Insecurity

Some friends of ours were robbed last night.

A back door was mistakenly left unlocked and while they were asleep, someone came into the house and took their laptop. Not only that, he (or she, I suppose) then searched for the computer's adapter, which was in a completely different room. A camera was also taken.

Here's the even scarier part--if you aren't going into it from inside the house, their backyard takes some serious effort to enter. the house looks tiny from the front but is built into a hill, so the lower level (living room, kitchen, one bedroom, bathroom, dining room) is huge and the backyard is surrounded by really high walls on three sides and two stories' worth of house on the fourth. It takes a ladder. Furthermore, they never leave doors unlocked.

One of our Indonesian coworkers says he thinks the thief was probably someone who was familiar with the house--a construction worker from the empty house next door, a day laborer the school hired or something like that.

The worst part is there's nothing they can do other than lock their doors from now on.

It's impossible to report anything to the police here because they're so corrupt. Indonesian citizens don't even trust the police. If our friends reported a robbery, they would not only have to pay several hundred dollars' worth of "fees" for an investigation that would never happen, they would also probably have to worry about an increased threat of future break-ins.

How horrible is that? I mean, I know I joked and complained about the Seward Police because they were bored and had a nasty habit of pulling over and harassing college kids for driving less than one mile over the speed limit or for stopping at an icy blind intersection when the sign only said "yield." (Oddly this behavior stopped when I got a Seward County license plate!) But bored cops will be bored cops, and I always knew if something ever really happened, the police were there to--as they saying goes--serve and protect. Law enforcement.

Here, there's nowhere to turn. People, and not just foreigners who are automatically viewed as wealthy, but all people here have nowhere to go if they need help! The government won't do anything about it--they're too busy dealing with their own corruption. It's kind of a vicious cycle, and I'm not sure where it all began. Some people say it stems from the Dutch colonization. I don't know. At any rate, it's awful.

Any expatriate with a car dreads the day they get into an accident. I think the only requirements to get a license here are money and a face to put on said license. People drive like lunatics. Motorcyclists drive like lunatics on a three-day crack binge. It's terrifying to drive at night in our little suburb because motorbikes will come barreling down the wrong side of the road, in the middle of the lane, no lights on whatsoever, and sometimes with as many as five people crammed on--including, usually, a baby or two. There is no such thing as right-of-way here. A motorcyclist like the one mentioned before could intentionally drive into our car and we'd be at fault. We have a car, we're foreign, therefore we're at fault.

A month or so ago, the same friend who was robbed last night was sitting in Jakarta traffic when a truck decided to merge across three or so lanes of gridlocked traffic. Said truck bumped lightly into our friend's car's side mirror. Our friend's car wasn't moving and was in no way at fault, but the guy got out of his truck and came over, screaming. He demanded money for the "damages" and tried ripping off the side mirror. Thankfully, traffic started moving so the guy had to go away, but...scary. And there's nothing our friend could've done. He was automatically at fault.

I'm tired. I want to come home.