“Yes. Why don’t you come on up here and I’ll put you to work,” David replied.
Several weeks later Leigh arrived in Blimbingsari. David did a double take when he first saw him; Leigh looked so different. He had lost weight, shaved his beard, and cut his hair. He was eager to get to work doing whatever David needed him to do. David soon had Leigh at work supervising the building of the dam.
As construction of the dam neared completion, pipes had to be run several miles down to Blimbingsari. However, the path of the pipeline ran through two Hindu villages. The residents of these two villages regarded the Christians of Blimbingsari with great suspicion, and David had to encourage the leaders of Blimbingsari to negotiate with the leaders of the two villages. It was not easy for them at first, but as the leaders of the three villages talked to each other, a level of trust developed among them. Before long the leaders of Blimbingsari had come to an agreement with the other two villages. They would supply the two villages with water from the pipeline in return for the residents from the two villages not sabotaging the pipeline. Before long, water was flowing down the pipeline to Blimbingsari, and concrete was being mixed and poured into the forms for the foundation of the new church.
As work continued on the church, Ron and Meg Hewitt arrived from Sydney. Ron was a builder, and he and David had been friends at the Waverly Methodist Mission. The Hewitts had come to Blimbingsari so that Ron could help out with the building. David was delighted to have them around, and he and Ron would sit together in the evenings reminiscing about life back in Sydney.
One day Ron was working on a beam at the mezzanine level of the new church, about ten feet above the ground, while David was up higher on a scaffold. As he worked, David heard a thump below him, like the sound of a sack of sand being dropped. As he gazed down, he saw Ron lying on the concrete below. David clambered down from his perch on the scaffold and ran to Ron. Somehow Ron had fallen off the beam and hit his head hard on the concrete. He was unconscious and bleeding, but he was still breathing. Pak Nyoman Yusef, foreman on the church construction site, immediately jumped onto his motorcycle and headed for Melaya, saying that he would be back shortly with a car to transport Ron to the hospital. However, no one in the village owned a vehicle other than a motorcycle.
David tried to keep his unconscious friend warm and comfortable as they waited for the foreman to arrive with transportation. Two hours passed before Yusef finally arrived with a bemo, a local taxi that was basically a small SUV with a canopy on the back covering two wooden seats for passengers. David and Yusef carefully loaded Ron into the back of the taxi, and then David and Ketut Suweria climbed in, and they were off to the nearest hospital. David and Ketut Suweria cradled Ron’s head in their arms as they bounced down the rugged road from Blimbingsari.
“Sorry, we can’t take him here. The accident didn’t occur in this region,” the stone-faced supervisor told the men when they finally arrived at the hospital.
David could hardly believe what he was hearing. “But he could die if he doesn’t get to see a doctor now,” he protested.
The supervisor just stared coldly at him, and no amount of reasoning would change his mind. There was nothing to do but head toward Denpasar and hope that the next hospital would treat Ron. As they raced on, however, David began to have doubts as to whether his friend would make it. By now a large pool of crimson blood lay on the floor of the taxi, and Ron’s breathing was getting shallower as the minutes ticked by. Before the taxi reached the next hospital, Ron died, his head cradled in David’s arms.
David was devastated. His friend was dead, and now he would have to break the news to Ron’s wife, Meg. But before heading back to Blimbingsari, they drove to Denpasar to leave Ron’s body at the morgue there.
Meg Hewitt broke down, convulsed by deep sobs when she learned of her husband’s death. David and Carol tried to comfort her as best they could, and the next day David escorted Meg to Denpasar, where they made arrangements to fly Ron’s body back to Sydney. David then accompanied Meg on the flight to Australia.
When he finally arrived back in Blimbingsari from Australia, David was still trying to make sense of Ron’s death. Things weren’t supposed to have worked out this way! Still, while in Australia David learned that Ron had a history of blacking out, and he supposed that Ron had blacked out while on the building site and had fallen headfirst to the concrete. David knew that the best thing he could do, and the thing that Ron would have wanted him to do, was to carry on and finish building the new church.
David was soon wondering whether finishing the project would be possible. The men refused to show up on the job site. Every Balinese person knew that the area around Blimbingsari was the place of the evil spirits (which is why the location had originally been called Alas Rangda), and it was obvious to the men that an evil spirit inhabited the building site. How else could such a thing have happened to Ron? If there was an evil spirit on the job site, the workers would not return to work.
Each morning David got up and went to work on the new church. He worked alone, hoping that his example would encourage the men to come back to the job. But after two weeks no one had shown up to work, and David was beginning to wonder whether the men would ever come back. At this rate it would take him many years to finish the project by himself.
Chapter 11
The Reality of Poverty
Do you need some help?”
David looked down from the scaffold he was standing on to see Made Wenton, a young man from the neighboring Hindu village. He climbed down and talked to Made, who explained that he wanted to earn some money and had heard that David desperately needed help on the building job in Blimbingsari. David put the young man straight to work.
The sight of Made Wenton working with David on the church building site had an impact on the village. Slowly over the next several days, men began showing up to work at the site, and things got back into full swing. David was relieved—and surprised that a Hindu had shown the Christians that they had nothing to be afraid of.
The water that now flowed down from the dam into the village was beginning to impact the community. Until now the people had lived at a subsistence level. Being dependent as they were on the seasonal rains to nourish the seedlings they planted, they were able to grow only one crop a year on their land. And if the rains were late coming, it meant that they could not grow a crop that year. But now, with an ample water supply, they were able to irrigate their fields whether the rains came or not. Better yet, instead of growing one crop a year, they could now grow two crops a year.
Despite the improvement the water supply had brought to the economics of the village, David was concerned about the level of poverty that still pervaded the community and, as he had noted on his trips to Java, was pervasive throughout most of Indonesia. As he talked to people in the village and closely watched how they went about things, he began to see that this poverty arose not because people were lazy—far from it. The Indonesian people he observed were incredibly hard working. Rather, people were born into poverty with no opportunity to ever rise above it. The problem arose because most people did not own the land on which they grew their crops. Instead, they were tenant farmers, who turned over the greater share of their crop to the landowner in return for being allowed to farm the land. If a farmer gave 60 percent of his crop to the landowner, he was left with 40 percent with which to feed his family. And since he could grow a crop only once a year, there was a period each year when the fields were fallow and not producing anything.
To tide them over during these periods, the tenant farmers would borrow money from the landowner, who in turn took a greater percentage of their crop to pay the money back. Over time this approach snowballed into massive indebtedness, where the debt owed to the landowner was passed from one generation to the next. As a result, when a child was born into a tenant-farming family, that child was already in debt to the landowner, with no way of ever breaking the cycle. Instead, the child would work for the landowner, possibly in a factory, or struggle along through life and pass on more debt to his or her children.
Obviously, being able to now grow two crops a year was going to help some, but it wasn’t going to break the cycle. Something else was needed. People needed a way to break out and stay out of the cycle. David knew that simply granting money to farmers to pay off their debts was not the answer. Yes, it got the farmers free of debt, but it provided no mechanism for them to stay out of it, and before long they would be back where they started—ensnared in debt.
In the evenings when the girls had gone to bed, David and Carol would sit by the light of a kerosene lantern and discuss the whole issue of poverty, seeking to understand its nature more deeply and come up with solutions to it.
Then one day as David was on his way to supervise work at one of the building sites in the village, Ketut Suwira excitedly stopped David and told him the good news that his wife was pregnant. David’s mind immediately drifted to the debt that the child would inherit, and after congratulating Ketut Suwira on his wife’s pregnancy, David asked, “What could you do with your spare time to make some money?”
Ketut Suwira had not been anticipating the question, and he had to think for a few moments. Eventually he replied, “My wife is very good at sewing.”
Ketut Suwira talked with David about the kinds of things his wife sewed and what she would need so that she could do more sewing. Before long the two men had come up with a plan. David would buy Ketut Suwira’s wife a new sewing machine with which she would sew dresses, and then Ketut Suwira would sell the dresses to generate income for the family. Ketut Suwira was very excited.
“There’s just one condition,” David added. “I won’t give you the money for the new sewing machine. I’ll loan it to you, and you can pay me back a little at a time from the money you make from the dresses.”
Ketut Suwira agreed to the terms, and soon his wife was busy sewing dresses, which he then sold throughout the surrounding area. Ketut Suwira was delighted with the income he was earning from the venture. No longer did he have to rely on loans from the landowner or moneylenders when times were lean. Now he was earning money that would help him and his family through those times. It wasn’t long before Ketut Suwira had paid David back the money he had borrowed to purchase the sewing machine.
David talked to Wayan Mastra about the approach, and the bishop encouraged him to make more small loans. Wayan also told David that he knew of several others on Bali with impressive business plans but no money to put them into action. On Wayan’s recommendation, David made loans—some of them for several thousand dollars—to these people. Among those he loaned money to was John Panca, who used the money to set up one of Bali’s first travel agencies. David also continued to make smaller loans to the residents of Blimbingsari.
Each village in Bali had its own unique hierarchy, and Blimbingsari was no different. David was aware of this and did not want to upset that hierarchy by being seen to play favorites with people in the village, loaning money to some and not to others. Thus the loans he made to people in the village were made after consultation with the village elders. When a person received a loan, as far as he or she knew, the money came not from David but from the Bali church.
Pak Nyoman Yusef, foreman on the construction projects, was an early recipient of one of the loans. When he wasn’t working on the building site, Yusef would spend his time collecting coconuts. He would wander about through the surrounding countryside finding coconuts and loading them into his oxcart. Back in Blimbingsari he would shuck the coconuts to remove their fibrous outer skin and then stack the shucked coconuts in a huge pile behind his house. Then buyers would come from Melaya and purchase his coconuts and ship them to Java, where they would be turned into coconut oil. Of course, the buyers from Melaya would offer to pay Yusef only a small portion of what his coconuts were actually worth, but there was not much Yusef could do about the situation. He needed the money, and if he didn’t take their price, how was he going to get the coconuts to the factories in Java to sell?
