populous island, more than half the children younger than 2 suffer from malnutrition, the UN Children's Fund recently reported.
Fathers are leaving home in search of work. Children are dropping out of school or turning to the streets to fend for themselves. Indonesian educators have warned that the dropout rate could nearly triple this year because families cannot afford school fees. "Now because of the crisis, children are seen as an obstacle, a burden," said Adi Dananto, director of an outreach program for street children in Yogyakarta, a college town on Java. "Parents are selling the daughters into prostitution. Mothers are renting out their babies for begging. Parents are sending their kids to work as laborers. It's always been there, but the numbers are increasing."
Wasmin's family, at least, is holding together. A year ago, his father moved everyone to the Jakarta dump site because he no longer could earn a living as a farmhand. The family's old home was in a village three hours away. Not far from the ocean, it was set against green rice paddies and coconut trees. The air was cool and clean. Now the family lives in Bantar Gebang, an outlying suburb of the Indonesian capital that has attracted much of the city's new middle class to big, new developments. Wasmin's new home sits atop a garbage heap.
The dump is a village for trash pickers, who slowly crawl over mounds of rubbish, hauling straw baskets on their backs and using metal picks to poke for empty cans, glass jars or plastic containers. All the scavengers, from skinny-legged children to weak, old women, cover their mouths and noses with cloths, vainly trying to block the sickening stench. On a road that winds through the dump, what look like grains of rice spilled all over the pavement are white maggots.
Entire families live amid the trash. Wasmin shares a shack with his parents, younger sister and older brother. The house was cobbled together with scraps of wood and built on makeshift flooring of discarded rubber sandals gathered from the trash. Water is stored in buckets outside; a gas stove serves as a kitchen.
A bare lightbulb, incongruously painted with a happy face, hangs from a low roof. The only signs that children live here are sketches of tigers that Wasmin's older brother tacked to the wall. The family has a black-and-white television but no toys. Neighborhood children use old cans to play soccer.
"It's better to live here," said Wasmin's mother, Taringkem, 35, who like many Indonesians goes by only one name. She did not flinch as flies buzzed around her head and swarmed over the naked body of her 7-year-old daughter, who rested in her arms. "We didn't have any work in our village," she explained. "At least here we can work as garbage pickers. I wanted to be here. When I lived in the village, I had nothing."
Wasmin looks forward to school each morning. It is his escape from the dump. He gets up at dawn, puts on his maroon shorts, white shirt, and black knee socks with holes, and heads for a morning of classes.
His eyes are big, black saucers with long, curly eyelashes that a woman would envy. His arms are reed-thin, his belt is cinched tight. He said he heard about the blood drive for food from a teacher at school. More than 100 children showed up to donate blood. With a smile, Wasmin said he was afraid at first, but the reward was too great to ignore. He said he missed his grandmother, who lives in the family's old village, but he does not mind living in a dump. "It's the same," Wasmin said with a shrug.
Wasmin's father sells noodles from a wooden cart to the garbage pickers who tend to the "fields," as the smoldering garbage hills are called. From his noodle cart, Udin can make the equivalent of $1 a day, double what he earned as a hired hand in his former village.
But he needs more than that to feed his family a simple diet of rice and vegetables. Both his sons go to school from 7:30 until noon but have to earn money the rest of the day working as garbage pickers. That money helps fill the gaps, but every day is tight. Their mother worries about being able to keep up with monthly school fees, which are less than $1 for both. "I'm afraid for Wasmin," she said, sitting in front of the family shack before her son took off for school. "I didn't go to school; I cannot read. I don't want my kids to grow up ignorant like their parents."