Just in case, you, KawaNina/readers, haven’t figured out of what my daily work involved in, I will inform you here then. I’m one of the consultants for Ministry of Public Works and Housings of Republic Indonesia. I joined the team since 2005, as their publicist and one of the website managers. Mostly, I handled the journalism stuffs for this socialization team.

Sometimes I’m sent to the field and oversee some places all over Indonesia: Bogor City/District and Bandung City/District in West Java Province, Semarang City in Central Java Province, Yogyakarta in Special Region of Yogyakarta Province, Gresik District in East Java Province, Makassar/Ujung Pandang City in South Sulawesi Province, and Manokwari District in Papua Barat Province. No duty-travel to cities/districts in Kalimantan, Nusa Tenggara, Sumatra, and other area of Sulawesi and Papua Island yet, though..

Well, the team is dealing most with urban problems: poverty alleviation, people empowerment, gender equality, livelihood, and slum. I, myself, am interested in these urban problems. Say: community empowerment, slum areas, resilient cities, disaster risk reduction, and geospatial analysis. It’s very interesting topic to learn, I tell you.

IMO, urban life is so complicated because of its heterogeneous characters in the community. You may say, most of urban people are so eager to achieve something to make their lives better, so they readied themselves to learn fast, do more, and work harder. They’re more receptive and adaptive to changes, more open to new things–technology, information, value of life, and so on. In other hand, more and more suburbs grow into urban area. Suburbs people are more like a sponge, they absorb things (information, even ideology and lifestyle) much faster than urban people do. This “culture shock” could create new problems, in fact, adding their existed-already problems.

I learned that, there are efforts to bridge these problems, so they will no longer be problems to the community–of urban, suburb, even rural areas. These effort must be done by the people itself (bottom-up planning), as well as by the government (top-down planning). And most of all: supportive regulations, and . Without which, we’ll just be echoes in the wind.

Anyway, since today forward I will post more entries about the related topic. Not only about slum in Indonesia, but the world. May it be lessons learned from other countries as well. I will post entries both in English and bahasa Indonesia. I’m doing this for learning purposes. And I may write about the topic myself later. 🙂