Neng makes t-shirts at a local factory, earning $5 USD per day Even if I could leave, I wouldn’t want to.” All my friends are here and I can see them after work. “We don’t have a bathroom in our house and have to pay 1,000 rupiahs to use the public toilet. “The main problem with living here is that there’s no soccer field or place to play,” she continues.
I keep 10,000 for myself and give the rest to my mum.”ĭespite her situation, Neng says she is happy with her life. I earn 50,000 rupiahs a day (around $5 USD). “Now I wake up in the mornings and help mum cook food for the stall. I don’t know why – I didn’t do anything wrong,” she says. “I left school because my teacher was always angry at me. Now she works on her family’s food stall and at a small t-shirt factory in the slum. But she dropped out of school when she was ten years old. Neng looks like a typical teenager, with a trendy haircut and ‘Gangnam Style’ t-shirt, reflecting the latest Internet craze. The air is stale and the lanes smell of rubbish and sewage. Here, the only light comes from neon tubes and bare lights bulbs hanging from wires. In the densest areas, people have built across the top of the alleyways, cutting out the sun altogether and plunging the lanes into perpetual night time.
Sunlight is in short supply throughout the slum, due to the narrow alleys and tall buildings. The ground floor homes are reasonably well constructed but as they ascend, they become increasingly makeshift, with walls and floors made from wood and scrap metal. The slum is one of the most densely populated in Indonesia, rising to four stories in places. Unlike other children her age, she rarely gets to see the sun. She lives and works on Venus Alley, a lane in the notorious Jembatan Besi slum in Jakarta, Indonesia.
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