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span class="inline inline-center">Living on the brink: Children play amid a heap of trash in Karang Serang village, Tangerang, on March 5. The village is often inundated due to rising seawater levels in recent years.(JP/Agnes Anya)

The sun was descending toward the horizon when Nimah and her neighbors were talking about their daily lives, from increasing chili prices to the recent rainy weather, on a bamboo settee in front of her house.

As they ran out of topics to talk about, Nimah stared at the receding sea just 1.5 meters from her home — a 10-square-meter rattan structure in Karang Serang coastal village in Tangerang regency.

“The land used to stretch from here to there,” Nimah broke the silence while pointing at a line of rocks farther out to sea. “Now as you can see it’s all mud and water.”

The line of rocks, located 200 meters from her house, used to function as a wave breaker built in the 1990s by village officials.

However, the rocks turned out to be no match for nature, with seawater already passing the wall of rocks and inundating a large part of the village.

While it is unclear whether the inundation has been exacerbated by abrasion or land subsidence, abrasion has damaged 579 hectares of productive land in the regency’s coastal areas, including Karang Serang, according to the Tangerang Fishery and Coastal Agency.

Due to the rising seawater, the authorities had to relocate nearly 200 families from the area to a nearby village as Karang Serang kept losing land.

Yet there are villagers like Nimah who have refused to move from the village despite the constant threat of tidal floods.

Nimah and the few other villagers left have learned to be creative to deal with the tidal floods, which they have done for years.

For instance, Nimah has moved all electrical sockets and electronic devices, like her radio, to a bamboo table to avoid electrical failure whenever floods occur.

The 52-year-old housewife has been forced to be quick-witted as the government has left the villagers to their own devices, with no official attempt to save the village from disappearing into the sea.

“[Nevertheless], the floodwater is only as high as my ankles. It has never been higher than that,” said Nimah, adding that no officials from the village or the regency had discussed the issue with the residents.

Besides tidal flooding, the coastal residents also have to live with the possibility of being evicted as most of the land belongs to PT Shangrila Indah, said Supardi, head of the village’s neighborhood unit (RT) 02 of community unit (RW) 04.

“Residents here are aware that most of them live on other people’s land so they will just follow whatever happens, I guess,” he said.

While the company has owned the land since the 1980s, the land that the village occupies had never been developed, save for a soccer field, added Supardi.

According to Tangerang Development Planning Board head Didin Samsudin, the company owns most land plots in Karang Serang, which lies roughly 38 kilometers from the regency’s administration center in Tigaraksa.

Despite the constant threat, Nimah has no plan to move as she has nowhere else to live.

“It’s good enough that I have a place to stay even though this land does not belong to me,” said Nimah, who has lived in the area since she was a child.