Letter from Indonesia: mosquitoes and other PR stunts

Jakarta, Kamis (Thursday)

Some chaps gassed our kampung last Sunday.

The noise of a small electric motor at constant high revs pushed its way up and over the usual sounds of the inner-city village: The bass notes of adults, kids’ shrill voices, cries of the itinerant food and services sellers, the rumble of an occasional motorbike or car. A look out the window confirmed my suspicion: Clouds of white smoke were rising above the roofs of the houses lining the alley behind us. Yes, it was the bi-annual “gassing of the mosquitoes” — a ritual enacted by the local government to propitiate the annoying and dangerous Mosquito God or, more accurately, the Occasionally Voting Citizenry.

It seems a sensible idea, doesn’t it, to kill mozzies before they kill us, especially in a dengue fever “hotspot” with lots of excellent breeding grounds in the form of stagnant open drains, a fetid canal and prolific plant life, as well as plenty of ready victims, particularly little kids and the elderly?

Sadly, the whole event is a farce or, to call it by its modern name, a PR event staged for the purposes of convincing the public that the government is doing something in defense of their health.

Nevertheless, it’s quite a dramatic spectacle, at least in a sleepy kampung on a Sunday morning, with the somewhat devilish noise and the clouds of unpleasant-smelling smoke. I fled the house to the open space of the larger street that dissects the kampung while two chaps with machines that looked like weapons from a “Ghostbusters” movie criss-crossed the kampung’s alleys, flushing out residents or enveloping them in fog, as long as you paid the Rp 10,000 fee that was being asked for special attention to your part of the kampung (which meant that plenty of fetid drains were left untouched by the gas).

Looking down the alley to the small square that is home to a suitably small church (dear Islamic Defenders Front, the mayor of Bogor and other defenders of faiths, please don’t panic, there’s a mosque 50 m away) and a badminton court that doubles as a clothes line, there was nothing to see: Everything was obscured by a thick white fog, from which cheerfully emerged, waving her hands about and doing a little jig, one of the chubbier of the kampung’s small children. It was obviously quite good fun, being gassed by insecticide.

After about half an hour of dodging the supposed poisonous gas, I ventured back into the house. The first thing I saw was, you guessed it, a mosquito, flying lazily about. I assumed it was in its death throes and anticipated it spiraling to the floor in a final coup de grace signifying the triumph of mass public health measures over disease and ill health. And then it settled on my foot. I stared at it for a while, expecting it to totter sideways and go belly up. It didn’t. So I applied the usual technique – I slapped it – and produced a pool of my blood and its body parts. Perhaps this was a lucky rogue mozzie? No, another couple careened past, ready to take up breakfast where their colleague had left off. They seemed perfectly healthy. Assuming that the mozzies in my house were no tougher than the mozzies in the rest of the kampung, it appeared that the gassing was a waste of time.   But we felt that Something Had Been Done, which is all that matters to government.

Salam