Letter: Tell people to respect our rivers

Jakarta happened to be located in a river basin where rivers from the surrounding higher grounds converge.

Hunting for jobs, people from neighboring provinces flock to the capital city, only to find accommodation near rivers and estuaries. They make use of the river especially for free daily toilet services.

Let us not blame them for it — they are only trying to survive in an undesirable part of the city. Indeed, they need our full attention in terms of education, economic improvement and employment.

The city would benefit by accommodating and training this unfortunate part of our city’s population. By investing time and resources in these parts of society, we would gain trained laborers for local as well as employment abroad.

Besides, educating these people is important to helping them understand why rivers are no place to defecate, nor a convenient place to dump our daily trash.

Let us teach them that all these behaviors create not only a bad image for tourists, but improper use of the rivers causes flooding in the city, which in turn creates traffic jams as well as skin and stomach diseases, and forces numerous elementary schools to remain closed due to inundated classrooms.

These potential laborers are indeed a key point of our economic development; without whom, we could easily be gravely dependent on other nations.

This labor force, when educated and properly trained, could very well become nationally needed industrial hands, or fulfill similar needs in our neighboring countries.

When a number of above-mentioned labor force obtain their goals in life, more and more members of the “riverside brigade” will voluntarily join this properly educated and trained force, slowly yet surely encouraging them to leave the banks of the river behind.

Transforming the city’s rivers into tourist attractions will surely require workers to make it livable and attractive to local as well as foreign tourists. Restaurants and tourist boats will attract businesses in the food and beverage industry.

All kinds of human and kitchen waste should be gathered daily by special institutions to turn them into useful and needed organic fertilizer. The river should never be contaminated by the river tourism.

All the chiefs of villages along the rivers should see to it that the views along the rivers are worth seeing and in fact livable for all concerned. This means no waste of any kind may be seen nor placed near the riverbanks at any time of the day for any reason.

For flood mitigation, the government should instruct (not suggest) all the people living in Jakarta conserve rainwater in drilled ground holes wherever possible in the vicinity, especially those who live at higher elevations in Jakarta. Further, anyone caught littering should be fined to the extent that he or she wouldn’t dare to repeat it.

If we start this work now, it will coincide with SBY’s program to convert all vehicles to gas by 2014, when we can expect the long-awaited blue skies over Jakarta.

Putting our political differences aside, we can certainly  reach our goals together — happiness for the marginalized in society, cleaner city river water, reduced frequency and extent of the city’s floods, and last but not least our long-awaited Jakarta blue sky.
Moeljono Adikoesoemo
Jakarta