Jakarta Doldrums

Our Tour d'Europe completed two weeks ago and we have adapted seamlessly back into our Jakarta life. Instead of long walks through historic neighborhoods to world famous monuments, we have long drives through heavy traffic to the grocery store. The sulfur scent of exhaust, pollution, and trash have replaced the sweet aromas of coffee, ocean breezes, and fresh bread. We've replaced our days of exploration with days of repetition - wake, work, wind down.


Returning from the Western world to Jakarta has made one thing abundantly clear: Jakarta is not home. Don't get me wrong, Jakarta, and Indonesia as a whole, is a wonderful place. There are experience opportunities here that exist nowhere else in the world. And, for a price, we can closely approximate our Phoenix lifestyle. Yet, the key elements that make someplace feel like home, the key ingredients to a fulfilling life, are absent.

1) Sense of community. This is hard to achieve, for a number of reasons, and it has nothing to do with the fact that there are 18 million people living in Jakarta. First is the fact that we know we are here temporarily. We have no incentive to establish roots that we know we'll just uproot in a matter of months. Second, the community with which we can relate - the expat community - is really a combination of subcultures, divided by either organization of employment or nationality. The expats from my company are mostly at our mine site, and Americans are not nearly as common in Jakarta as are British, Australian and other Europeans. This makes identifying a community we can call our own quite challenging.

2) Lasting friendships. Recent studies have shown that the relationships we have with others, whether they be friendships or familial, have the largest impact on our perceived quality of life, and even contribute to our longevity. In Indonesia, the economic disparity with the locals, even colleagues, is so great that, even if we can overcome the cultural divide, the economic divide creates an impassable canyon. Something as simple as going out to dinner can prove economically awkward. That leaves us to forge friendships within the expat community which, by its very nature, is transitory. Many of the friends we made in our first few months in Jakarta no longer live here. Relationship bonds are forged and strengthened with time and common experiences. We don't have the opportunity for either. Returning to our friends and family in Arizona will be a renewed blessing.

3) Quality Time. Many people in the US have long commutes. In Phoenix, driving at least an hour each way to work is fairly universal. Ninety minute commutes are commonplace. New York City residents can face two hour commutes. We all complain. I look forward to the day when my work commute is the only time I experience traffic. In Jakarta, we dread leaving the house because we never know how long we'll be gone. A trip to the grocery store because we ran out of peanut butter can take over an hour. Going to dinner at a restaurant in our neighborhood has us away from home for three hours just because driving the two miles takes forty-five minutes each way. We'd walk, but there are no sidewalks and the pollution and humidity leave you too sweaty and smelly to enjoy the evening. We often spend more time getting to activities than we actually spend doing the activity.  It's difficult to have "quality time" in your car.

Thankfully, we are on the downhill side of this assignment. With nine months to go, we have already started planning for our move back to Phoenix. We have a renewed energy, and an increased urgency, to experience everything we can about Indonesia, and the Asia-Pacific region, that we can before we return. More than that, we can see the end. We can see the return to normalcy. A life of washing our own clothes, of doing yard work, driving our own cars, making a five minute trip to the grocery store. A life where we can have familial privacy again, where we don't have maids and nannies always about and drivers that know everywhere we've been.

We've enjoyed our time in Jakarta.  We've met wonderful people, experienced great things, and have found enrichment opportunities we would not have had staying in Phoenix.  But it is time to come home.  It is time to return to our home country, despite its flaws, and live our lives again.