“It Happens All The Time”

Imagine a world where if you had a motorbike accident and were critically injured you would be left on the side of the road to die. Imagine a world where you died 3 hours later to the sound of car horns annoyed at the disruption to traffic. Imagine a world where your body stayed on the side of the road for a further three hours until word reached your family of your death and they arrived to lift your body into the back of a ute and take it away to be cremated. Imagine…Indonesia.

In my first post from Indonesia I mentioned closing my eyes and shedding a tear in the dark as my flight took off from Perth. On landing in Bali I remember our flight attendant announcing “Welcome to Paradise Island”. In the back of my mind I thought “Paradise my ass” but forgave the tourist talk as passengers clapped and cheered in anticipation of “the time of their lives”.

When I boarded a plane in Denpasar some 16 days later, I again closed my eyes as we took off, and I cried. I was leaving behind some special children, unfinished business and a whole lot of problems I knew I could never solve. I was grateful however to be leaving alive.

The last five days of my time in Bali were some of the most intense days of my entire life. With the basic bones of what I was trying to achieve in place, it was a time of chronic activity to make everything fall into place. There was much running around, shopping and organising to do. Many things worked against me but I did my best to remain positive as familiar faces disappeared and things “went wrong”.

My frustration was all put into place however, watching a taxi meter ticking over in a traffic jam. My new bestie, who I’ve mentioned endlessly, taxi driver Alit had gone back to his village for a ceremony. I reluctantly put my fears behind me and propelled myself out for a shopping trip in Denpasar. The shopping list included bedding, towels, clothes, small electrical items, anything and everything you need for an orphanage that can fit in a taxi.

Exhausted, at the end of my shopping I piled my purchases into a taxi and told him “Padma Street” he smiled and nodded. I sat quietly in the car as we made our way through the insane Bali traffic and motor bikes whizzed past us like maniacs on both sides of the road. Eventually I looked at him and asked “dari mana?”

“Singaraja” he smiled. “And you? Where are you from?”

He spoke perfect English. I laughed, relieved.

“Brisbane, Australia”

“Ooooooh, Oz-stray-lee-yah” Ok, so maybe not perfect English but very good.

We exchanged chit-chat as he made his way towards our destination. Suddenly the traffic came to a stand-still.

“Bullshit!” he exclaimed. It’s amazing how quickly they pick up English expletives, and yet use them completely out of context.

“I thought this would be clear by now” he said as he strained his neck to see ahead of us.

“Ceremony?” I asked.

“No…” he paused looking for the correct word but opted for a hand gesture instead. He held one hand up with the open palm facing sideways and took the closed fist of his other hand and ran it into his opposing palm.

“Car accident?”

He nodded “Very bad”.

We sat quietly in the car as we crawled further towards the scene. I watched the meter over the coming 45 minutes inch towards 100,000 rupiah and beyond.

Two things that I found most frustrating in Indonesia were a) being reduced to menial conversation because any sense of eloquence or articulate speech are wasted here, it’s the most you can do to get your message across at all, and b) knowing you have limited finances and getting obsessed with how much you’re paying for things, even though you KNOW you are getting far more than what you paid for.

At 100,000 rupiah I began to twitch – seriously, that’s like $13, of which the taxi driver will earn less than $3 by the time he pays for petrol and pays the taxi company their 70% share. Not knowing where I was and assuming I was still some distance from my destination I resigned myself to the fact that I was going to pay more than the cost of a couple of pizzas for my taxi ride, gave myself an uppercut and gazed out the window.

As I peered forward I saw a crowd gathered on the side of the road, motorbikes darted past on the sidewalk and reckless arm waves attempted to wave the cars past in a random and disorganised manner.

Suddenly from within the middle of the crowd the lifeless body of a man was lifted above the heads of onlookers and passed “crowd-surfing” style towards the back of a pick up truck. As the taxi inched past the scene I looked into the glazed and open eyes of the man. Then without warning his body was dumped into the tray of the truck. My stomach churned as his head twisted back. Tears formed in my eyes and my chin began to quiver. I breathed in deeply through my nose and exhaled to hold back the tears. He couldn’t have been more than 25.

My taxi driver commented that the accident had taken place some 6 hours earlier and I noted the pool of congealed blood in the middle of the road. I sat quietly in the car until I reached my destination, paid my fare and fumbled through the door to my room carrying a heavy load of bags, which sat unpacked inside the door for the next hour as I sat on the side of my bed staring blankly out the door.

I later learned that the man had been struck by an oncoming car and was flung from his bike which he road without a helmet, as many people do. He lay in the middle of the road injured until he was lifted out of the traffic’s way to the sidewalk. He managed to hold on for some 3 hours and probably bled to death while begging for help from onlookers. No one, however, can afford to help a dying man.

You see in Indonesia, as Alit told me later, there is no ambulance that comes rushing… no helicopter. Maybe in three hours, if the man was fully insured, an ambulance might attend but the passersby would be liable for his medical costs if they were Samaritan enough to take him themselves to a hospital. So they don’t.

When I close my eyes I can still see this young man’s face…what’s worse, I can hear the sound of angry car horns frustrated by the inconvenience his death had caused them. I have no doubt that somewhere a mother is grieving but this country as a whole has too many young men to miss just one…and this, I’m told, “it happens all the time”.