As his left foot twisted hard at an awful angle, the beggar limped to my car where I waited for the green “go” light.

Fishing an income from this ocean of traffic light changes with a fast flowing tide, the young man, crippled maybe since birth, maybe in a motor bike crash, was foraging for his daily rice on the Ngurah Rai Bypass in Sanur, Bali.

In his early 30s, he swung up to the car with his twisted left leg bobbing like his pony tail under a brimmed cap.  He was surprisingly joyous against the grid of traffic stop lights.

This man in rags smiled like the sun and a split second of eye contact told me his story.

He connected through the fumes, the road rage, the wait for that green light. He understood that people were more focused on getting home and shutting down in front of the television, the Internet or dinner with friends than banging the drum for reform loud enough to be heard, for a change to come to his life.

There are people crippled for life — like my pony-tailed friend — born into families without access to medical intervention, babies with congenital deformities that could be addressed and fixed in the earliest months of life for just a few dollars, which would put them on the ladder to economic feasibility in adulthood.

Instead, their congenital disabilities solidify in young bones, freezing them into the torturing deformities that can remove opportunities for a lifetime.

All I could do was pass over a fist full of rupiah. Driving away from this man with the wide smile below his shading cap, I sobbed as I steered through laden trucks and shiny cars, heartbroken that I could not carry him to a hospital and unfreeze his left foot. “It’s up to the government,” said my husband.

He is correct in the notion that this young man should have been treated at birth by a caring government, funded by the people for the people. Which governments are: They survive on royalties from mining and other resources owned by the people, on taxes on land, food, housing, permits, licenses or the myriad of other potential income streams generated by the people and their national lands.

But you see, there are some corrupt bastards out there, people employed by government offices — including the tax office — to receive royalties and taxes on behalf of people like the pony-tailed man and hand over to the government the monies needed to better the country’s health and education.

There are people who have allegedly misappropriated a sizable portion of these public funds and are using them instead to bankroll bribes, buy airline tickets and travel on holidays, off at tennis matches in Bali while they are supposed to be in detention in Jakarta. They are traveling offshore to protect their investments with the monies they have stolen from my friend — the man denied medical attention, because there was no money left.

Are they bloody mad? No, they are such champions of corruption that they can have false passports issued with the nation’s anniversary of independence stamped as their new birth dates. Unworried by the demons of conscience, they sleep like kings on sheets of white, 300-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets in five-star hotels.

These people learned by osmosis that in Indonesia, even today, you can steal, cheat and then buy your way out of punishment.

Funds hijacked from the public purse are spent buying the law in its many forms — police, prosecutors, defenders and judges — and we, dear tax paying friends, are picking up the tab.

Meanwhile, my friend with the shading cap and the pony tail is stopped at the red light of life alongside, give or take a few hundred thousand, many others of the nation’s some 241 million people. Stick thin, he limps away smiling, “Ikhlas dan rajin aku” (I work hard and surrender my fate to God).

— Trisha Sertori

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