Papua comes alive on Day 5

I joined the last half-day of the conference not because I expected to hear anymore interesting subjects debated, but did not want to miss my last chance to talk with the women delegates.  I am glad I came because I had the most interesting- and intense because it was all in Bahasa- discussion with the two delegates from Papua.  Once I learned they were from Timika, the site of controversial copper and gold mining company Freeport, I struggled to pace the deluge of questions that aroused in me.  Listening to this aged woman opine about the current state of native Papuans, I learned about the positives and negatives of Freeport’s presence in Papua (significant assistance to public health and education vs. vast destruction of forests and pollution), the widespread discrimination against native Papuans by police and Indonesians who have moved to Papua, the lack of jobs for natives because of this influx, the pervading poverty in those communities, and the incredibly high rate of HIV/AIDS that she emphasized with a story about a three-year-old girl she knows with the virus.  When I told her that I worked for a family planning NGO in Sumatra I was abashed at her immediate refusal, declaring that ‘Papua doesn’t need family planning, give it to Java and Sumatra, but our population is almost gone.’  This angry plea was enough to make clear the situation faced by Papuans; it’s desperate.

Despite the tone of the conversation, it also turned out that our presence sitting next to each other happened to be a gold mine for the photo-zealous delegates, and they did not hesitate to repeatedly weasel in around use and force smiles (or if you notice from the photo below, only I bowed to those requests).  Our presence in Jakarta was equally foreign.  I think it is the only posed photo I got on my camera during the whole conference, I wanted to remember her after that conversation.  There is another branch of the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association on Papua and I never know when I may have the opportunity to travel there.