News feature: The World of Indonesia's Street Kids (fwd)

["M.G.G. Pillai" <pillai@mgg.pc.my>]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: 13 Mar 2000 03:08:21
From: tapol@gn.apc.org
Reply-To: "Conference act.indonesia" <indonesia-act@igc.org>
To: Recipients of indonesia-act <indonesia-act@igc.org>
Subject: News feature: The World of Indonesia's Street Kids

From: TAPOL <tapol@gn.apc.org>
Subject: News feature: The World of Indonesia's Street Kids

Received from Joyo Indonesian News

The Age [Melbourne]
Monday 13 March 2000 

News Feature

A child's eye    

By LINDSAY MURDOCH 

The baby sits in rags among the filth, a commodity for sale. A beggar pays a 
little money and buys a tragic bundle to cry when cars pull up at the traffic 
lights. 

Sixteen-year-old Agung, who took the picture, knows the scam; he's also from 
the streets of Jakarta. Misery is everywhere here, seen through street kids' 
eyes as part of a unique project, called A Child's Eye, to record what the 
United Nations Children's Fund warns could be the loss of an entire 
generation of children. 

"About one third of children under five years old, or almost eight million 
children, are malnourished," says Stephen Woodhouse, the fund's 
representative in Jakarta, referring to the impact of the 1997 collapse of 
Indonesia's economy. 

Indonesia's Government estimates 17 million families do not have enough to 
eat in the world's fourth-most-populous nation despite its rich natural 
resources. 

The number of people begging in Jakarta's streets has soared. Suffering the 
greatest setback of any country in South-East Asia, there are 20 million 
newly poor Indonesians - those earning less than $1 a day. 

According to estimates by the International Labor Organisation, almost two 
thirds of Indonesia's 210 million people are now living below the poverty 
line, a reversal that the World Bank has described as "the most dramatic 
economic collapse anywhere in 50 years''. 

In other photographs for A Child's Eye, children scavenge for food in a 
mountain of trash, their skin black, scarves barely keeping out the stench. 
Sometimes bulldozers push more trash down the slope, burying those who are 
too slow to react. 

"We were at work and the bulldozers came. Not everyone managed to escape," 
reads a caption under a photograph taken by an 11-year-old girl, Tariah. 

British photojournalist Jonathan Perugia, who launched the A Child's Eye 
project when he handed out cameras to 30 street children, says about 150 
photographs they produced were amazing. 

"They shot in a way no professional photographer could," he says. "They had 
the access. They saw people who were suffering the same as them." 

The images are often intimate, sometimes shocking. 

Glue-sniffing boys lie stunned on pavements. "Still some left," reads a 
caption under a photograph taken by Andre, 16. 

A deformed boy walks on his hands and knees through motorbikes, a cap askew 
on his head. "This is a crippled man with his imperfect body begging for 
money to buy one spoonful of rice," says the photographer, Agung. "He has 
been abandoned by his family." 

Agung himself was abandoned by his parents when he was nine. Now he sings and 
plays the guitar at intersections, one of thousands. 

A tiny girl stares at passing vehicles under an expressway; maybe somebody 
will stop. She will then start to sing, hoping the driver will hand over a 
few rupiah. 

These are images of life: mostly bad times, but sometimes there is fun. Two 
girls in a children's shelter share a mirror and put on lipstick. 

Winah, 12, snapped a skinny girl sitting on the shoulders of her blind, 
squatting mother. 

Karmin, 13, snapped a child taking a bath in a polluted canal and another of 
two children among the rubbish, eating leftovers. 

Ucil, 16, took a picture of a street transvestite, his best friend. "I like 
teasing her when she spots me on the street,' he says. "She would immediately 
call me. We've got a lot in common . . . we sing for money on the street." 

Supri, 17, snapped two boys holding each other. "This picture shows 
friendship . . . hugging is not only for a dating couple," he says. "These 
two kids were just hugging like brothers. Together they always walk from one 
dark alley to another, which is always full of rats running around. They are 
like people with no money or job." 

Perugia, 33, says that through workshops supported by university, local 
photographer and non-government-organisation networks, street children were 
shown how to use simple pocket cameras. 

"I told them this is your chance to tell your story," he says. "They took to 
the idea with extraordinary enthusiasm . . . they were honest and forthright 
in what they saw." 

Perugia says the aim of the project was to raise the children's self-esteem, 
help them climb out of the poverty trap and heighten public awareness of the 
suffering. 

A Child's Eye is a non-profit organisation dedicated to supporting children's 
arts, education and welfare, which was founded last year by Guruh Sukarno 
Putra, the brother of Indonesia's Vice-President, Megawati Sukarnoputri, and 
a leading Jakarta charity worker, Choki Rezia. 

Only one camera went missing. "I think even that was genuinely lost," Perugia 
says. 

The photographs have won wide praise after being put on display at the 
National Gallery in Jakarta and in Bali. 

Perugia hopes to display them in Sydney during the Olympic Games. He also 
plans to copy the project in the East Timorese capital, Dili, where he has 
worked as a photographer and says he has seen increasing suffering among 
children. 

UNICEF's Stephen Woodhouse says the street children are resilient. "But there 
are now more than six million Indonesian children who are not even completing 
junior school," he says. "We are seeing the emergence of a lost generation . 
. . malnutrition in early childhood is robbing these children of mental and 
physical capacity to compete in the marketplace." Agung says he is proud to 
be a street kid. "But one day I would like to be a photographer," he says. 

* See www.achildseye.org 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
TAPOL, the Indonesia Human Rights Campaign
111 Northwood Road, Thornton Heath,
Surrey CR7 8HW, UK
Phone: 0181 771-2904   Fax: 0181 653-0322
email: tapol@gn.apc.org
Internet: www.gn.apc.org/tapol
Campaigning to expose human rights violations in
Indonesia, East Timor, West Papua and Aceh

26 years - and still going strong 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++