Mati Lampu
Trip Start
Jun 02, 2007
1
20
47
Trip End
Ongoing
Medan, North Sumatra,
Indonesia
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Pardon my French, but after a few weeks in Medan, mati lampu can get really annoying.
Translated from bahasa Indonesia, mati = dead and lampu = lamp. Put them together and you have a major pain in the butt.
Mati lampu would be all right if it only happened once in a while. It's just part of the way Indonesia is; there's simply not enough electricity to keep up with the growing demand of the more than 220 million people who live in this country--it increases by nine percent every year. And when the power goes out, rubber time kicks in, stretching into a long, drawn-out period of darkness, boredom and tropical heat. No lights, no television, no stereo, no air conditioning. You simply adapt to it and find something to do that doesn't require electricity, like watching paint dry by candlelight.
In cities like Medan there are other ways to while away the time, like go the mall, where generators, massive beasts of machinery the size of trucks that grind and growl and spew out toxic carbon monoxide fumes, keep the electricity alive and the air conditioning humming so that life can go on as usual and the shopping frenzy can continue unabated by the vagaries of mati lampu.
I go to Sun Plaza, the nearest mall, where the clothes are just as pricey as in North America and a Starbucks is even more expensive-17,000 rupiah for a tall Sumatra, or two dollars for the smallest size. (It tastes the same here, by the way, though my friend who works at a Starbucks in Canada says Sumatra coffee actually comes from Costa Rica-they label coffees with different names to make them seem more exotic. The Sumatran tiger leaping across the label is nothing more than wily advertising, which disappoints me. But I digress.)
Sometimes even the malls are not immune to electrical blackouts. Suddenly, in the middle of the bustling commerce, out go the lights and a collective "awwww!" arises from the masses, as in "aww, not again!" But no one is really troubled by it; there's even some amusement in saying "aww!" all together as if watching a fireworks display in reverse. People simply mill around in the darkened shops before the generators kick in and things start moving again. It's a wonder the malls aren't looted, but it doesn't seem to happen.
The kids at the Australia Centre, where I am now teaching English, especially love to make noise when the lights flicker or go out, and I think we all secretly hope that maybe the generator won't work and we can have the day off. But the school has its own efficient new generator, and the darkness doesn't last for long. Alas! School continues, and the children go back to work nibbling their pencils or smiling at the silly western teacher who exclaims "Mati lampu!" in her strange Canadian accent.
Mati lampu is the talk of the town. As in Vancouver, when people talk about the weather, people in Medan talk about mati lampu:
"Did you get mati lampu last night?"
"No, luckily for some reason we haven't had it for a couple of days."
"Really? At our house the lights were off when I got home from work, then they came on again at one in the morning, then off again at eight. I couldn't see myself to put my makeup on!"
Smaller generators are available for houses, but they are expensive to buy and maintain. Most people don't have one, and neither do we at the teachers' house in Sei Petani, where I just moved in. When mati lampu hits-and it usually does in the evenings when I get home from work, for about four hours at a stretch-the house is shrouded in darkness, made even more gloomy by massive walls of bamboo surrounding it. I've come home from school after my last class at 8:30 to find the house dark and foreboding, and I have to fiddle with the lock and the gate to the main entrance by the light of my handphone, imagination working overtime in the dark, nervous that a thief is lurking in the shadows.
In the house there's not much to do but light some candles and wait it out; the light is too dim to read or write by, and I have only about an hour and a half on my laptop if it's charged up fully. Even then it's hard to write because it's so hot without the fans. At night, I just lie there in bed, despising the neighbours out the back who have a noisy generator that churns into the night, spluttering noxious fumes and fuelling their dangdut parties and their television set. Damn them! It's time to make friends so I can go over there.
One night Karyn, Peter, the head teacher, and I gathered at the table to have a few beers by the feeble light of our portable emergency lamp that takes all day to charge up and lasts about an hour before fizzling out.
Peter's theory about mati lampu corroborates with what I've read in the papers. He says it's because the city is growing too quickly for the antiquated city generators to keep up. Very few buildings are over two or three storeys, but the landscape of Medan is changing, now dominated by the concrete skeletons of large office buildings and hotels, operated on continually by cranes. At night, the new multi-storeyed but completely empty Marriott Hotel, a prime bombing target if there ever was one, is lit up like a Christmas tree, towering over the darkened neighbourhood.
Karyn said she just heard that a generator was being brought up from Jakarta, but it fell off the truck and into the river. They tried to hoist it out with a crane, but it was too late; the generator lay in the muck at the bottom of the river, completely destroyed. I don't know if the story is true, but I read in the Jakarta Post that the government has a new fast-track program to build 35 coal-fired power plants in Indonesia, two of which will be in Sumatra-one in the north, where we are, and one in the south-due to be operating by 2009. Perhaps it will be a good short-term solution for the mati lampu problem, but it's definitely not good for putting a stop to global warming.
There's also corruption-lots of it. North Sumatra is known to have the most corrupt government in Indonesia, a dubious distinction because the rest of the country is known for corruption; it's open knowledge amongst Indonesians, and the world for that matter. When mati lampu hit TASBI, I was told that the Chinese neighbour up the street, an influential businessman, had paid off the government so he could have his dinner party uninterrupted. It only takes a few million rupiah to keep the lights on. It's no coincidence, either, that the governor's house, a massive, gated colonial complex only a short distance away from the tin-roofed shantytown on the river, is lit up continually year round, with electricity-gobbling Christmas lights twined around every palm tree in the front yard.
Mati lampu is mainly for the underprivileged masses. It never happens at Malibu, the most high-end gated compound in Medan, and less at TASBI than in other areas. But for the rest of the population, it's lights off, heat up, and wait it out in the dark. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone to stage a protest. The general way of thinking is, what will be, will be-just light a candle and get on with it. People are too busy dealing with everyday life to protest the lights going off.
Well, that's enough writing for me. The lights just went out and the fan has stopped fanning me.
Mati lampu strikes again.
