The 3rd Dirtiest City in The World
I was devastated. I had made a decision that was going to affect an entire year of my life, and I was full of regret. It didn’t take me very long to realize that the country and city I had chosen weren’t the greatest choice, and I was miserable. Jakarta is dirty, smoggy, and not a great place to choose to move to without doing your research first.
All of the teachers were placed in the same house. The house itself was great, and we even had a maid that did some cooking and cleaning for us. But just down the street were the slums, and every time it rained the open sewers would overflow, and we’d have to walk through it to get to our ojek drivers (I’ll explain those in a minute).
Most toilets in Jakarta are just a hole in the ground. The city is filled with rats and cockroaches. The open sewers were nasty, and the mosquitoes were hungry enough to drive a person mad. It rained nonstop and was so humid that it didn’t matter how strong your antiperspirant was, you were sweating in seconds after a cold shower. We bought beer at the local corner store for a dollar, and it was filled with formaldehyde.
And then, there were the ojek drivers.
We used to play a game with these drivers. In a nutshell, an ojek is a motorcycle taxi. Groups of these men would sit on every corner with their scooters, waiting for someone to come along and ask for a ride somewhere. The majority of them drank beer while waiting, and so the game we played was trying to figure out which one was the most sober. Hiring an ojek driver was a normal, everyday requirement in order to get to and from the school where we taught.
Coming up to our corner by the teacher's house, we always had a group of drivers who were particularly rambunctious. They enjoyed the fact that they got to drive a couple of young, white women around, and they were almost always inebriated. Getting on the back of one of these ojeks was taking a risk with my life every day. Not knowing how drunk my driver was, having no helmet, careening in between 6 lanes of cars at breakneck speeds, and trying to avoid the groping hands of a drunk motorcycle driver, was a twice-a-day experience.
I phoned home almost every day in that first month, miserable, and massively regretting my decision to move there.
Mom told me I could come home. She told me I didn’t have to see it through if I was that unhappy, but something deep down inside of me wouldn’t let me quit. I hung on. I was determined to get the most I could out of the experience, and to make my life better. I knew if I returned home I would be giving up on myself, and would only return to my addiction.
I chose to persevere, but the ojek drivers were only the beginning of an adventure that was to take me in multiple wild and weird directions. As I began to get to know the teachers in the house and get more comfortable, we began to venture out and learn more about the city we had chosen to live in.