♥ A SUNNY LIFE ♥

My family has been living in Kalimantan (Borneo) since 1990, at first we lived in Sangatta, a coal mining town, about 193 miles from Balikpapan, then in 2003 we moved here. Even though Balikpapan is not the capital of East Kalimantan, it is much more developed than Samarinda, the capital. I’ve only lived in Balikpapan for short period of times; the longest was 3 months because I used to work in Jakarta.

Balikpapan today is much more crowded than I remember; traffic is a nightmare especially with those thousands of motorbikes on the street. They’ll cut thru traffic the way the want it and whenever they wanted, almost giving me a heart attack! The other driver in their car and taxies doesn’t help either (by the way, they call those public transportations as taxi here). Although my father is a very good driver it is still giving me the chills to see how bad people drive here. Since I have Alex, I’m more nervous with the way others drive.

Another thing that strongly disappointed me from Balikpapan is the way PLN (the national electricity company) has been doing power shut off to different parts of town daily! In where my parents now lives, Balikpapan Baru, we have the power off for approximately over 5 hours once every other day, sometimes it’s in the morning and sometimes at night until 10 PM. Thus, nearly every household here own a ‘genset’ (generator set) to power their homes, unfortunately the one we have right now cannot supply enough power to light every thing in the house such as the air conditioner, so only one air conditioner that can run but at night, it’s impossible to power it since we have to use more lights.

What is more ridiculous is the way PLN still charge these people. They reason that they don’t have enough power to supply the whole city, even including Samarinda and Sangatta area. My brother even once wrote to Kompas (the national newspaper) and they published his letter about how PLN still charge us as if we use normal wattages every month.

I can’t help but comparing how people will react to this in the States. The electricity company will definitely be sued by public if this were to happen over there. What about those people that cannot afford to buy a generator set? I saw on the news in Jakarta that some people already did a demonstration for the same thing. Seems like the so-called electricity crisis not only hit Balikpapan areas…I just cannot understand how on earth this country that has so many potentials and natural sources has an energy crisis. Perhaps, corruption had crippled our country. How sad!