Families anxious over transmigration plan

[This is the same program I believe that Ny.Agl (30) was a part of. She died on 12/1.)

Fri, 12/05/2008
Kartini is counting the days left before her family leaves their modest home, one of many along an alley in the densely populated Semper Barat, North Jakarta, for a transmigration camp in Kalimantan.

As the date to send Jakartans off to transmigration camps in remote areas in South and Central Kalimantan provinces approaches, the successful applicants wait anxiously to be called.

"Lately, I have been sleeping restlessly, every night, wondering when we will be sent off," Kartini, 40, a mother of three girls, told The Jakarta Post on Monday.

She said her nervousness and anxiety began shortly after her husband, Suharto, 42, applied to join the, program, which will take urban sprawl to Central Kalimantan, in early November.
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"For everyday meals, we are now counting on the money we get from selling the things left in the house that we can not take anyway to the transmigration site," she said.

The couple have sold their gas stove, refrigerator, washing machine and water dispenser, as well as their small brick-house, for a total of Rp 13 million to see them through until it comes time to leave.

"A neighbor has paid for that TV," Kartini said, pointing to the TV being watched by her teenage daughter Elvira, adding that she had packed clothes, pots-and-pans, as well as the children's books into sacks, ready to leave.

Suharto has been unemployed since he lost his job as payment collector for the state-owned power company PT PLN last year.

Kartini used to work in a garment factory. "Factories these days prefer workers in their 20s. It's getting harder for me to find a job."

Kartini and her family aren't the only soon-to-be transmigrants feeling anxious.

"I have been going back and forth to the North Jakarta transmigration office asking for a departure date," Acim, 49, of Tugu Utara, North Jakarta, said. Mid December is the most definite answer he has received so far.

Acim, who has been living in Jakarta for the past 30 years, currently in a rented house, first applied to be a transmigrant in 2002.