When I was a boy I lived in Kebayoran Baru, Indonesia, a suburb south of Jakarta. Our home was on the last street carved out of the urban village or 'kampung' that stretched seemingly forever. The kampung was a melange of small but clean tin roofed, concrete floored cottages that were so close together that there were virtually no streets or open spaces to speak of.
Our home had a high wall around it. In the front there was a part of the wall that was cut out with the wall coming in to form a 'c' shape that opened out to the street. This is where we dumped our trash. Our trash was valuable. Even after our servants had stripped out anything that could be recycled: cans, paper, cloth, the remaining garbage was prized by the local 'trash kampung'. You see, the trash kampung 'owned' access to our trash dump and woe betide anyone that stole 'their' garbage.
My friends and I used to ride our bikes through the kampung. We had fancy "Chopper" bicycles imported from Singapore that probably were worth more than a month's wages to our Indonesian neighbors. Despite this we were never bothered. Never even touched. Sometimes we would ride through the trash kampung. The 'trash' part of the kampung was a series of wood and tin roofed buildings that paradoxically encircled the only significant open space around. In it was a large steaming, reeking trash pile upon which dozens of goats, cats and chickens happily scavenged food. This mass of stench and decay was how they made their living. And they guarded their access to our waste as if it were gold.
I sometimes think about the trash kampung and what is says about what's really important. Things that I value such as status and honor and glory and comfort really pale into insignificance when I think about people who were just happy to get the stripped down garbage that 'rich' people and their servants didn't want. The truth is that as far as I could tell, these scavengers were every bit as moral, honest, true and indeed happy as I. Yet my trash was their life.
Something to think about next time you take out the trash.
Interesting Bill! A trip down memory lane.... riding bikes in kampungs and rice paddies. I remember thinking as a young boy after I visited one of my kampung friend´s mother´s kampung outside of Bandung, that happiness has nothing to do with money. I remember we laughed a lot back in the day, me and my indonesian friends.
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