The beggar women of Ubud have become an integral part of
the landscape. With a plastic bag of belongings balanced on
their heads, babies at the breast and toddlers at their sides,
they crouch on the sidewalks around town with dusty palms
outstretched. People say they’re organized by a Mafia
that rotates them through different tourist centres by truck
at night. Others say they come from a village where begging
is an established old tradition. I wanted to get to the bottom
of this; what was the real story of the Ubud beggar women?
The trail led quickly to Daniel, a retired Swiss banker who
encountered the beggar women during a year-long sabbatical
in Ubud four years ago. Curious and concerned, he drove a
motorbike through Karangasem to try and find out where they
came from. It took him three days to locate the area of Muntigunung
where most of Bali’s beggars originate. What he learned
about their lives inspired him to return permanently to Bali
and to set up a long-term program, together with many friends
in Bali and abroad, to help lead the villages out of poverty.
Bali is a land of milk and honey for some Balinese, and dust
and despair for others. In the arid mountains between Amed
and Tejakula are, among others, 34 small settlements where
about 5,500 people exist in the direst imaginable poverty.
In the dry season, there is no water at all –- no permanent
rivers, streams or springs. Most families have a small, uncovered
cistern which loses most of the collected rainwater through
leakage and evaporation. So the women and children walk between
two and five hours every day on steep trails to the coast
or to Lake Batur to collect 25 litres of water -– a
heavy load for anyone, but especially for a malnourished woman
walking uphill with a baby in her hip in temperatures that
reach 40 degrees.
“We made a rough calculation of the families who must
collect water for the seven to eight month dry period,”
explains Daniel. “We came to the conclusion that literally
millions of hours a year were being spent on journeys to collect
water. Their only other option is to purchase water from a
dealer at high prices. If we had to carry water for hours
every day in those conditions, we wouldn’t have enough
energy to work either.”
For years, the women have been organizing themselves into
teams which each go to different tourist centres. They walk
four hours to the nearest bemo stand, drive hours more to
their destinations, and beg and live on the streets until
they have enough money to feed their families for a few more
days. Eighty percent of these people have never attended school
and are illiterate in any language. There’s no access
to health services; infant and maternal mortality are very
high. The men drag a few crops from the reluctant earth during
the rainy season, but hardly enough for their own needs; there’s
not much left to sell. Literally the only income these villages
can generate is from begging, which brings in about Rp 100,000
a month per person –- well below the official poverty
level. The work ethic is a foreign concept in communities
where chronic dehydration and malnutrition go hand in hand
with isolation and ignorance. Begging has indeed become a
tradition here.
Leading these communities to self-sufficiency is a long, slow
journey. “The biggest learning point for me has been
not to rush toward a solution. Development must be slow and
organic in order to be socially responsible,” says Daniel.
“We research everything thoroughly, consult with the
community and then put one small project in place. Any problems
that arise from that are solved before replicating the project
in other villages. It will probably take about three years
to bring each village to some kind of self-sufficiency.”
Working with highly reputed Indonesian Yayasan Dian Desa,
Daniel has spent the past three years researching the conditions
in the villages and consulting with the villagers about their
priorities. Unsurprisingly, the people’s primary concerns
were water and income generation. The initial in-depth study
took four months and included professionals from many fields.
A plan to pump water from the coast or dwindling Lake Batur
was found to be unviable due to the high cost of fuel for
the pump and the difficulty of maintaining 25 km of pipes.
The simplest solution is usually the best in developing areas;
it was decided to build rainwater cisterns in each village.
First, each family’s tank was renovated and now holds
enough water for about three months. But this isn’t
enough to see people through the dry season. Large, covered
communal tanks holding 180 – 280 cubic metres of water
were designed and have almost been completed in five villages.
The water collection roofs were strategically designed for
use at a later stage to provide shelter for meeting or production
venues, a village school or training centre. From next year,
800 people will have enough water for drinking, cooking, washing
and small-scale gardening all year round. Eventually, all
the villages will have a tank.
Dian Desa also addressed the drinking water issue by introducing
the Sodis (www.sodis.com) water purification method to Bali.
This simple, sustainable technique uses heat and ultra-violet
rays from sunlight to kill bacteria in the rainwater within
six hours.
“The village has to participate if they want a water
tank. We require that each community clean up all the plastic
waste in the village and provide the labour to build the tanks.”
Bringing water to the villagers is the first step on their
path to self-reliance. Next will come livelihood development.
Households will learn to produce and process products grown
with waste water delivered by a drip/trickle irrigation system
to optimize scarce water resources. Markets will be found
for their products.
There are very few beggar women in Ubud these days. They are
back in their village learning to lead treks for tourists
-- along the same steep trails they used to follow on their
journey to town. Daniel and his friends look forward to the
day when women from all these villages will be able to generate
more income in their own environments than they can from begging
and create a brighter future for their children.
The Buddha said, “Wisdom and Compassion are like two
wings. You cannot fly with one alone.” It’s wise
to build cisterns, but until the new programs are in place
these people have to eat. Regardless of government decrees,
compassion dictates that we share a few rupiah with them until
they can rise out of the dust.
