help wanted: kids!

Eating sweets that come in a banana leaf sealed with a traditional staple, I was in a coffee shop Sunday morning, the TV blasting away with its usual omnipresence, when I was winged back to childhood memories of watching weekend cartoons. That and being forced to dig my parents sprinkler system when I was in second grade. All that digging and sweating and pvc cement might seem like a strange association to make, but as you might expect, Indonesia TV is rarely what you expect (and frequently hazardous to the health of young ones).

However, instead of cartoons, the children of Indonesia can look forward to a tabloid-style program, loosely translated to ‘Kid World,’ that mostly seems to extol the virtues of working.

The first segment was a tight little piece about a family of brothers and sisters who go wading around some of the ‘rivers’ in Jakarta to collect a certain type of water-growing plant. The best word to describe Jakarta would probably be swamp so I feel obligated to scare quote. These stalks, nourished at the bosom of Jakarta’s runoff, when dry are used to weave mats, something I am sure these lucky kids get to play blindman’s bluff for the privilege of doing.

I would get bogged down here, but why waste time when the next segment is coming, right, at, you!

The next piece is about a special place that all Indonesian children dream, bi-nightly, of being magically transported to. Undoubtedly a land of dreams, in this town the local elders have decided to sink their community activity funding into building child-sized becaks to be peddled around a child-sized course. I think somewhere between the shot of the local welder fashioning mini becaks and a 7 year old negotiating hard with a fare, you could really see how lucky these kids are. I should be clear, becak-driving is one of the lower rungs of the Indonesia employment ladder. Any life as a becak driver categorically involves poor dental hygiene, one of those really long-term sunburns, emphysema (though this issuance extends to much of the populace), several traffic accidents; and all this in only the base package!

Though, when I take a step back from the fact that children’s TV programming is openly plugging child labor, I realize how much I just cannot wait to have kids of my own, so they can love life in their highly-competitive, by-admission nursery platform (for when the word ‘school’ is a scosh too traditional).