Stuck in the mud: A Sidoarjo travelogue

The Jakarta Post | Thu, 01/24/2008 1:41 PM | Reporter's Notebook

Life has turned upside-down for more than 12,000 people since mud began gushing from a gas exploration site in East Java last May 29. The resulting lake of muck has flooded houses and factories, closed roads, and affected the economy throughout the region. Jakarta Post copyeditor and freelance journalist Trish Anderton recently traveled to the site with her husband, a fellow freelancer, and filed these notes.

Mud in your eye

My air-conditioned skin feels like it’s going to melt as we step out of our rented Kijang into the midday sun in Porong, Sidoarjo. We’re in a dirt parking lot a short distance from the main highway. A long dusty trail leads to the geyser itself, marked by a plume of smoke on the horizon.

As we approach, the air gets hotter and hotter. Fine dust blows into our eyes – dried mud from the volcano. I’m expecting a sulfurous smell, like you get at hot springs, but instead there’s a hint of ocean salt in the air, and an earthy smell almost like manure. The embankments around the geyser come into view, pocked with large excavators and other heavy machinery.

Inside the embankment, still hidden from view, is a pool of hot mud. Outside are scattered, smaller ponds of muck that escaped the volcano earlier. Buildings poke out of these ponds, submerged up to their roofs.

We dawdle a while among a gaggle of reporters, waiting for our turn to interview an important official. I keep eyeing the embankment. Finally I can’t wait any longer. I sneak away and scramble up a wall of dirt and sandbags more than twice my height.

I’m totally caught off guard. I was expecting to look down at the mud. But it’s right in front of my face, just inches from the top of the embankment. The surface looks like water. Small waves roll at me, pushed by the strong wind. The dark gray-brown ooze underneath appears to be at a slow boil; little peaks keep splurting up, plink plink plink, like thick oatmeal over a low flame.

Every now and then, the wind shifts and the smoke parts for a moment, allowing a glimpse of the column of muck shooting a few meters into the air. But mostly the geyser stays hidden ... like its origins, and like the future of Porong itself.

Drowned village

Under the front gate of Siring village, right next to the main mud site, a guy is loading roof tiles into a pickup truck. He’s just brought them in on a makeshift raft lashed together from empty metal drums and scrap wood. He’s salvaging them from his former house, to build a new house.

As we chat with him, his frustration shows. It’s early March, and he’s waiting impatiently to see whether Lapindo will come through with its first scheduled 20 percent compensation payment to local residents. It’s a refrain we’ll hear over and over again. People need the money to start over, and they need to know the cash is beginning to flow their way.

We try to cajole him into taking us out on the raft, but he says he’s busy. Another man offers to take us to his house in a boat – for a price. Rp 150,000 (about U.S.$16), to be exact. This seems quite steep, especially after we see the boat, a rickety, handmade canoe barely worthy of the name. But we can’t bring ourselves to haggle with someone who’s lost his house and his job. So we roll up our pant legs and wade out to the canoe.

In my copy-editing role at The Jakarta Post, I often get stories that describe buildings or towns as “drowned”. We dutifully change this to the more correct “flooded” or “inundated.” But as we pole our way down the main thoroughfares, it strikes me that “drowned” is exactly the word for this place.

Signs stand proudly in front of schools that no longer exist, and banners advertising Clear New Generation shampoo dangle above glop that’s anothing but clear. Somebody’s rubber sandal drifts by. The houses are keeping their heads above water, but the life has gone out of this place. It’s pale, clammy ... drowned.

The homeowner’s name, ironically, is Untung, the Indonesian word for “lucky”. His house looks like a fairly humble four-room affair, which he shared for thirteen years with his wife, child, and three other family members. He used to work as an assistant at construction sites. These days he makes a little money parking the cars of tourists who come to see the mud.

We ask how he feels. Is he angry? The guy at the back of the boat, who’s just supposed to be taking us around, suddenly pipes up. “Angry!” he says bitterly. “Of course we’re angry! And it’s not over yet!”

We ask a few more questions and take more pictures. Then we start the slow journey back down the drowned streets. Suddenly Rp 150,000 doesn’t seem very expensive anymore.

A house is a choice

When I first heard refugees were being housed at the newly-built market in Porong, I admit to having certain romantic notions about rustic wooden stalls and baskets piled with chilis. “Rustic,” however, is about the last word I’d use to describe the reality of this place.

The market consists of two huge concrete buildings with rows of windowless rooms somewhat smaller than a one-car garage. These rooms – cubicles, really – have metal doors that roll down so you can lock them up tight. They reminded me overwhelmingly of the complexes of rentable storage units you see in the U.S.: cheerless places where you put stuff nobody really wants or needs.

Budjiono, 35, showed us the cubicle he shared with three families, or a total of twelve people. Most of the floor is filled up by sleeping mats at night. During the day the stall is usually stays empty because it’s too hot and stuffy to hang around in. The other two families are from his village. They were all friends beforehand.

Remarkably, they are still friends now, after literally living on top of each other for two months Budjiono displays the kind of forbearance we’ve seen in so many refugees in Java over the last year. Pressed for his feelings about the place, he’ll only say that it’s “not comfortable” or “not nice”.

He’s one of the lucky ones, relatively speaking; he’s got a good job as an engineer in a shipbuilding company, and he’s still working. Perhaps that makes the experience more bearable. Others are clearly worn down. When we visit a somewhat larger complex of two interconnected rooms, occupied, unbelievably, by 67 people, they thrust a paper-wrapped meal of rice, a rather-tired looking fish and a small lump of vegetables at us.

“How can we eat this three times a day? And what are the small children supposed to eat?” they say angrily. People complain of long lines for bathrooms and laundry, lack of privacy, and lack of certainty as to their future.

One woman breaks down in tears, saying she is “nearly crazy” from the stress. The residents all appear to agree on one thing. They reject one form of compensation that’s been considered: mass resettlement to newly-built neighborhoods. They want a solution that has acquired a trendy English-language name: “cash and carry”. That is, they want direct cash payments to compensate for their lost houses and land. They want control over their lives, something that is sorely lacking here.

“A house is a choice,” says Budjiono. It’s one he’s determined not to give up.

The rice rebellion

The women at the market have found a way to reclaim some control. They’ve launched a cottage industry. Every day they spread the rice from their meal packets in the sun to dry. Then they mix it with salt, orange drink and other flavorings to make a dough, flatten it into rounds, and fry it in small woks. The result is a kind of rice cracker called krupuk puli.

Buyers come to the market twice a week and pick up bags of the stuff to sell. The women tell us they can make about Rp 20,000 each, twice a week, from krupuk puli. The money goes toward buying food – their choice of food. In some cases it goes for their children’s school fees. They fry us up a batch and are delighted when we pronounce them tasty. And they are: salty, oily and crunchy, with, if I’m not mistaken, a hint of sly subversiveness.

Mud tourism

On our last day in Porong, we visit the viewing area that has sprung up along the traffic-choked highway near the main mud pool. When we walk up, a man with a cardboard box demands an entry fee. Ojek drivers and vendors crowd around, tugging at our arms, trying to sell us a motorcycle tour or a DVD about the disaster. I have rarely felt threatened in Indonesia, but there’s a whiff of desperation here that prompts me to pull my kit bag in tight against my side.

One man tells us 200 mud victims have been designated as ojek drivers for the disaster site. Dodik is from Siring, the drowned village we visited. He used to work at the Sarinah watch factory. Like everybody else, he’s waiting for cash compensation so he can start over. “I don’t want to drive an ojek anymore,” he says. “I’m going to look for other work.”

We walk up to the top of the viewing area and take one last look out over the pool of hot mud. Sooner or later this open wound will become a scar, and gradually the area will change into something different. Local officials tell us scientists are looking at the possibility of separating precious metals from the mud. Some people have suggested the enormous geothermal power here could be tapped as an energy source. The area’s tourism potential is also being weighed.

But for now, the Porong mud refugees have their hearts set on less lofty things. They want houses and real jobs. They want some semblance of their lives back.

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