Let us dare to test
God’s resources…
Let us ask Him to
kindle in us and keep aflame that passion for the impossible
that shall make us
delight in it with Him,
till the day when we
shall see it transformed into a fact.
Stuck by these
words I look back on my first week in Jakarta. I am sitting on the roof of my
new home, enjoying the airflow in a this hot city.
It’s a new
season! After coming back from Jakarta last Christmas I knew that Jakarta was
my next step to take. A time of preparing, period of transition, wrapping up my
live in Bandung and goodbyes followed. It was a weird realization that (almost)
all of my belongings fit in 1 car. Realizing that I got a ‘real’ job for the
first time in my life, making the switch from language learning into this new
step of being involved in that where my heart is beating for.
You have to
understand for me as a girl from a village in the Netherlands with ‘only’ 50.000
inhabitants, Jakarta feels pretty overwhelming. And eventhough in the last year
and a half I got used to live in the 7 million city Bandung, still Bandung feels
like a dot on the map in comparing to Jakarta.
Just to
give you a picture of the daily craziness that is surrounding me. Here some
facts:
Jakarta
fits 51 times in the Netherlands, size wise.
Jakarta
counts 13 million people, and the Netherlands 16,5 million…
You can do
the math yourself ;)
This week
walking down the streets I feel like an ant, it seems that the city is
swallowing me, and its buildings are big giant ugly monsters that stare down at
me. And in the midst of it rich and poor live and exist right next to each
other. The difference between rich and poor here is so big, that I can’t wrap
my head around it and I wonder how to bridge. I try but it’s too much. Being
rich here means you live in more wealth than the queen of the Netherlands, and
when your poor your daily income is barely enough to feed your family, not even
1 euro a day. Think about it what you can buy for 1 euro in Holland.. even
though things here are cheaper. But take in into your context. And think you
and your family had to eat from that, pay the rent for the house in the slum
and send your children to school…
And where I
am at a place where I can enjoy the luxury of AC, still my body has a hard time
adjusting to the heat. In hot days it can rise above 40 degrees. Not that it’s
all from the sun, but the pollution adds
up. On some days you can see the smog hanging
in the sky, like a fog over the city. Yuk, realizing that that is what I breath
in every second of the day…
..But I am
still able to pull myself back, but how many of these beautiful people are
wandering down the streets, nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, not knowing that
they have the freedom to decide to not run into the arms of their abusive
boyfriend. Working hard for a less than scratch and living in an inheritance of hopelessness.
Yet in all the
giants I face, in my adjustments, in my work, in my personal struggles. Those
giants who like to scream: WE ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO DEFEAT and in the midst of what
I call ‘Jakarta craziness’: I have faith, I believe, and I know that it only
takes the size of a mustard seed…
