The Garbage Man of Wamena
pjdillon@attglobal.net

Sitting on the top floor balcony of the Manokwari Wind music bar and restaurant, drinking in the sweeping views of the Jayapura harbor-front on Saturday, it was easy to forget the ugly realities of the previous few days.
We’re only a 45 minute flight – and a airport commute of similar length – removed from Wamena, the only substantial settlement in the Baliem Valley highlands, but it might as well be a different century, a different planet.
Last Friday night was spent listening to the harrowing tales of street kids living rough in that district capitol, a place where all the ugliest aspects of “modernity” collide with the millennia-old pastoral existence of the tiny farming communities that dot the landscape.
Here the shiny Land Cruisers of the elite, top civil servants, timber barons, the trades who get fat off the inflated prices of all commodities here, thunder past craggy-faced men in feathered crowns and swallow-boned old women bent double beneath loads of yams and firewood. A group of young toughs in Philadelphia 76ers caps and surfing shorts loiter on a darkened street-corner seemingly oblivious to the man passing by, naked except for a penis sheath and face-paint, a black umbrella tucked beneath his arm.
This is the end of the world but the girls fear nothing but the Garbage Man.
The Garbage Man cruises Jl. Irian, a 250 meter-long strip of tiny grocery stores, pirated DVD shops and rooming houses that passes for ‘downtown’ here, as part of his regular route. Here the girls alternately loiter in the shadows or ply the trade, selling themselves off for the equivalent of six US dollars to the men who hide behind the mirrored windows of their automobiles and the official red licence plates that mark them for senior officials of a notoriously corrupt district government.
Yosephina, Afrida and their friends mark with their eyes the dilapidated, long-body pick-up stacked high with rotting food, cloth, and plastic bags. On the nights the Garbage Man is not alone, the girls sink further into the dark pockets between buildings, or saunter into the midst of idling boys. With the help of two or three friends armed with machetes, the Garbage Man stalks them through the streets and alleys.
Cornered, subdued, they’re loaded in with the rubbish and trucked out of town. Along the pot-holed airport road. Away from the hangers of the Missionary Air Service, away from the lights of Jl Irian, to the old graveyard where Christian city dwellers were once buried beneath small roofs of corrugated tin. Here the police officers are waiting, smoking.
Over the next several hours the youngsters, 14-, 15-, 16 years of age, are raped in turn by the Garbage Man, his friends and the laughing men in uniform. As dawn begins to lighten the mountains behind their backs, the girls make their way back to town on foot. Shivering in the crisp mountain air.
Of course my new friends aren’t offering up ‘eyewitness’ accounts of the Garbage Man. No, these are the tales told by their friends on the strip. Teenagers less lucky than they, kids who’d not been able to leap off the pick-up before it reached the graveyard… No, these are the stories of other girls. And yet, no one will look me in the face and somewhere behind my left shoulder, there’s the gargle of a choked-back tear.
And it’s interesting how they describe the sores on a friend’s face. A 17-year-old from a village ‘behind the mountains’ who is wasting away to some disease they cannot identify. They say the sores look like someone extinguished their cigarette on her face. And chest. And back.
Who thinks in those terms? Someone who has seen cigarettes butted out on human flesh? Someone who has had it done to them?