At the beginning of the school year, our options seem limitless: there are classes to take, clubs to join, people to meet, things to do. But every year, as the glow of autumn fades, the seemingly vast landscape is suddenly reduced to roughly the size of a study cubicle: a vortex of papers, exams, deadlines, and stress making the cliché that university “expands your horizons” seem a bit misleading. This point seems particularly poignant as I look back on my summer, which I spent in Indonesia on an Engineers without Borders placement. There, my perception of reality expanded to include rice for breakfast, roosters crowing outside my window at one in the morning, and families living (quite happily) without electricity, phone, or TV. Not to mention carrying things on the back of a bicycle that I did not consider possible!
I found myself so overwhelmed that I had to spill my thoughts and experiences into a journal-part of which will occupy this space in roughly every other issue of The Varsity. Reading over my entries, it’s obvious that the most invaluable thing I will take away from this summer is getting to know people so different from me-in lifestyle, in culture, in beliefs, in goals-and finding out how much we have in common.
Now back in Canada, I realize one doesn’t need to go to the other side of the world to do this. The international student who sits next to me in class; the homeless man I always pass on the street; the lady I bought vegetables from this morning- each live in a very different world than my own.
The challenge, then, to myself and to everyone else this year is to continually ask: “How big is your world?” and, when it starts to contract, (most likely around the last week in October) to take the time to connect with people least like yourself and step into their world for a bit. You may be surprised what it does for your own.
First Stop: Jakarta
A mind blowing, insanely beautiful city. It’s as if enough buildings and roads for 10 million got thrown down on top of a rainforest. Dense trees and foliage threaten to spill over onto the highways, and palm trees mingle amongst so many other kinds-a far cry from the lawn ornaments in my native Los Angeles.
Driving here elevates organized chaos to an art form. No speed limit, no traffic laws, just densely packed little cars fending for themselves at top speed through the twisting tangled roads. The motorcycles here are almost liquid, the way they stream around our taxi so closely and
profusely.
The city itself has worlds within worlds. At the centre is the world you’d expect of a large, world-class capital. Towering hotels-Marriott, Hilton. McDonalds. Pizza Hut. A Starbucks on the corner. Billboards for SUVs, camera phones, and Marlboro cigarettes. It is a North American bubble settled on the other side of the earth.
But a few blocks later, it’s an entirely different place. Sheds that are houses look like they’d be gone in a good gust of wind. You’d swear they’d been abandoned decades ago, but then you notice a child looking out of a window. There are more of them on the street, barefoot, playing among piles of garbage. This is what less than $2 a day is.
The next instant you pass a gleaming white marble mosque surrounded by manicured grass. You blink and you’re back among the tires and scrawny street cats and makeshift stalls. My guest house is in one of these neighborhoods, but it has chandeliers, marble floors and elegantly appointed furniture…as well as tall gates and walls laced with barbed wire.
Priscilla, the lady who runs the guest house, tells me all the new buildings are put up by French, German, American companies; none were erected by the Indonesian people themselves. I ask her why and she tells me that Indonesians are too lazy; things will never get done if they were in charge. According to Priscilla, the only thing they do in these ‘development’ projects is the manual work such as pouring concrete. Priscilla is from California like me.
All of a sudden, the importance of having local people in development becomes very real to me. Not only involved, but in visible, important roles that can demonstrate that they are entirely capable of running their own country.
But if this is true, why aren’t they in charge already? And why am I here?
How Big is Your World will appear again Tuesday December 7.
