Download the full zine here!
AWARENESS
One can easily argue that the concept of inequality in
life has already started when one was born into this world. Some people were
born into families that have everything, and while others arguably would have
to struggle a lot more during their quests to financial stabilities. Certainly,
no one wish to be born into a poor/financially struggling family and it’s not
like we have a say in it before coming into this world. However, we do have the
power to choose how we will live our lives with what we have been given.
I was born and raised in Jakarta and have spent most of
my life here. It’s no secret that Jakarta has a big issue over social and
economic inequality among its residents. Over the years, I’ve had friends from
Australia, Phillipines, Singapore and other various countries coming over for
holiday and most of the time I had to explain to them why some people could
afford to buy the latest BMW cars and others were picking up scraps and pieces
of garbage off the street for living.
My realization of this social/economic gap has started as
early as I could remember. My parents used to take me and my sister to orphanages
when we were kids to show that there’s a whole different world out there filled
with less fortunate people. Of course I had to learn the lesson the hard way as
well : growing up, there were times when I had been mugged and asked for money
by these ‘less fortunate’ kids on the streets. Since then, I had been really
conscious when it came to social/economic gap among people and brought this
experiences and knowledge with me as I turned older and became an adult.
At present, I’m a 26 year-old guy working as an English
teacher for an enrichment learning centre. Eighty percent students that I teach
go to International schools where the facilites are vastly better and could
cost about ten times as expensive as state-owned schools. Having been teaching
for almost two years now, at one point I realised that most of these kids have
never been on Jakarta’s public transportations nor have they experienced the
crowded, sweaty, traditional markets that my Mom would take me to every Sunday
when I was a kid. I was puzzled.
One of the things that has to be done in order to stop
these massive disparities is to have the ‘more fortunate’ people share their
wealth/knowledge/love/time with the lesser ones, especially with the way our
systems right now only benefit certain classes of people. It’s simple and yet
its the most effective way. And for this to work, awareness among people and
kids from young age is crucial. Kids need to know what really happens out
there, on the other side of their parents’ car window.
Without ignoring my main responsibility of teaching my
students English grammar and how to write a well-structured essay, a big part
of mastering a language is about communicating ideas. Ideas are formed from
knowledge, experience and the world around us. I tried to transfer some of
these to my students in class everytime I had a chance. Hopefully they take
something from these processes, no matter how small it is.
At the end of the day, it is about holding on to that
hope that something will change in the future and make sure that we are doing
something, anything that will propel the current’s state of things towards that
change, no matter how small it might be. Seeing how bleak things are and the
fact that our government turns into a bigger joke every day, I feel like the
social/economic gap among Jakarta’s residents is sadly our problem to solve.
-Yudhistira-
