No poor people? How would we buy 'pisang goreng'?

The Jakarta Post , Jakarta | Sun, 10/08/2006 10:04 AM | Life

A couple of weeks ago I conducted a three-day retreat for third-year high school students at a village in Puncak, West Java. In one of the sessions, I was struck by comments a student made when asked to reflect on their life.

""I feel fortunate for the existence of the poor in my neighborhood. I don't who I would buy pisang goreng from if they didn't exist! Without them, I think we would have had great difficulty building our house. Don't you agree, guys?"" I was saddened because no one there disagreed. Everyone seemed to be in line with his ideas.

On returning home, I weighed up the logic of my students' views toward their less fortunate fellows. Of course, my students do not lack anything needed for life. They are protected and fostered by parents who provide everything for schooling -- a driver and housemaids to wake them up in the morning, to prepare their food, to clean up their rooms, and to wash their clothes. Their world and their daily habits have constructed a ""brainware"" within them that money can solve any problem and that money was all the poor needed to survive. I called this brainware a ""money-paradigm"".

What kind of human relationship comes up with such a paradigm? I formulated this question after listening to their comments on poverty. ""They are poor because they are lazy. I don't think I have to get my hands dirty."" They don't find themselves guilty for the sorrowful reality. ""For me, poverty is indeed not my problem. It is just their fate."" ""We dutifully pay our housemaids, driver, and security guard. I think we have paid our obligation to them."" ""I don't know what to do with poverty."" In a nutshell, I sense the absence of empathy for those impoverished.

My students feel fortunate for the dramatic poverty since it preserves their convenient lives. For them, poverty is not a problem at all but a social condition they need in order to continue their comfortable lives. I said to them, ""so you wish that poverty be kept as it is so as not to change a social structure that benefits all of you."" Some of them nodded, while some others understood the point of my statement. Well, not seeing poverty as a serious problem is already a problem in our education. Their parents and teachers seem to have misled them in understanding the reality of this world.

I tried to categorize their attitudes toward the oppressed within the philosophical frame given by Martin Bubber, a German Jewish thinker. He proposed two main types of human relationship: I-it and I-Thou. The former might be easily understood as a relation of a subject toward an object, e.g. a carpenter to a piece of wood, while the latter as the relation of a subject toward another subject, e.g. a husband to his wife. My students love to perceive their servants, driver, security guard as just objects which they can utilize. All they need is to give them some money at the end of month. Their human (or rather monetary) relationship is based on a mere functional dimension. In brief, the center of such relationship is I, not We.

To deconstruct their point of view on human relationship, I propose them a formulation to consider. ""I am good to you because you have done something good to me otherwise you won't be anybody to me."" Their replies still did not convince me that they would initiate building a deep empathy for the wretched. It seemed to me that their money brainware is deeply rooted and has effectively driven them to fail to interpret all this unhappy reality. This was a comment made by a student: ""As far as we give them money to sustain their lives, it is OK!""

By the end of the retreat, I found I had failed to change their mindset. To cheer up myself, I could do very little. Then, I concluded ( I might be wrong) that our schools needed to enlighten them. Every attempt has to be made to convince students that poverty has been a pernicious threat to our humanity. Poverty hampers all children from growing and blossoming in all respects. I think we could not just explain through words. It would be good to immerse them in a neighborhood stricken by poverty for a couple of days. Such a program, followed by a reflection, I hope would bring some changes to their brains and hearts as they share the life of the poor.

--J. Supriyono

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