Down in the Dump with the Blues

The dump aside...
News item from my two weeks in the Grand Kemang Hotel:
Several dozen Jakarta residents were hospitalized with servere gastro-intestinal problems within a week or so of each other. I believe fatalities were involved. The complaints were traced to meat served from many of the city's street vendors. It was rotten.

Among my first impressions of Jakarta were the flood of litter and garbage everywhere, the prevalent pungence of burning trash in the air, the mini-bonfires right by the side of insane city highways, and the fact that I hadn't seen one obvious garbage truck.

Well, a few days ago I saw the common model garbage truck. Hadn't noticed it before because it fit right in to the chaos of life systems everywhere here, but now that I'm looking, it's everywhere. A skinny human, usually barefoot, about 1.2 meters, open shirt and deeply soiled long shorts, yolked with a rubber hose around his chest, and a security rope of some sort nearer his neck, leans into a big metal bar in front of him, strapped on both sides to the cart behind him. The cart's longer than he is tall, and probably a little more than a meter deep, and it's piled way past overflowing with trash. He moves very slowly, but steadily, and the image I get is of Roman slave rowers on galleons in those 1950's Tony Curtis epics. Anyway I watched this guy haul his trash down the street past my apartment complex in this ritzy upscale shopping neighborhood, and I couldn't imagine to where he was headed. However, the mystery of where the trash goes was partially solved.

Apparently there are a few garbage trucks. I'll believe it when I see it, but for now I'll trust Rio. And it's these trucks that eventually unload the garbage at the dump, whereever that is. And the dump is forever smoldering, of course, but more than that... While Jakarta's population is impossible to estimate, 12 million is supposedly a reasonable guesstimate. 40 years ago it was under three million, or something like that. which explains two things: 1. why there is zero organization to any of the streets and living areas in the city; 2. why lots of people live in dyi shanties at the dump and scrape their living off its embers.

These folks thought manna was finally theirs one day when one truck rumbled their shanties and tumbled a mountain of pre-packaged meats from a large foreign import company onto their mountain. This company was following the rules and directly sending to the dump a shipment that had arrived spoiled due to faulty refrigeration on the sea transport. Didn't look too bad yet, though, so the dump-dwellers clambered around it, cleaned off the plastic wraps, and took the packages into the street vendors...

Now, I know what rotten (or even just nearly-rotten) meat smells like when cooked up, and I can't be in the same room with it. So that tells you, I guess, about the strength of the smell of both the spices used at your average Indonesian hot dog stand, and ... sadly... the air we breathe here, which I already hardly notice anymore, 'cept when I'm in Singapore. Street vendors sold the stuff, people ate the stuff, nearly a hundred were hospitalized, and some died...
end of the dump aside