Jakarta – Her chores are done and Tina is waiting for her husband to come home to their makeshift shack under Matraman overpass in Central Jakarta. She is not alone.
Under the overpass, which traverses Ciliwung River, hundreds of the city's poorest people live in damp and squalid conditions. Many do not have ID cards, meaning they are considered illegal residents, and make barely enough to eat.
Thirty-two-year-old Tina and her husband started off in the city as scavengers. But the husband recently got a permanent job separating organic waste from nonorganic waste to be sold to a garbage collective in Manggarai, South Jakarta.
"I know it's illegal to live under bridges, but there is no other place for us to stay," said the mother of two, who came here from Indramayu, West Java, 10 years ago.
To survive in the capital, many people from poor regions end up living in semi-permanent structures or cardboard boxes under bridges or overpasses. Some of them even run businesses from home.
One of Tina's neighbors, Rumsi, makes furniture from sheets of plywood, which he salvages from buildings that have been torn down, and sells it at the market. "I can only make two chairs or tables a month but it helps us survive," he said.
Under the overpass in Teluk Gong, North Jakarta, motorists get a good view of the living conditions of some of the city's worst off. They live in the rows of shacks alongside the dump. Garbage trucks come and go constantly.
Eko, one of the slum dwellers, said his family moved there because the city administration evicted everyone in his neighborhood in 2003.
"We used to live near the street... The Public Order Agency burned down our houses. Governor Sutiyoso has not said anything about us living here. Hopefully they'll allow us to stay."
To earn a living, the community assembles power plugs for a nearby electronics goods factory. "They pay us Rp 2,500 a sack," Eko said.
Perceived as "illegal" in the eyes of the law because he does not have an ID card, Eko, who came here from Central Java, is ineligible for one of the low-cost apartments the city makes available for the poor.
The head of the planning unit at the Jakarta Housing Agency, Suratman, said the low-cost apartments were only for Jakarta residents.
"In North Jakarta slum areas, from Tanjung Priok to Penjaringan districts, only 994 of 2,557 households are eligible for the apartments because they have Jakarta ID cards," he told The Jakarta Post recently.
The city administration is planning to build some 3,000 units of low-cost apartments. It has allocated some Rp 251 billion to acquire the land for the construction in its 2006 budget.
The city administration had ordered 301 developers to build the low-cost apartments as part of their obligation to provide public facilities for obtaining the permits to construct housing estates.
The housing agency estimates there are some 40,000 people living in slums or on the banks of polluted rivers.
However, an activist who has taken up the cause of evicted residents in North Jakarta, Firdaus Piping, said that the city administration should give people without Jakarta ID cards equal rights to housing. "They should not stay illegal residents for the rest of their lives," he told the Post.