Planes, Pirates, Pachyderms and Pauline

Telang Saleh, South Sumatra, Indonesia

Late in the afternoon on 19^th December 1997, my staff and I were trudging back to our lodgings in Telang Saleh, a god forsaken transmigration settlement area straddling the delta of the mighty Musi River of South Sumatra. We had been inspecting the pathetic attempts ex becak drivers from Jakarta were making growing rice in the saline swamp waters of the Musi Delta into which they had been dumped. 

Most days in the field were fun, but there was little respite from the sun which beat down mercilessly on us as we trudged from plot to plot. There were no roads here. We had a small fleet of flat bottom speedboats which whisked us from Palembang on a two hour ride to the swamps of Telang Saleh.

We paused near a warung for some coffee and cakes when we heard a strange noise. It sounded like a cross between the whistling of a meteorite hurtling to earth and a jet engine screaming at full throttle.  We shielded our eyes and looked skywards but saw nothing. A few seconds later, the sound abruptly stopped. We had another coffee.

Later that night, the local village head came to our project hut.

‘A jet has crashed into the river,’ he said.

Our mouths opened in shock.

‘When?’ I asked.

‘About 4 this afternoon,’ he replied.

We looked at each other. We wondered whether the strange noise we had heard was the jet plummeting to the ground.

It was not till the next day that we heard the news. A Silk Air jet en route from Jakarta to Singapore crashed into the river in our project area. All ninety-seven passengers on board plus the seven crew members died.   Flight MI 185 had taken off from Jakarta at 3.37 p.m. At some time after 4 p.m., the plane disappeared from radar screens.

Searchers found most of the plane in the river. The bodies were unrecognizable. Part of the tail lay a couple of kilometers away in our rice fields. We were not involved at all in any of the search efforts but the police came round and asked us if we had seen anything to which we honestly replied: ‘No!’.

The tragedy rocked Silk Air and its parent airline, Singapore Airlines. We carried on our work and travelled in our speedboats past the search area, but, apart from a few perfunctory questions from the local police, were neither asked to be nor expected to be involved.

While it seemed to be a poor comparison, I was struck by the equipment that was brought in to dredge the river where the jet had splashed down and disintegrated. Not that the searchers needed massive cranes to lift the debris. Most of the pieces of the plane (and the bodies) were shattered into small fragments and piled onto a barge.

I wondered why we could not muster such equipment to look for our lost tractors.

A few weeks earlier, long awaited equipment had arrived from agricultural suppliers overseas. As part of our multi-million-dollar project, we had purchased twenty hand driven tractors that were suited to operations in muddy fields. These were designed to help the farmers cultivate their fields more easily than they were managing with buffalos and hand hoes.

The Department of Agriculture advised us that they had shipped the tractors from the port in Palembang, which is a huge inland port about ninety kilometers up river from the sea. Sadly, the barge sank mysteriously in an unknown location.

‘Did the crew survive? I asked.

‘Of course,’ was the reply.

‘So why were they uncertain of where they sank?’ I asked.

‘They got confused and the trauma must have…’ he continued but I walked out of the office and admired the new fleet of Mercedes vehicles lined up outside. I was sure they did not have tractor engines, but I am equally sure that the tractor engines paid for them.

Financial sleight of hand in those days was a fine art form. Indonesia was high on the World Bank’s list of corrupt clients and South Sumatra was ranked the highest (i.e., worst) in Indonesia. How sad to lose so much without a trace in the Musi.

At least they found the Silk Air plane. I happened to mention it to the governor at golf a week later. He smiled at me.

‘Acts of God are beyond my control,’ he said and hit his five iron to the right into the jungle where the monkeys grabbed the ball and disappeared up a tree.

‘You should use white balls, Bapak,’ I said. ‘The monkeys always go for the colored ones’.

He looked at me and grinned. ‘And I suppose your balls are white?’ he asked.

He had been to Sydney and Kings Cross and had a wicked sense of humor to reflect the bad influence that had on him and to match his taste for new cars and other exotic imports paid for by siphoning off the top third of the cream from most activities in the province: however I have always found that military people might have ‘nasty’ or ‘evil’ traits, but still be fun to know when they are not ordering a massacre or discussing their Swiss bank accounts.

 He had befriended me as my handicap was (then) single figures and he figured I might be able to help him improve his game. I played a couple of rounds with him but soon wriggled out of regular outings with his Excellency. I loved the fact that our party was accompanied by his personal cook and attendants who followed us round the steaming course with iceboxes filled with cold drinks and baskets of delicacies.

 What I hated was that he and his cronies (no, I was not one) gambled on each hole. The going rate was Rupiah 250,000 per hole. They settled their wagers at each hole, peeling off the notes from huge wads that they had stashed in their shirts and elsewhere, ostentatiously flinging it to each other whilst the caddies and the drinks carriers looked on mutely. The caddy fee was Rupiah 10,000 for a round, which in those days was less than one US dollar.

They asked me to gamble, but I have never been a gambler.  I refused.

These wonderful Muslims found that odd, but were prepared to overlook my failings so they could watch me make a few pars and a (very) occasional birdie. I could not take it. I took exception to the way they flashed their money around in front of men and women who had nothing.

I also took exception to the way they splashed my money around by inventing barge-sinking stories which could never be substantiated.

I thought I had found him a useful ally some weeks later when my secretary burst into my office.

‘Rusman and Dadan have been shot!’ she said.

I just looked at her, stunned.

‘They took the wrong fork in Telang and ended up in one of the straits pirates areas,’ she said. ‘They shot them’.

I put my head in my hands and thought about my two staff. One of the reasons why we were working in that awful place was to counter the influence of the pirates in some way. As I said, there were no roads into the area. The only access was by boat.

The pirates operated high-speed launches for their forays into the Malacca Straits. They knew the hundreds of waterways of the delta like the back of their hands. We knew (or I thought we knew) where we could or could not go. Obviously, Rusman and Dadan had lost their way, though they were not piloting the boat.

‘Where is the boat captain?’ I asked.

‘The police have taken him into custody,’ she said.

We never saw him again.

I mentioned the tragedy to the Governor the next day at golf. He nodded.

‘I heard about it,’ he said. ‘I have sent my men down to deal with them’.

I nodded and muttered gratitude. As I said, it struck me he had his uses. It was not till a week later that we heard that his ‘men’ had gone down to the spot to ‘deal with them’. What I had not realized was that they went there regularly to ‘inspect the books’ and ensure them of continuing protection.

Not everything in Palembang was negative, corrupt or tragic. We had our amusing moments. A friend of mine, Melody, a feisty WID warrior whom I have known for centuries came to Palembang to join the project for a short-term input. Melody is the kind of person who suddenly just appears and everyone knows that she is there and is glad to see her. From that point, she takes over. She knows what she wants to do and she does it: efficient, effervescent and effective. She remains a rare gem amongst the dross of aid workers that infect the planet and when she leaves, the place is all the better for her visit.

One of the things for which Indonesian government offices were renowned was clean toilets. The worst were often to be found in the Ministry of Health. You used the toilets only when absolutely necessary. Our Agriculture Office in Palembang was no exception. But Melody was. She had only just arrived when she swept into my office.

‘I want some money to buy such Jif and Duck,’ she said.

I grinned and nodded at the keeper of the shekels who handed over a few million Rupiah. Melody commandeered a project car and returned soon with cleaning gear. Within half an hour the toilet was fit to serve as a table for a Padang Buffet. Melody showed the cleaner what she had done and trained her. The toilet remained clean.

Word got out. Our toilet became the toilet of choice! Even the executives came down to inspect.

‘How do you do it?’ they asked me.

I introduced them to Melody. They soon understood. Sadly, I doubt that the message got much further than our floor. There are some limits to impact.

Shortly after Melody arrived, we were joined on the project by another consultant of the feminine gender who had been recruited from the good old US of A. The brief my head office sent me was that she would do the Women in Development part of the project. According to head office, she was 47. She had incredible credentials.

Pauline arrived. She too, like Melody, swept into the office, scarves flying behind her. Wrapped around her neck, I thought of mutton and lamb. Forty-seven? She had obviously worked hard. I soon found that ‘sweeping in with scarves flying’ was the only similarity between Pauline and Melody.

Pauline had no intention of dirtying her feet on the site so it was only with the utmost diplomacy that I talked her into visiting the women she was there to help. Her intention had been to write her report from the air-conditioned comfort of the office.

Her field visit was a disaster. She left in the morning. The boat normally took an hour and a half to get to the site. She was back by three in the afternoon.

Consternation.

‘What is wrong?’ I asked innocently as she stormed into my office.

‘You expect me to go to a place where the roads aren’t even sealed?’ she asked.

I blinked.

‘What roads?’ I asked.

‘My next question!’ she glared. ‘I know what to do. Let me do it!’

I called head office and asked them to remove her.  They refused. I thought momentarily of sending her down to meet the pirates, but dismissed that after three and a half minutes as an unworthy thought. Head office, of course, refused to act.

‘Do the best you can,’ they said.

On that project another large American male was assigned as an ‘agricultural expert’. He refused to start work each morning until he had won a game of solitaire on his computer. Sometimes he never won a game all day which meant that nothing got done that day. Even when he did win, he did nothing. His reports, like Pauline’s, were also generated without the need to dirty his designer shoes or XXXX trousers on the mud of the Telang Saleh swamps.

I was about to give up when a parcel arrived from head office. In the parcel was Pauline’s passport. Idly I flicked through it. I checked her date of birth.  It took little brain to work out that she was not 47. She was 71! No wonder she needed scarves! She had to keep her sagging jowls from plunging into her over plunged cleavage.

I shall refrain from recording exactly what I said. Suffice it to say that I momentarily lost control and, in a voice a little louder than normal, said something to the effect: ‘Bloody hell! Seventy-one!

The whole office heard.

Pauline heard.

She stormed in to my office.

‘How dare you say that!’ she demanded.

I glared at her. I showed her the passport. ‘You lied!’ I said.

She glared back at me.

‘My age is none of your business!’ she said.

‘Sit!’ I shouted.

I was surprised when she did. As she watched I called head office and explained that this was not an old person’s rest home and that she would be on the next plane out of Palembang. She was. But my solitaire specialist stayed on.

Melody watched it all from the sidelines and we went out that night to celebrate Pauline’s departure.

‘What next?’ she asked.

‘We are going to araldite some coconuts onto some coconut trees,’ I said.

Melody looked at me strangely. ‘Huh?’ she said. She was always good with words.

‘A team from the World Bank is due next week to inspect progress on fighting coconut dieback,’ I explained.

Melody looked at me. ‘But the whole fucking swamp is affected. There is hardly a tree with a coconut left on it’. 

I looked at her and smiled condescendingly. ‘Which is why we need araldite,’ I explained.

She said nothing.

‘The Head of Department wants us to araldite coconuts to the trees along the route the team will take, so it looks as if they are healthy,’ I said triumphantly.

 ‘And you are going to do it?’ she asked incredulously.

‘We will supply the araldite!’ I said.

Melody looked at me yet again, She was a good looker. ‘Are you kidding me?’ she said, with a look that accused me of being a Judas.

I sighed. ‘If we supply the araldite and keep the visitors busy next time the tractors might actually make it to the site’.

As things turned out, the araldite was wasted. An army of farmers were press ganged into climbing up the healthier coconut trees and fixing coconuts to them. Only one farmer fell.

Of course he died. In the Pacific, the saying went that a country could be said to be ‘developed’ when the number of deaths from road accidents first exceeded the number of deaths from falling out of coconut trees.

Telang Saleh had no cars. They had a few ramshackle motorbikes that wobbled round the paths between the rice paddy fields. But…

And the World Bank visitors?

As luck would have it, they never made it to the site. They loved the exhilarating trip down river in the flat bottom boats. They loved stopping off en route to have a cool drink on one of the makeshift huts that the locals had built on logs that had been floated down from the forest but never sold. Both banks of the river almost from shore to Palembang, ninety kilometers away, were huge rafts of logs that never made it.  But they were put to good use as platforms for floating villages.

We left the floating pit stop and turned into the first canal which bordered on the struggling forest reserves to the south of the swamps. The farmers there had problems with the few remaining and endangered Sumatran elephants from the remnant forest euphemistically called a ‘nature reserve’. These frustrated creatures insisted on swimming across the canal and foraging in the rice fields.  Elephants wallowing in paddy fields are not good for rice paddies.

So the farmers took matters into their own hands. To keep the elephants out they went into the reserve where tree lopping was banned.

They cut down large saplings and sharpened both ends. They drove one end of the sapling into the muddy floor of the canal so that the other end was more or less below the high tide mark. This they did at several points along the canal.

Mostly the elephants avoided the saplings. After all, how many saplings would you need to provide a deterrent for a perimeter dozens of kilometers long? But on that particular morning, one elephant lay in the agonizing throes of death, impaled on one of the saplings.

Three of his ‘family’ fussed around on the bank of the canal unable to help. The team leader from the Bank insisted on returning to Palembang. He was shocked. I sent one boat off to fetch someone with guns who could come and put the unfortunate elephant out of its misery.

‘Who has a gun big enough to finish off an elephant?’ asked my Bank experts.

‘The pirates,’ I replied.

I could tell from the way they looked at me that they were wondering how long I had lived in such backblocks.