Saturday Stats

We folk (and wee folk) can get engrossed in some fascinating topics. Just this week, the 29th annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Title of The Year was awarded to the The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide To Field Identification.

Titter ye not, but this is a real book as are the couple I would really like to read - How Green Were the Nazis? and Tattoed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan. However, I think I'd get depressed reading Better Never to Have Been: the Harm of Coming into Existence.

The Jakarta Post was at a book launch yesterday: it gives the topic but doesn't actually give the title.

Magdalena Sitorus of the Commission for Indonesian Child Protection said that, despite the presence of laws mandating the provision of free certificates, "Last year, some 50 million children from a total of 85 million children lost their first basic human right of having recognised identities and nationalities."

The Commission said that many obstacles existed, including a discriminatory legal system, a complicated bureaucracy and differences in regional procedures. There are also problems for those born to parents of different religions: such children are deemed to have been born out of wedlock.

This is the fate of many children, including Our Kid, whose parents are of mixed nationalities. We await the full and proper enactment of the new nationality law.

More stats gleaned this week include these from the State Minister for the Development of Disadvantaged Regions, Saefullah Yusuf. Apparently, based on 2005 data, 30% of the 17,611 villages in Indonesia have never had access to electricity. Of the remainder, only half (61,638 if you're interested) can actually afford to use it. That he was on the west coast of the island of Ambon inaugurating a windmill capable of generating 5,000 watts of three-phase electricity for 40 households, for lighting and operating a water pump, is to be applauded.

The Molluccas are fortunate in the sense that the group of islands lie in the path of the windstream from Australia to the Pacific. That Indonesian government officials use words such as energy independence, a cleaner environment, alternative and eco-friendly is more than encouraging.

Now if they could only do something about abandoned shopping carts .....
 

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¶ 9:30 am