A Papua Story

I am sitting in a tiny Suzuki minibus front passenger seat, with its window open to allow air to come in.  It is humid in the old cranky car with no air-con; and without the air from outside, I would have been sweat-baked in no time.  So the dusty breeze blowing on my face was the better option.

Despite this simple, time-worn public transport, the ride is quite enjoyable.  It is my second time to be in Sorong, Papua, but this is the first time for me to stay for more than just a day.  So I have the chance to get to know the city a bit better.

Sorong is a small town full of life.  I can imagine massive coastal cities like Mumbai or Singapore were once like Sorong before they became a city everyone wants to go to and eventually the metropolitans that they are.  A strip of road thread the coast, linking the tiny airport in the east and the small sea port in the west, all within a 10 minutes ride.  Along the way I see little businesses from hawkers selling fresh sea food to mom and pop retail shops to small distributors of building materials.   I see a large, nicely designed blue-white mosque prominently standing not far from the port.  I see a couple of signs of “buddhist vihara” as I pass by a bit further to the west.  I see a few newly built hotels, all of them hanging red colored lantern with some chinese characters at their front porch (it’s coming close to Chinese new year).  I finally stop in front of a row of coconut vendors, all of them women of the local tribe.  The coconuts, large and freshly picked, were laid out invitingly.  I and my three colleagues that came with me from Jakarta spent a good half an hour enjoying the delicious fruit. 

I am enjoying this little town, where many things coexist promisingly in one strip of road.  It’s a land that has been transformed into a small town no longer than 25 years ago.  From the perspective of the indigenous people, many has changed, many migrants from all over Indonesia have made the town their home.  Yet if we look at the women selling the coconuts by the sea, we will be reminded that it’s the land of the Mooi tribe of Papua. 

“Mooi people are open minded people”  my business partner mentions as we sit together in the tiny poblic transport.  He himself is not a local.  He came from the city of Surabaya as a business migrant, one of the seemingly many who came more than 15 years ago, when the town began to grow.  “Unlike some of the other tribes that live in this town, the Mooi people are welcoming and are willing to learn something new”, he continued.

I had the chance to meet a few Mooi people a few days earlier as I spent three full days at the cargo port, taking care of my business. I did not have the chance to talk to them very much, as they were busy working, unloading my cargo from a few containers at the port.  Frankly, I can’t tell the Mooi people from the other tribes that have settled in Sorong too; but I know some of them are.

I am in Sorong because I am expanding my business here.  To do so I have to find a local partner, and we managed to find one before we came.  In the last 3 days my colleagues and I had to train and supervise him and his crew at the port.   Everything went well thanks to him and my colleaugues who did a good preparatory work.  Our partner was well prepared, well supported by the local workers, fully dedicated and quick to learn.  We finished the work well within the timeframe we planned for and left the port feeling excited for the possibility to do more business in Sorong again in the future. My skin is noticably darker than it was when I arrived.  That’s what you got if you stand under the sun at the port for 3 full days.    

Back in Jakarta, it is very easy to have negative perceptions or be intimidated by the land of the Papua, the farthest province from the capital.  People tend to talk about the bad things that happened here, and the media only makes it worse as they report only the sensational bad things. 

So it is very heartwarming to hear my business partner say that the town of Sorong has become what it is thanks to the openness of the Mooi people.  The many migrants that are working and living in Sorong came from all backgrounds, from the island of Sumatra, Java to the island of Sulawesi. From the presence of the large mosque, I can imagine a fairly strong population of muslim people who may have come from Java and Sulawesi. From a couple of budhist vihara that I saw,  I learned that there are also a fairly established buddhist community in town.  There is also the christian influence that came from the Dutch occupation earlier in the 20^th century. Sorong is a small cosmopolitan, a town that is not only rich with natural resources, but also with an exciting mix of cultures and background.     

However this town is not spared from the many troubles that are happening as the modern life entered.  There most common talk in town is the wars that are often happening between the tribes.  There are different tribes who have settled around the town of Sorong, co-existing with the local Mooi tribe.  Time and again, tension flared among them, and hostility lead to another level of hostility.  The fights are often violent and destructive.  A local supermarket was recently vandalized badly during one of the wars.  I asked the public transport driver how often does this happen, and he told me “often”.  

Related to this is problem is the serious pandemic of intoxication and poor state of being of the native people.  Some of the immigrants I talked to perceive this as a problem of the native Papua people, who are often branded as lazy and addicted to alcohol and drugs.  But I refuse to believe this; I refuse to believe that a certain race is more “prone to alcoholism” or more lazy than others.  The Papua people got into this problem because of something has happened to them in the past; something unjust, something that violently took them out from the lives they know and comfortable with.  The fact that the problem worsens is only a testament that the cause of the problem is getting stronger, not weaker.  

I don’t have to search very deep to find similar problems everywhere else.  Just look at the displaced aborigines community in Australia, who also struggle with alcoholism, violence, drug abuse, lack of education and poor living condition.  Or look at the native american communities who struggle with the same things in the american continent. 

We have to face it: modernization and migration that violently displace the indigenous people, make them worse off from their earlier lives and ignorantly dismiss their problems are not good progress.  It is no different than looting at the grandest scale.  It is colonization at the highest and most shameful degree.  It is happening right now, and worsening every day.  Just because the indigenous people do not go to the media to scream and shout about it does not mean the problem does not exist. 

To be continued…

2015

Three hours left till the sun sets
In this last day of the year
It's so hot, as hot as it gets
Not a cloud in the sky so clear

"Time to write some reflection", I thought
review the year that's been hard to explain
But inspiration escaped me like a drought
I wrote, delete and wrote again in vain

So I try to go with words that rhyme
Hope it will help the fuzzy mind
Clarity should come just in time
So here I go with my rewind

It's been a year of courage
Started a business and listened to my heart
Free like a bird out from a cage
Worked hard like a horse with a cart

It's been a year of solitude
Wrote my first book in my house on the hill
Kept at it with a positive attitude
Believe in myself, I said, if not who will

It's been a year of wonder
My body needed some TLC
'Slow down' that's the doctor's order
I healed through prayers, herbs and the help of my lemon tree

It is hard to find a word with all the meaning
2015 is just a start of everything
Faith and Courage have kept me going
and Gratefulness I offer each night and morning

Melbourne, 31 December 2015

Talk is cheap

Jiro-san is a sushi maker who owns a nice sushi joint in Singapore's East Coast road.  He is not related to the famous Jiro from Japan, who happened to also own a world-renowned sushi restaurant.  Jiro-san of Singapore just happened to share the same name.

In fact, Jiro-san of Singapore never had any experience in sushi making before he decided to open the joint 15 years ago.  He was working in a Japanese company as a "salaryman", a term that the Japanese like to use to describe the nine-to-fivers.  One day, he was told that his services were no longer needed and he was let go.  Stuck in Singapore in the late 1990s, he decided to do something radical: he stayed and took on a brand new field of sushi making.

His joint is now one of the "best kept secrets" of Singapore - where only the lucky few would know and have the chance to visit.  He never advertise and relies solely in word-of-mouth.  I happened to be sitting in front of him in his restaurant a day after he had an operation.  I asked him, why is he not delegating, despite the pain he had to endure standing for hours behind the sushi bar while his wound is not yet fully healed.  He said in his broken English that he tried, and he could not find any one to fit the bill. Therefore he had to return as soon as possible.  So Jiro-san has been working in this mode, 7 nights a week, for the last 15 years.

Jiro-san clearly takes his job seriously, you can see in the way he slices the fish to the way he places the sushi on the plates.  But he is also a struggling businessman.  Singapore rental market has gone up tremendously. When he started 15 years ago, he did not have the foresight that the rent cost will blow up out of proportion compared to his income.  He also did not have the money, the opportunity or the interest to buy the property he was renting - so he kept on renting the place since he started.

A couple of foreign expatriates were sitting in front of him last night.  I happened to be the only other customer left, and I over heard their comments:

The wife: ".....so, after all these years, you have never bought a property"....
The husband: "...if this things go up-and-up-and-up, you will suffer.....  If you were to buy this property a long time ago, the value of the property would have beaten any income from your sushi shop...."

It hit me when I heard those comments, how arrogant and unhelpful these two ignorant expatriates had been. Jiro has to endure the rent problem every night he closes his shop.  Yet he still have to ensure that he slices the best sushi for the customers, just like he did 15 years ago.  And here they were, a couple of ignoramus who has never done anything as good as he does, lecturing him about buying properties.

At that moment I felt like I needed to stand up and tell them, that if Jiro were to spend his time speculating on properties, we won't be sitting here enjoying his sushi. Also, if they can't say anything useful, please shut up.  But I decided to stand up, paid the bill and left.  I managed to escape the rest of the verbal garbage - but poor Jiro had to endure it until the end while serving the sushi.

Talk is cheap. People should do more, and talk less. 

The Transient Life

A bright red-blue-green Rosella flew in front of me as I stood in my back yard porch in Australia, looking at the mountains, holding to a glass of red wine.  To my surprise he landed on a branch not more than an arm’s length from where I stood.  He may have mistakenly thought that the wine glass was a cup of delicious corn kernels.  He stood there for a while, staring at me as I admire the amazing mix of colors of his feathers, wishing that I had real corn kernels to give.

As I stood there, I thought, this is how life should be……the bird in the tree, a glass of wine and the mountain at the background.   The bird flew away and I went back to my house.

I stood at the junction of 16th and K street of Washington DC.  I looked along the 16th street and saw the White House at the end of the street.  I walked across the street to the office that I had to go to, one block away.  The city was clean as always, the smell of coffee from the café next door was tempting.  The monuments and the flowers in the parks make the city feel cozy.  An African American lady who worked as the security guard of the office building greeted me with a smile.  She said – “how are you today?”.  I returned the gesture.  I met with 3 of my colleagues, an immigrant from China, an old Caucasian man, and an African American lady.  They told me that if I am hungry there is a very nice Indian food joint just around the corner.

As I stood among them, I thought, this is how life should be…..the beautiful city, a rich mix of culture. The meeting finished after a couple of hours and I made my way to the airport.

I alighted from bus number 10 in East Coast Road in Singapore.  I walked to a hawker center selling one of my family’s favorite foods, the vegetarian wanton noodle.  The stall lady-owner greeted me and asked how my family and I are doing.  I answered that we are doing well but we have just moved to Australia.  She asked me when will we return, and I said I do not know.  I ordered one dish and asked for a cup of my favorite tea to come with it.  She made me a slightly up-sized dish as a nice gesture.  I heard familiar noise of other hawkers working in the background as I enjoyed my comfort food.

As I sat there, I thought to myself, this is how life should be…..beautiful food, familiar people, familiar places.  The food was finished in no time and I rushed back home to pack up and return to Australia.

Everything in life is transient.  Love what you do, love who you are with, love everything around you.  

Finding Greatness

Last time I checked there are 7 billion people on earth, and counting. That is a steep growth from 3 billion just sixty years ago, and from less than a billion a century before.  Sometimes I wonder,  with so many bodies in production, would God be running out of stock one day and say - "no more soul to give, if you need a soul look in eBay, maybe someone is selling"

The human body is a superbly designed vehicle that is self governing and self repairing. Furthermore it is equipped with the mind, the software that helps the human race to be the dominating species in the world. The human beings can easily replicate - an average woman has more than 30 years of fertile age and only 9 months lead time to produce a baby.  Theoretically it is easy to get a population from 1 billion bodies to 7 billion, and equally easy to bring that to 70 billion.

So here is a question: would life be the same for you and me, whether there are 7 billion, or 70 billion, or 7 million people in the world?

The answer depends on whether you believe on a higher purpose.

I believe a body is assigned to every soul (I define "body" to include the mind). The soul is on earth with a purpose, and it needs the body to manifest it. The life purpose is never hidden or elusive. It is as clear as the sun, shining brightly. But our mind, that is created to help us survive in this world, is very obstructive. Our thoughts, dogma and emotion that came from the mind create the sand-storm and smoke that block away the clarity.

The modern world is a world focused on the mind. Education system and professional life afterwards reward the sharpest minds. Tools are created to sharpen it even further, or at least to help the mind make more detailed analysis at a faster pace. But as we focus on the mind, we also create more and more smoke and sand-storm that blocks away the clarity of our soul's purpose.  We have been doing this for so long that so many of us are lost souls, and so many have been born and left without finding the purpose.   Many people try to find the purpose for the soul by thinking even more. Unfortunately, no analysis, thinking or frameworks can help us obtain clarity for the soul, because the mind is not created for that.

Lost souls are harmful for the body, because it may lead the body to do things that it is not meant to do.  Naturally it will also be harmful for others and the earth....it is so easy to pick a few examples of people who harm others.  So if there are 7 billion lost souls in the world, that's bad and we would be better off to have only 7 million of them.  But if there are 7 billion souls with clarity of their purposes, that would be a wonderful thing. So the state of the world's well being is not in the left brain or right brain of every person. It depends on how many people of the 7 billion has the clarity of their life purpose.

When the soul finds that purpose, it would have found greatness. Greatness not in the sense of fame or financial wealth, although it could be a side effect. Greatness in a sense that the soul will find satisfaction and conviction in what it does. Greatness in a sense that there is a feeling that the universe is working to provide its support.  And greatness in a sense that the energy it brings inspires others and the environment around it.

As a parent I have asked myself how do I give my child the best passage to clarity? How do we reduce the exposure to man made smoke and sand-storm that prevents her from seeing the clarity?  I also asked myself on how do I overcome my bad habits, my thoughts and emotion that have created the smog in front of my own eyes?

Nature is the best teacher. Pollution in a city can be stopped within a day if the city decides to stop doing what it has been doing. In the same way the sand-storm and smoke that cloud our souls can clear up very quickly when there is stillness of mind.

After being in the world of noise for so long, creating stillness is no longer natural and it requires tremendous courage and faith. But it is worth the pursuit by every one of us, every one of the 7 billion people in the world. Afterall, within the stillness, there is greatness.

The Wise Buffalo

In the narrow and winding road an hour outside of Chennai, I was sitting in a car, having some conversation with my colleagues.  We felt rather tired after being trapped in Chennai's horrendous traffic for hours, but fortunately we finally reached the outskirt of the city.  The view around us was nice.  Around us are grass fields, growing temporarily to cover the plots of rice fields that were probably harvested a few months ago.  Cows and buffaloes were peacefully grazing, as our driver pass them by in our MPV.

In one part of the journey, a hundred meters ahead of our car, we saw a buffalo.  He seemed to have been tied to a rope by his owner just by the side of the road, so that he could graze while waiting for his owner to come back.  But as this buffalo took a break from his grazing, he decided to climb up the bank and stand in the middle of the road instead.  Our car approached him.  He saw us coming.  He looked at us with his peaceful eyes.  No anger, no fear, no excitement, no panic.  He was sending a simple message to the arrogant, noisy, ugly metal structure that was coming fast to bully him off the road: "I am not moving....."

So as we came close to him, our driver hit the break, turned his steering wheel to the right to slowly pass by him.  As our car left the spot, I said to my colleagues: "Something to learn from this buffalo.  We should always be able to look at someone in the eyes, stand our ground and say no....."

The dreadful "C" word

I have been traveling to India for business frequently in the last couple of years. It's a country that I enjoy visiting, for its rich history, depth of cultural heritage and great hospitality.  I have also been a huge fan of India's famous epics, the Mahabarata and Ramayana, and it is great to see the places that inspire these amazing stories. One main advantage of being very involved in developing businesses in India is that I get to see and visit places, meet people and observe things that many other people would not have the privilege to experience.


In one of the trips, I attended a logistics conference and listened to a captivating presentation done by a journalist. He did a recount of his 8 days of investigative journalism to tell the story of a life of an Indian truck driver. To do a credible story he decided to disguise himself as a truck driver's assistant, fully immersing himself to the task of delivering goods from Chennai (south of India) to Delhi (north of India). Unbeknownst to him, he would witness the level of inhumane hardship that the drivers had to face throughout the journey. He was so taken by his experience that he did a passionate presentation to raise awareness of this social issue, and managed to mesmerize the audience for more than 45 minutes.


His presentation was eye opening to most people, even to those who knew but chose to ignore. He described the poor hygiene condition the drivers face, the horrible abuse they receive on the road, the unaccounted risks to their lives due to poor safety standards and poor road conditions, their severe separation from their family, the little acknowledged psychological and physical side effects that include injuries or sexual diseases they contracted. He also highlighted in many ways the main cause and enabler of all these problems: the rampant corruption across the board.


Road conditions are poor because the construction budget that was made available went to someone's pocket instead. The abuse to the drivers happened because the state border patrol wants to have that extra money, otherwise he will block the vehicle from passing through. The poor truck condition were allowed to pollute the road and endanger the driver's safety, because the law enforcement authorities can be bought easily and cheaply. Corruption to society is like bacteria to our body: it takes life when the immune system is weak, and it can cause other illness to come in.


While corruption exists everywhere, it seems that it is not well understood.


First, most people like to think that there is a higher moral ground position against corruption. Many global corporations and some countries announce that they have "zero tolerance to corruption".  In practice most of them who wants to do business in India or trade with India will still use the services of those truck drivers, indirectly pay the border crossing bribes, close their eyes and ears to the hardship of the drivers, as long as they can distribute their goods. The problem with this hypocritical approach is that nobody gets to understand why and how the corruption happened in the first place. At the end,  it will be perpetuated or made worse, not better.


Second, most people thinks that criticism on corruption will help solve the problem. Some rating agencies publishes the annual analysis of the most corrupt countries in the world. The problem is that this type of analysis helps nobody, offers no solution, and does nothing in changing the behaviors of those who does the corruption in the first place.


Third, most people thinks that corruption is a black or white matter. A UK anti corruption act considers gift giving, or favor giving as an act of corruption and violators will be prosecuted under this law.  It also specifies that if one uses someone who uses someone who does gift giving, then one is still guilty for corruption. This applies in UK, or to anyone in the world who deals with the UK. The problem of creating a stupid law is that it will not be enforceable, and in the mean time it wastes everyone's time.   Business is built on relationship, whether it is done in UK or in India. Relationship involves some form of favors and gestures, whether we like to acknowledge it or not.


The governments, policy makers, corporate leaders and individuals should take a practical approach to corruption, not a philosophical  or a moral one.  Just like bacteria, corruption can be eradicated only through good hygiene and better immune system. Therefore in every country there has to be good organizational "hygiene", which involves transparency and regular processes of check and balance. There has to be strong immune system, by putting honest people at the key positions while in the mean time ensuring that nobody can stay in power too long.  Governance and policies are key to eradication of corruption, but only when it is made at a practical level.


As per the problem of truck drivers living condition in India, there is a solution. I have been a part of a government sponsored project to promote rail as an alternative mode of transportation in India. After intensive work for more than 1.5 years, we are nearing the implementation time.  This project has a powerful social impact: it will dramatically reduce the need of truck drivers to drive long distances.  This helps the life of these drivers as they can stay closer with their family, have a better lifestyle and have less exposure to the border corruption. It is just a little example that practical solutions are everywhere. We just have to start by acknowledging the problem, not pretending we are above it.


Pune to Mumbai, by road
Friday, July 20, 2012