Batam, Indonesia

Hello once again,

Things have been moving along, and now I finally get to start on my June holidays entries, even if they are a bit late due to the Olympics. My first trip out of Singapore was a simple hour long ferry away to Batam as part of a school trip. However, the ferry ride would have been even shorter if 1) it could go directly instead of around a bunch of shipping lanes or 2) we went from the ferry terminal closer to where I stay. Batam is part of Indonesia, and I can even see it from my desk at home as it is only about 12 or so miles away. However, it is quite different than Singapore on many levels from level of development to the people who reside there.

Batam was never particularly important until recently. Even up to the 1960s and 1970s, it remained a lightly populated island. However, it began to grow significantly in population as Singapore grew economically since people from all around Indonesia began to migrate to Batam for economic opportunities enabled by its proximity to Singapore. The population growth was further aided by treaties helping promote free trade in the area of Singapore. Currently, over 1 million people reside in Batam, and it is one of the more diverse areas of Indonesia due to its wide and varied history of migration.

We stayed at a quite nice hotel perched above the island, and the next picture shows the view from the room I was in. Do note, the reason the picture is a bit fuzzy is because the cameras always fog up when moving from an air conditioned spaced to outside, as happened here.

Singapore's Ministry of Education has been pushing for more service trips to help engage students more in community service, and especially appreciates trips to poorer Southeast Asian countries so that the students can better understand the differences between living conditions in different places. Along this line of thought, I was a teacher accompanying my History class to Batam for the expressed purpose of helping to repaint an orphanage.

As with many orphanage visits in poorer countries, the conditions you see are always surprising. However, I ended up realizing that I felt much more immune to the conditions than I had been when exposed to worse conditions in the past. I guess my time in India and South Africa has desensitized me somewhat to such levels of poverty, and has given me more of a chance to understand and accept my role and position in the world. That said, the students were very much shocked and disturbed by what they saw. Singapore is very much a 'bubble' country where bad things are pushed out of sight and below the surface quite successfully. Hence, when they saw true poverty, it was simply something many of them had never seen before. As a teacher, it was really great to see how the visit did open their eyes to the world outside Singapore and its shopping malls.

Orphanages in Indonesia are often a shady business, especially ones with tourists and volunteers. There have been numerous cases in places like Bali where orphanage operators are just out to make a profit, and even intentionally keep their orphans in terrible conditions to keep more contributions flowing in to skim for themselves. There is not quite the same problem in Batam, where there are significantly fewer tourists, but volunteer-tourism has its negative aspects as well. Talking with one of the people who helped arrange the trip, I discovered that there were several cases of huge volunteer groups who would come in for activities like painting, only to repaint walls that had been painted just a month or two prior by another group. In effect, the orphanages can almost end up catering more for the tourists and the volunteer tourists than the orphans themselves.

However, fortunately, the orphanage we were at was not one of those orphanages. It had recently been kicked out of its previous home for not being able to pay the escalating rent. Then, the head of the orphanage was able to lean on a friend to temporarily donate their unused and run-down storefront to house the children, in which many of them slept 8-9 to a room and on the floor. So, we arrived only about a month after the had moved in, and the place really did need to be painted. It was a perfect situation in which the students were able to fulfill the unmet need of the orphanage but did not demand too much of the orphanage. The following picture is of some of the boys working out the painting plans for the two days of painting.

The boys did not merely just paint the orphanage, they also attempted to teach some English and Math(s) to them as well. The following picture is of the orphans (and the translator to the far right) sitting down to listen to a story.

Beyond working at the orphanage and doing a couple of workshops with the boys about international service-learning (probably more about this in a future entry!), I did end up having some free time to explore Batam itself. On the last day I was there, I went with one of the people who arranged the trip and an older teacher to one of the older marketplaces in Batam, as pictured below. On the streets there, we ended up having durian, the king of fruits, for the first time. Although the smell is quite annoying, the taste isn't too bad, but not quite my first choice.

For me, one of the most interesting comments was made by the older teacher who had grown up in Singapore before it developed. A couple of times, he compared Batam and its level of development today to Singapore when he was growing up. In particular, at this market, he specifically talked about how there were so many types of foods available that were no longer sold in Singapore, to his great sadness. However, he did stalk up on such foods for his return back home, and I was then able to have a bunch of delicious free samples.

The architecture of Batam is definitely different than Singapore. Many buildings and storefront really gave a type of Dutch colonial feel, almost a bit like Cape Town and Malacca, but not a feeling I have gotten in Singapore. The following picture gives a bit of the sense of the colorfulness of the architecture in Batam.

Well that's all for now. Next up, my trip to Vietnam!

-Andrew