15 Nov 2002

Mayor's blisters bear witness to tourism fall

Eric Ellis, Penestanan, Bali

NYOMAN Sada sees the impact of the Bali bombs on his blistered hands.
But the 36-year-old Balinese father of two girls is anything but a terrorist.
Rather, Sada is a symbol of a generation of Indonesians who emerged as a prosperous, democratic and moderate middle class that the Kuta tragedy has, in less than a month, bombed back to penury.
Before October 12, Sada earned $80 a day operating a tourist transport service, showing travellers around his beloved island. Now he has returned, by necessity, to work in a family rice paddy he hasn't farmed in 20 years.
"In just two days after the bomb, my business totally dried up," says Sada, who is also mayor of the village of Penestanan, near Bali's main cultural centre, Ubud.
He's been able to keep his cars for when things turn around, which he says won't be for at least a year.
But the change has been tough for the educated, English-fluent Sada.
His puffy hands are blistered from what is now alien work to him. He has to rise at 3am to get to the family paddy.
He has also been ill from a change in diet, which had become more Western because he could afford to buy what Balinese saw as luxury Western goods, such as chocolate bars and soft drinks. "My problems were your problems," he says, proudly pinching a paunch and pointing to a heart he says is full of cholesterol.
And his bleeding hands refuse to heal, despite coating them with a salve to ease the pain. His 62-year-old father, who has never stopped working the paddy, says the best medicine is to work on. "They will heal if you work," he advises his son. "They will become tough like mine."
Sada's situation is playing out in villages across Bali as people are forced to return to more traditional lives because the tourists they'd become rich hosting are staying away.
The issue has become a hot topic on talkback radio programs like Forum Merah Putih, where people like anthropologist Luh Ketut Suryani have said the bombing was a good thing because it would put Balinese back in touch with the land tourism and prosperity had caused them to forget.
Bali's suddenly straitened circumstances is also causing other problems. As thousands of Balinese service workers are suddenly made jobless, there has been a spike in petty crime and isolated cases of attacks on expatriate houses, which are perceived to be where money is kept.
One expatriate, an American, who has lived outside Ubud for five years, suffered a home invasion by seven youths last week.
They broke into his house while he slept and demanded money at knifepoint. He wasn't sure if they were Balinese or outsiders, Bali's euphemism for money-seeking Muslims from neighbouring Java.
The man has now hired two guards to patrol his house from dusk to dawn. "This is not the Bali the world knows,"he says. "This was the most peaceful place in the world."