Descending from the clouds
An unexpected sadness seeps in as my flight begins its descent into Soekarno Hatta airport. I don’t know if this will be my last visit to Jakarta, but in one sense, it is.
A decade earlier I dreamed of travelling here to work. And travel I did, though not initially for work – just to visit. Over time and with guidance and support from a close friend, I realised my dream and found myself working on exactly the kinds of projects I’d envisioned. Projects with benevolent intentions. Complex and engaging projects. Projects with tangible and fulfilling outcomes. Now, my flight gently banking over cargo ships steaming towards port a thousand metres below, how I wish I was just visiting.
Thumbing through my music library I happen across Sugar Man by 60’s singer-songwriter Rodriguez. The jangly opening chords transport me back in time and a thousand kilometres east across the Java Sea, to a yacht anchored just off the island of Lombok. It’s an early moment from my journey into international development. I am mingling with seasoned development practitioners. Bintang beer flows, young Indonesian deck hands scamper back and forth tending to ropes and hatches and chit-chattering guests, while Sugar Man blares at unreasonably high volume out across the bay. I am neck deep in this new lifestyle, soaking it up as best I can. Scrambling to make sense of it. Searching for my place.
As my flight continues its steady descent, surfing down through the layers of Jakarta’s ever-present haze, I recall other moments from my approach into the land of development. How eagerly I’d peered out the windows, craning to catch a glimpse of the exotic landscape below. Its places and peoples and customs slowly revealing themselves to me, gradually growing clearer and more familiar as the years went by.
On the ground, development land is much like Jakarta. Exciting. Messy. Chaotic. Poverty and wealth. Opulence and filth. Cutthroat competition for money, praise and prestige. Some do make substantial impacts here. Others, not so much. I suspect that in the end, just as with any city, your fortunes are entwined with the neighbourhoods you inhabit. The people you mix with. Ensconced in this world, I learned how the noblest of intentions can fall by the wayside, bled out in all the meetings and workshops and conferences brimming with hype and hubris and development speak. Luxury and perks are part and parcel of life here. It is the way of things. Deserved. Expected. Our lot. Not theirs.
My flight safely on the ground, I head out of the airport and into the heat and humanity. I am quickly targeted by the first spotter for the cabs to get a fix on my tall, white figure. He’s young and lithe and moves and talks at speed, all the while maintaining a broad smile across his face, all the while clutching his nearly gone kretek cigarette. This car here, he motions – a Blue Bird. There are better and more comfortable options available, but I don’t care. I roll with it and leap in. An hour later and well into the city I realise we are heading in the wrong direction. No surprise. After a brief discussion about our whereabouts using the very best of my very poor Indonesian, no one has lost face and we correct our course.
I settle back into my diffuse state of mind, ruminating on my previous week at work. How I’d waded through soul-crushing project negotiations, but didn’t care. How I’d checked in on a partner I thought had lost focus, only to learn they’d squandered an entire project for themselves. No surprise.
At the end of that week, a meeting with my funder put a sharp full stop to my development story. There’d been a change of plans. As quickly as the taps had opened, the flow of money supporting my tenure in development land was now shut off. I was to return to Jakarta, wrap up my work, paint it in the best possible light, and prepare it for fossilisation in the archives.
Sitting in my taxi, still processing this development, encased in downtown traffic, monsoonal rain hammering down, I realise I will soon be just a visitor once again. My sugar man has gone. I am thankful. No regrets.
I relax and observe the city anew, free of the lens of my self-imposed identity of someone who works in development. Just a visitor, in a cab, in the rain, stuck in traffic. No wicked problems. No intractable challenges. No vision, mission, agenda, or ambitions. I am a spec, a single cell in this huge organism of a country that lives and breathes and grows all on its own, oblivious to those who claim responsibility and privilege for its development.
Thoughts? Email cam@camgrant.com.