Dear friends in my supporting churches:

Asep walked to the next car, energetically strumming his battered guitar, his entourage of three other kids clapping their hands and not missing a beat as they launched into their next song, all the while looking plaintively through the window at the driver, who eventually rolled down the window just enough to pass out a few coins. Mairioji, the group’s banker, reached out for the offering, and the band moved on to the next vehicle stopped at the busy Jakarta intersection.

These children live on the streets of Indonesia’s capital city, a sprawling megalopolis of more than 11 million people. You may have seen on television the recent images of flooding–the latest in the archipelago nation’s painful litany of disasters. But every day is a disaster for these kids. Having fled or been pushed out of abusive homes, they take refuge under bridges and in abandoned buildings, finding solidarity and safety with each other. They earn money for food–and often for drugs that provide them comfort on lonely and hungry nights–by singing at stop lights or on the city’s decrepit buses. Their main songs are about the difficulties of being poor, and a plea to God to show them the pathway to heaven.

Given their vulnerability to all sorts of dangers on the streets of Jakarta, Church World Service sponsors a program that provides the kids with education about HIV/AIDS and a safe place to crash for a few hours or a night. As part of a three-week trip assignment in southeast Asia, I spent a day with the program and its kids, photographing them at work on the streets of Jakarta.

As they periodically counted the coins and few dirty bills they collected from their audiences, the kids decided I made a good member of their team. Drivers and bus passengers are evidently more generous when there’s a foreigner pointing a camera at them. The kids said they’d share their take with me if I kept on taking photos of them and their patrons. If I ever need a new job, I’ll keep that in mind.

Most of my time in Indonesia was spent in Aceh and Nias, areas affected by the 2004 tsunami (and, in the case of Nias, a devastating earthquake that followed three months later). Despite the huge scale of the tragedy, there’s good news in Aceh these days. The tsunami broke through decades of violence and distrust between the central government and Aceh’s people, most of whom had long backed a separatist movement. The two sides signed a peace agreement in Helsinki in 2005, and last December Aceh’s citizens held their first election, choosing as their new governor a former rebel who was in prison when the tsunami hit, but the giant wave battered down the walls allowing him and all the other prisoners to go free.

Part of what has made peace possible in Aceh is the massive wave of solidarity that followed the well-publicized destruction. Without resources for reconstruction, peace wouldn’t have happened in Aceh. Your generous contributions in the wake of the tsunami have really made a positive difference.

Unfortunately, the daily disaster of homelessness, violence, and abuse that plague poor children in Jakarta and so many other cities doesn’t get the same attention as the tsunami, and groups like Church World Service struggle for funding to keep open the doors of programs that reach out in Christ’s name to those at the margins. CROP Walks need more feet. We all need to take ever more seriously our faith’s demand that we stand with the children, be they singing at a stop light in Jakarta or going hungry for food or love just down the street from our churches.

As always, thanks for your support and prayers.

Paul

Paul Jeffrey
pauljeffrey@earthlink.net
www.kairosphotos.com/pauljeffrey