We have a good 5 days of holiday for Idul Fitri here in Jakarta. The streets are clear of traffic and it's quiet because about 80% of the people living here in Jakarta have already made the trip back to their kampungs. We have the city all to ourselves. Joy!
We drove ourselves, for the first time, to Grand Indonesia. Grand Indonesia is a huge shopping mall and it's next to Plaza Indonesia which is an even huge-r mall. They're just across the street from each other but there isn't a sheltered walkway betwen the two. It started pouring while we were in one of the malls and we couldn't make our way back to our car, which was parked in the other mall. While we were contemplating whether we should brave the rain and make a run for it, up came 2 little boys with an umbrella offering to ferry us across for a small fee. How enterprising I thought! We took them up on the offer and they sheltered us across the street. After our brief encounter with them, I was gushing on about how enterprising these kids were and how they were working so hard to get a little bit of pocket money before Lebaran. That was until Stephen burst my little bubble. Stephen speculated that these boys probably were recruited in their village by some man who's putting them to work. While these boys were running around getting drenched in the rain, this evil evil man is probably sitting comfortably in a Starbucks somewhere sipping on his nice hot cuppa coffee, waiting for the boys will have to hand over their hard-earned cash to him at the end of the day.
Darn. I hope that's not true. So I'm going back to Grand Indonesia again today and hope that it'll rain so I can get to talk to one of these little boys with their umbrellas and find out the truth.
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