“I was tired of renting a room. It was so much pressure. Every...

“I was tired of renting a room. It was so much pressure. Every month would pass by so quickly and the landlord would be knocking on my door again. If I didn’t have the money, he would knock every day. I couldn’t take the stress. I just wanted a place where I could relax. So I saved for two years to buy a house in the slum. It wasn’t a legal house because it was built on government land, but it was all I could afford. I tried to make it nice. I gathered scrap wood and created an extra room. I built my own bathroom. I slept so well there. Nothing was burdening me. Then one day I got a letter on my door. Everyone in our slum got the same letter. It said we needed to leave because the government was planning to build a road on the land. Armed guards came the next morning and bulldozed all our houses. That was three years ago. They still haven’t built the road.”

(Jakarta, Indonesia)