Peddle 'til You Meddle

Posted by John

I want to take a moment to acknowledge the army of peddlers who have attended to my transportation, gustatory and souvenir needs from the moment we landed in Jakarta a little over a month ago. You’ve all gone to great lengths to show concern for my potential hunger, thirst and fatigue. You’ve sought me out on every street corner, train station and cafe. You’ve even thought of my need for musical accompaniment every step of the way. It’s all very been very kind.

But before you dangle another bottle of water under my nose, tug me by the shoulder and promise a private tour of your batik gallery, or forcibly seat me in one of your pedicabs and offer me a ride across town, rest assured I won’t be shy about asking for anything I might need during my next three months in Indonesia. In the meantime, I’d like to give you all the nod that says, “Don’t worry about me. I’m good.”

The latest episode of Indonesians’ more meddling form of peddling came during the bus trip Danielle and I took to Caruban, the village where the cousin of one of her Indonesian colleagues was getting married. We were excited about the chance to witness this Javanese ritual, but first had to navigate through a few roadblocks on the three-hour ride from our home base in Surabaya.

At 5:45 a.m. on Sunday, the Surabaya bus station already buzzed with activity. Indonesians start the day earlier on account of the heat and the 4:30 a.m. call to prayer, but it’s still jarring to see so many people out before 6 a.m.

Even at a full bus station, however, there was no sign of attendants capable of answering questions about arrivals of departures. No posted schedules, either. So we did our best to make our way through a maze of taxi drivers and shopkeepers, trudging toward the bus platforms. When the one uniformed attendant we found assured us we could get to Caruban on one bus—he even escorted us to the door to make sure we’d understood him—we boarded with hopes of an imminent departure and an on-time arrival in advance of the 9 a.m. wedding.

Instead, we spent the next half-hour as captives, unwilling participants in the impromptu bazaar that opened for business on the bus itself. As the driver waited for more passengers to pump up his fare, peddlers trod through the center aisle offering all varieties of fruit, beverage and confection. While the bus station didn’t have a route map or schedule, one bus vendor thought we might like a world atlas instead. We still weren’t sure the bus we were on would take us to another nearby East Javanese town, but here someone was offering us a full reference guide to the Swiss Alps and lakes in Africa.

The most aggressive sellers abandoned any pretense of decorum, plunking the merchandise down on my lap and calling out the price. Even feigning sleep (a plausible ruse at 6 a.m.) failed to dissuade them. My nap ended when one hawker tossed a trinket on my seat. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be a set of nail clippers with a plastic octopus attached. And I’d been looking all over town for a nail clipper with a mollusk. Thirty-five cents—what a deal!

The more than 20 onboard sellers all wore the same uniform, a bright orange vest with a blue ID number stitched on the front. Even the four guitar players who came on board to serenade us wore a uniform. So these sellers weren’t just random guys off the street; the station had licensed them to be there. They’d had to petition or audition for the right to try to pick up a few cents here or there from the one passenger in 100 who might offer the equivalent of two quarters for the world atlas.

The situation reached its apex of absurdity when the guy with octopus nail clippers came back through the cabin for a second pass 15 minutes after his first canvass. It was almost like he was expecting one of us to say, “You know, I wasn’t sure if I wanted those octopus nail clippers, but now that you’ve given me some time to think about it...”

There’s an obvious reason Indonesian hawkers aggressively promote their wares. In a country with few stable forms of employment, poverty predominates. Many neighborhoods in cities like Surabaya are tightly packed, dirt or asphalt paths lined with tiny one-room houses that have concrete floors and tin roofs. The average Indonesian survives on less than $3 a day, and most of the vendors in the streets of the city are living on less than that.

Even accounting for the lower cost of living here, $3 doesn’t stretch very far—it’s not enough to ensure access to food, electricity or clean water. And with most Indonesians (especially middle-aged and older Indonesians) having less than a middle-school education, there aren’t clear routes out of poverty. That’s especially the case in a country where profitable state-owned businesses remain in the hands of well-connected elites who consistently rank among the world’s most corrupt.

In this environment, the chance to make 20 cents selling a bottle of water or 50 cents for a pedicab ride around the block has a meaningful impact for a family trying to put together enough money to buy rice from the local market. But pedicab drivers have to compete fiercely when there seem to be 10 of them for every passenger. With far more supply than demand, every passerby is treated like a potential customer, no matter how studiously he avoids eye contact or how quickly he waves off assistance.

Indonesian sellers’ boundless energy demonstrates a promising kind of initiative, but it’s an initiative that begs to be directed at more pressing needs. Rather than knocking themselves out trying to earn a nickel selling watermelon, these peddlers could be building better roads in a country where potholes outnumber people or cleaning rivers that are depositories for trash.

It’s hard to build the political will for a public works program, however, when no one trusts political and business leaders. Everyone suspects that such an initiative would be just another opportunity for friends of the governor to skim money off the top. The current president has made anti-corruption his signature issue—with several high-level prosecutions to his credit during his first five-year term—but old habits (and popular fears of these habits) remain.

Indonesians who have money often seem to think the best way to redistribute income is to buy an occasional item from hawkers and give money to street musicians. The idea seems to be that the money will go directly to someone in need, whereas taxes will end up in some government official’s bank account. This sense of generosity (or obligation) to less fortunate individuals extends to the many Indonesians—including middle-class Indonesians—who hire servants for their house or pay people to do tasks that could easily be done by a machine, like washing clothes. But as far as peddlers are concerned, there are more of them than these acts of generosity can sustain, and Indonesia awaits the arrival of a political party that can better align the energy of its workers with the society’s needs.

If nothing else, the Surabaya bus station could employ a few more of these peddlers as attendants at an information booth—we ended up on the wrong bus. The attendant who had assured us that we could take the bus to Caruban had neglected to mention that we would need to get off the bus in another town, some 40 kilometers away from our final destination.

We ended up late to the wedding, arriving only in time for the last hour. Most of the proceedings were in Javanese (which Danielle does not speak), so we had to ask her colleague for an explanation of the bride’s and groom’s bows to each other and to their parents. We surmised there was an Arabic prayer from the Koran at one point, but most of the rest remained a mystery.

Toward the end of the ceremony, as 200 members of the bride and groom’s families looked on, the emcee summoned Danielle and me to the podium to join the bride and groom for pictures. In this small Javanese village, where most residents were born and will stay for most of their lives, we were honored guests from America, objects of curiosity in our batik prints. I couldn’t make out most of what the emcee was saying—some sort of joke about tourism. Struggling over Danielle’s French-sounding last name, he ultimately settled on calling us: “John and Lucy.”

There wasn’t much ceremony left after that, so we headed back to Surabaya. The bus ride back wore us out, but not to worry. When we pulled into the station, there were, of course, plenty of taxi drivers eager to drive us home.