The President’s decision on Indonesian Chief Police’ appointment

Right after Joko Widodo was elected president of the Republic of Indonesia in the 2014 presidential elections, he together with his team made a proposal for the appointment of the new chief of the national police. Recently, it was found out that the person chosen for this position, Budi Gunawan, is a suspect of corruption. As a reaction to this news, the President decided to cancel the appointment of Budi Gunawan. The peace of the Indonesian political scene was stirred after the finding of Budi Gunawan’s involvement in corruption. In addition, many politicians, including members of Jokowi’s party, are against his decision. Some of the most notorious Indonesian politicians have manifested their opinion against Jokowi’s determination. They believe that it would be more effective to put Budi Gunawan out of the police due to his suspicion of involvement in bribery (Muhamad Rizki, Syailendra, Tika Primandari, Muhammad Muhyiddin | Indri Maulidar| Anton A). Even though the cancellation appointment of Budi Gunawan has given rise to a great legal controversy, it is an effective measure against corruption because it shows that the government does not tolerate any case of corruption whatsoever, keeps the integrity of the government, and stops high level corruption thus drastically decreasing generalized corruption in society.

To begin with, the president’s election to cancel the appointment of Budi Gunawan is an effective action against corruption because it shows that the government does not tolerate any case of corruption whatsoever. That is, it makes people involved in corruption afraid because they see that the government is strict regarding corruption and truly fights it. If the government did not do anything about the suspicion of Budi Gunawan’s corruption practices, then the other people who are doing so would continue and even worse more people would join that kind of practices. This is especially important for Jokowi who is just beginning as president. If he is not firm enough, he might lose credibility.

Secondly, this decision is the right one because it keeps the integrity of the Government. Making a comparison, it is like trying to sweep a room using a dirty broom. If the broom is dirty, then how are you going to clean the room? It is impossible. That is why everybody working in Government positions must be totally clean from any shadow of corruption, especially people working in the police. The Government is an institution which is established to serve society and be an example of virtues like justice for every citizen. People working for the Government must be virtuous ones, and that is why Jokowi has taken the right decision.

Third and last, the proposal of changing the chief police is a wise one because if high level corruption is stopped, then it is easier to stop generalized corruption in society. A problem in Indonesia according to experts is that corruption is a generalized practice. When you ask somebody why he bribes the police, for example, he will answer that even the police officials do bribing. Therefore, it is clear that if people occupying high positions stop doing it, then other people will more likely stop doing it too. Besides, when high level people are involved in corruption, they are involved in cases where huge amounts of money are being handled, so a big number of people have to participate too. For example, if a city major wants to get some money from an infrastructure project, he will need the collaboration of many more people working together with him and thus corruption will be spread.

To sum up, Joko Widodo is proving to be a person with integrity who is firm against corruption. The decision to change the appointment of Budi Gunawan is one of the best actions taken against corruption in the Republic of Indonesia in the last years. Since this is only the beginning of Jokowi’s presidential turn, people have the hope that many other good actions are going to be taken by him.

What’s up in East Timor?

It was a Saturday afternoon three months ago when I met my friend Frenqui and decided to write this article. We had a long conversation in the porch area of my house. That afternoon was pleasant because of the fresh breeze which is unusual in a city characterized by hot temperatures, that is, Surabaya. Since it was Saturday, we could allow a long conversation. At the beginning we were catching up because it had been a long time since we last met. Nevertheless, the conversation turned into the topic of Frenqui’s country, East Timor. The conversation became more and more interesting. I must acknowledge that before that meeting with Frenqui, my knowledge of East Timor was very limited.

Frenqui told me that he was just nine years-old when the 1999 East-Timorese Crisis broke out. It was the time when a referendum to decide on the independence of East Timor from Indonesia took place. During that time many people chose Independence. As a result, those who preferred Indonesia to stay, decided to take arms and attack the other side. During that time many atrocities were done. Many people were killed. Fortunetely, this events took place far away from the town of Frenqui, which is Souro, in the subdistrict of Los Palos in Lautem.

In the end, East Timor gained Independence and the Indonesian troops had to leave. However,  many soldiers destroyed infrastructures upon leaving. The population also was asked to choose either staying in East Timor or moving to Indonesia and become an Indonesian citizen.  Many people chose to move to Indonesia. However, the family of Frenqui decided to stay in East Timor.

Many bad things were done in East Timor, but the attitude of the people is described in the following words that Frenqui quoted from Jose Ramos Horta:” we forget the past, we look at the present.”

These words reflect the real attitude of the Timorese people.  They are really commited to build their country and to make a better nation for the future Timorese generations. Frenqui is one of the many Timorese studying abroad. He is studying hard in Indonesia with the goal in mind of going back to Timor and to apply all that he has learned. This is Frenqui’s ambition; to give his best for the good of his country and his people. As I listened to Frenqui that day I wished that for myself, to lead a life which is meaningful and relevant for others.

I personally have learned a lot from him, and the reason why I decided to write this article in the blog is to share what I have learned from Frenqui with all the readers of this blog. 

An Afflicting Evil

On the tenth of September, a group of teens was caught after having stolen ten thousand dollars from a HSBC branch located in Long Island, the United States. Just one week earlier, another gang of teenagers escaped from the police after stealing two autos in the Big Apple. Local authorities are too worried about this situation of lack of peace and order on the streets. Juvenile crime, an evil afflicting our society, is growing. This kind of crime is caused mainly by one’s problems, family and social environment.

To begin with, juvenile delinquency is a result of personal problems. One of the main factors leading teenagers to get involved in illegal practices is the lack of emotional stability that generates aggressive impulses. This kind of mental illness results in unstable affection. These people often experience negative influences like problems with anger and anger expression. As a result, other people become the object of hate and contempt, and they end up destroying their relationships. For example, in a junior high school there was a female student suffering this mental illness. She enjoyed the company of one of her female classmates; in fact she wanted to spend the whole time with her. However, it so happened that one day the friend refused an invitation from this girl. As a result, the girl could not take it, and became absolutely distant from her friend. Likewise, emotional stability can lead to committing crimes in the form of theft or violence.

Secondly, the family and its situation can be a cause of juvenile crime. The first reason why this problem is rooted at home is that parents fail to provide a good education for their children. These kids cannot distinguish between good and evil; and therefore, they step over the red line between a worthy and a pitiable life even without being aware of it. For example, kids who have not received education regarding alcohol drinking may end up drinking a lot. Since they are under the influence of alcohol, drunkards are likely to commit crimes even without realizing what they are doing. Besides, youth delinquency stems from the need to escape from a hard financial condition experienced by the family. For example, there are boys who grow in homes where often there is nothing to eat. Because of that, these boys will go out to look for something to bite no matters whether the means are licit or not; it is just a matter of survival.

Last but not least, the society in which one lives is a main factor of juvenile crime. Many kids have started to commit crimes because of the influence from friends who are involved in criminal acts. When one is young, friendship is everything. For this reason, if someone is invited by his friend to commit a crime, it would be too difficult for him to refuse. Moreover, it is the desire for social acceptance when one lives in a criminal environment what thrusts teens into the criminal world. Everybody wants to have friends and feel accepted in his environment; that is why it does not matter if crimes have to be committed in order to attain this goal. For example, there are high schools in poor districts where a boy is bullied if is not involved in some kind of crime. The reason for this is that he is seen as lacking braveness and guts. This reason obviously does not make sense to a normal person, but this is how uneducated people who have grown up in a criminal environment think. As a result kids under this pressure are pushed into evil actions.

The regulation of asking every citizen to have a BPJS

A few years ago the Indonesian Government launched a health insurance program for those citizens who were interested to benefit from it. Recently, a regulation has been passed by the parliament that requires the BPJS for every citizen. Therefore, this health insurance is compulsory now for every citizen. Its implementation started in the beginning of 2014, and by January 1, 2015 every employer is expected to register all his employees in the BPJS. Then, by beginning of 2019 every Indonesian citizen is expected to be part of this health insurance program required by the government. This new regulation brings both advantages and disadvantages for the peoples of Indonesia. Although the new regulation of asking every citizen to have a BPJS helps the poor, it is not a good regulation because it does not provide good salaries for the doctors and nurses, it forces employers to register their employees, and it offers a health service to the poor that is not enough.

It is a fact that the new regulation facilitates the access to health services for people who cannot afford it. In Indonesia there are still many people who have this problem. It is a very sad reality the one of many people who suffer illnesses and cannot receive treatment in the hospitals. Therefore, the BPJS is indeed a noble attempt from the government to solve the problem of the lack of health service for the poor. However, this measure to help the poor to have access to medical services does not overcome its weaknesses. The BPJS unfortunately is not effective yet, and this regulation of asking every citizen to subscribe to it is making bad things worse.

To begin with, this new regulation provides unfair salaries for both doctors and nurses. The budget for the BPJS is determined by the INA-CBG (Indonesia Case Base Groups). This system allocates fixed funds for every specific medical treatment. For example, the budget for every type of CT scan is Rp 250,000. However, there are some types of CT scan that are more expensive than the allotted budget. For example, a heart CT scan is more expensive than a kidney one. Therefore, hospitals will have to pay the difference between the available fund and the real cost. Since the money received by the hospitals is less, then hospitals have to cut the salaries of doctors and nurses. However, that is not fair because doctors and nurses offer a professional work that entails a big deal of pressure and that should be rewarded properly. Beside, doctors spend many years studying, so they need higher incomes to balance the time they have not been getting any income.

Secondly, it is not fair to demand all the employers to register their employees to the BPJS. It is a lack of respect for freedom to force companies to subscribe to the BPJS program because they are free to choose the health insurance that is most suitable for them. If an employer thinks that the health service provided by the BPJS is not good enough, s/he has the right to register his/ her employees in another health insurance that is more suitable for the type of risk the employees are exposed to. For example, if somebody owns a construction company, s/he knows that employees may suffer injuries at a construction site like falling from scaffolding. Therefore, the employer would prefer to register his/her employees in an insurance company like Allianz because this insurance company is specialized in that type of injuries. Now, if the government forces the construction company to also register the employees in the BPJS, the company will have to pay a greater amount of expenses that may reduce the net income of the business and render the business less profitable. Besides, the employer and employees are already contributing to the BPJS by paying their taxes. So, it cannot be said that they do not want to help the poor.

Thirdly, it is not completely fair with the poor people because it does not really take good care of their health. Patients suffering major illnesses will be received in the hospitals and stay in intensive care units if necessary. However, once they recover and can leave the hospital, they will still need to take some medicines that will not be provided by the BPJS anymore. The problem is that those medicines are very expensive, and thus poor people cannot afford them. This is why the BPJS is not truly effective. It does not think in the long run. For example, if a patient is admitted to a hospital because of kidney malfunctioning, s/he will receive treatment in the hospital until the condition improves, but s/he will be left alone afterwards. Besides, it is not possible to get a really good medical service by paying so little. The facilities used cannot be as good because the financial resources are not high. As a result, the poor will get access to a rather low quality health service. Furthermore, the poor people still have to pay. Even though it costs Rp 25,000 per person per month, in the long run it does matter for big families. Since the income of these poor people is too low, they may end up sparing money needed for food in order to get the BPJS. For example, a family was interviewed about the BPJS in a clinic, and the mother said that only the husband and one of the two children have BPJS. The reason why is that they cannot afford the BPJS for four of them. That is why the Government should offer this service for free.

To wrap it up, although the new regulation of asking every Indonesian citizen to have a BPJS has a good aim, to provide health services for the poor, it is not a really effective means to achieve it. This new regulation causes the following problems for the peoples of Indonesia: it does not provide good salaries for the doctors and nurses, it forces employers to register their employees, and it offers an incomplete service to the poor. With the coming of President Joko Widodo, society hopes that this health insurance may become truly effective in serving the poor.

Does Gender Influence the Teaching?

There are some myths in society regarding the teacher’s gender. Those myths have blocked the access to getting teaching job vacancies for both men and women. Two sample myths are the following. The first is that women are better teachers at kindergarten, and the second is that men are better teachers at senior high school. At the beginning of the twentieth century, competition at work became high. However, that level of competition at work is nothing compared with the one going on nowadays. The advent of the state-of-the-art technology that everybody can enjoy has lead competition to rocket. As a result, employers look for the most qualified people for the needed jobs. Within this search for employees there is a study about which gender is more competent for a specific job. This is applied to education. Schools want to employ the best teachers; and for that objective, they need to know whether one gender is better than the other when it comes to teaching. Women and men can become equally professional teachers, but at the same time each one has unique gifts for making the teaching-learning experience more perfect.

Both, male and female have the same capacity to become excellent teachers. To begin with, women and men teachers have the same intellectual capability. It is a fact that no gender is more intelligent than the other. There are many studies that prove this fact, such as the one conducted by Jim Flynn and Lilia Rossi-Case in 2011. Moreover, male and female teachers have the same capacity to teach professionally; that is, helping the students to learn the subject matter in the most suitable way. Therefore, teachers of both genders can explain in a clear way that is understandable for the students. Also, they know when the students have a difficult time understanding the subject matter, and know how to adjust in these circumstances by explaining from a different perspective and offering new examples. For instance, among the winners of the Pearson Teaching Awards 2014, which is one of the most prestigious teaching awards in the world, we find the team of The King’s School, which is lead by Paula Ferrand and composed of both, women and men. Therefore, the ability to transmit knowledge effectively to the student can be acquired regardless of gender.

Women and men are gifted in its own way to make the teaching-learning experience more effective. First, women are more caring than men by nature, so they can help the students to feel more confident in the class and undertake a risk taking behavior when doing the exercises. Since the time of conception, women feed and comfort their children. This extremely close bound with their children enhances a special capacity for care and love. Therefore, female teachers are capable of exerting this care and love for those students who are undergoing a difficult emotional time. This is important because students are human and need to feel loved and cared for. As an example, in Surabaya there is a boy named Reiner, studying in Saint Louis high school, who had some personal needs, but it was only a female teacher who felt that, and was able to kindly help him find a solution. The male teachers of Reiner could not have imagined what Reiner needed. Secondly, men show more discipline than women, so they are more likely than women to engage the students in the subject matter at hand. It is a fact that men will not feel any remorse of conscience to correct students who misbehave in class. This is the reason why most of the military schools are made up of men. When something wrong is going on in the classroom, male teachers do not hesitate to take tough actions if needed. As a consequence, the students will develop the habit to focus more on the class and avoid disrupting the class, or getting distracted.

Nowadays in the midst of an extremely high competition at the workplace, schools do not need to worry whether the teachers they hire are male or female. Both, women and men can be excellent teachers. Regardless of gender, human beings have the same capacity to attain a high intellectual level. Besides, the skill of transmitting knowledge to students can be attained by both genders. However, there are differences between male and female teachers. Nevertheless, those differences do not make one gender better than the other, but rather unique. Both, men and women have unique gifts that make them special. Therefore, it is needed to have teachers of both genders. As a conclusion, schools should not look at the gender when hiring teachers, but rather at the acquired skills for teaching the given subject matter.

Official Trailer | The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (2013)

Here we publish the official trailer of the latest movie of the short story entitled, "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. If you remember, on September 1, 2013 we published a post on this short story.

The Amazing Story of Bosco Gutierrez Cortina

In August 1990, Bosco was caught on the street by a group of criminals. They punched and threw him in the trunk of a car, stripped naked, carried in a blanket “like a little taco”. They put him on black painted goggles so that he couldn’t recognize them. Once these criminals took Bosco to the place where he would spend nine months kidnapped, which is the city of Puebla, one hour and thirty minutes away from Mexico City, they removed the goggles, and Bosco saw his raptors for first time. They were wearing white sheets covering their heads. His captors told him via written instructions, that he must answer truthfully such things as where his wife went to the hairdresser, what school his children attended, what route they took and so on. If he lied, they threatened to kill him and kidnap one of his brothers. This was the way his raptors would communicate with him, so that Bosco would not know how their voices sound like. So, he decided to answer only those questions his captors could verify if they put his family under surveillance, but he still felt as if he had betrayed them. “I felt like a piece of nothing.” He was imprisoned in a cell of three meters long and one meter wide, without windows sothat he would lose the sense of time. The criminals were playing a thirty minutes cassette over and over again during the whole day. For a couple of weeks, he sat in the corner by a makeshift toilet in a fetal position, hoping to die.


His captors realized that if they didn’t do something he was going to die, so they wrote him a message on Mexico’s Independence Day and told him he could have a drink. He asked for a high ball-sized glass of whiskey. When it arrived, he felt it “was the best thing I ever had.” It began what he called a “cult of the whiskey,” where he smelled it, ran the glass along his unshaven dirty face. But then he heard an internal prompt: “Bosco, give up the whiskey. Show me you are strong.” That internal voice persisted, “Give me something that is under your control.” So he threw the whiskey away without taking a sip. He wrote himself a note. “Today I won my first battle. I know at the end I can still be free, that I am not a piece of nothing.”


Bosco realized his family was trying to arrange for his release and praying for him. So, in order to survive to the kidnapping, he designed a regime of regular prayer and exercise and Bible study. He also realized he could not live with anxiety. In addition he was focused on living a daily routine. First: mental health; second: physical health; and third: action! He lived an impressive discipline not allowing the imagination turning him crazy. He designed a plan of physical health—one cassette for crunches and three cassettes for footing and mosquito hunting in order to keep sharp reflexes—, a plan of mental health—avoiding anguish and negative thoughts—and a spiritual plan.


The raptors contacted the family of Bosco and asked for a ransom. Bosco’s family was willing to pay the ransom; they wanted to do anything to save him. Everything was planned to pay the ransom and to free Bosco, but eventually the ransom fell through. Bosco had been for six months kidnapped in the cell, when it happened, so it was another hardship for Bosco who imagined himself free already. He had to face other three months kidnapped there, although he didn’t know exactly how time would he spend there. That situation was very hard, because he didn’t know if he would continue there for another month, one year, or even he would spend the rest of his life there. Psychologically, that is very hard to bear and to give up could seem the only choice, but Bosco didn’t give up,and after three months he decided to try out some makeshift tools—that he had done previously—while he could hear one guard taking a shower and the other sleeping. He ended up walking past them to freedom. His family decided not to pursue an investigation as a tacit agreement with his kidnappers that they leave them alone.





Bosco had to spend nine months alone in a three meter long and one meter wide cell; without sense of time, he could not know if it was night or morning, because in his cell there was not a single window. Besides, he was always listening to the same music, even at night, which makes very difficult to sleep. He had to bear the terror of knowing that he could die at any time, because his raptors had weapons. He was very concern for his family knowing that they were suffering greatly his lost, and also the fear of knowing that they could be attacked too. Even during the first months, he didn’t even have clothes to wear, which made him feel like an animal losing his dignity of man. This is how Bosco spent those nine months that lasted his kidnapping, and yet he survived, and he was able to go back home with his family and to continue having a happy life with his beloved ones, thanks to his perseverance to keep hope and keep himself healthy.