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very year we have a rainy season and every year we act as if completely taken by surprise at the flooding. We'€™d rather busy ourselves with looking after evacuees and redirecting traffic than tackling the cause (rainfall is not the cause, and therefore shooting salt at the clouds is not the solution).

The real cause is attributable to the local obsession with uncontrollable concretization of the city and out of control population increase stumbling ahead on weak economic fundamentals. We literally build like there is no tomorrow and the way we are going there may not be. Not one we'€™d like to leave to our children anyway.

We have been building housing clusters, malls and shop-houses (ruko) without any drainage system or without hooking them up to whatever drainage was already there. Building proper drainage takes effort from proper engineers.

And effort is something we Indonesians appear to be allergic to and our own domestic education system doesn'€™t seem to produce any proper engineers. This is frustrating as there are so many bright young energetic people available who'€™d be happy to take it all on if ever they were given a chance and the right luggage for the trip.

A dear friend of mine pointed out recently that '€œwe steal money from the roads to buy cars'€.  Unfortunately, this is the truth and we all know it. (Brand new toll roads are sliding sideways down the mountain in Central Java as we speak). We want profit now, today! That is the only question racing around in our otherwise unoccupied heads. Building anything without a proper foundation won'€™t last. It never has elsewhere and it won'€™t here.

We just want to make a quick buck and maximize profits to buy stuff we don'€™t fully understand the use of and are actually rather uncomfortable with but that make us look modern and in sync with our perception of what goes on in the world, and boy, doesn'€™t the latest iPhone do the trick. You can upload pictures of your Bentley up to its windows in water inside the humongous garage of the monstrosity that your home is, and share these with all of your friends.  

Maybe the time has now come to really put our heads together and work on our foundations. Proper drainage systems in the big cities is only one issue, but a good start. We can work our way down the list while we maintain the results of work already done or in progress. Next year it will rain again and we will be totally surprised again when we find ourselves waist-deep in water.

There is no way around it. If we ever want to play a different role in the puppet show we put on domestically, we have to go back to page one and read the bits of the book we didn'€™t like, skipped and thus led us into all this confusion.

We are a young country. We have time. We are entitled to make our mistakes. If we have the courage to forget about personal gain for a bit and start enjoying the process of the actual work, take on the challenges for what they are and not for how much is in it for us personally in the short term, we may surprise ourselves to see what a great nation we are really becoming.

Flooding is a direct result of our own behavior. It'€™s man-made. Preventing it costs a lot of money. Fortunately, this is not an obstacle, as Jakarta, be it knee-deep in water, happens to have plenty of that. But I am an optimist and I believe we have what it takes. We have everything going for us if we can find it in ourselves to take pride in what we do. So let'€™s do it and get on with it!

Peter Verbakel
Jakarta