The Jamu Gendong: Indonesia

I have a massive collection of articles and in my archives I found this article on Jamu Gendong and it is a follow up to the article I posted yesterday on Jamu.

You will have seen the Jamu sellers in Bali on your travels. They are generally carrying a basket slung over their arm. In Java however they tend to sling the basket on their backs and carry it somewhat like a backpack.

The word gendong means to 'carry on the back'. Early each morning well before dawn the jamu gendong prepares several litres of three or four different of jamu in her home, having purchased the ingredients from a local market. She measures out the plant materials, grinds them on a stone mortar and pestle mixes them with water, and pours them into empty plastic Aqua bottles, puts the bottles into a large round bamboo basket, hoists the basket on to her back and sets off on her regular jamu route.

She carries a plastic pail of water to rinse out her glass between customers as well as a wad of change wrapped up in the knot of her shoulder cloth. Each jamu gendong has a regular route. She begins at dawn visiting her steady customers on foot although she might have to take a bemo to get to her area.

These customers may be becak drivers who after drinking their fatigue-relieving tonic joke and chat with the jamu gendong. Customers include shop keepers, house servants, restaurant customers and just private people in their homes. The jamu gendong charges vary for each glass. Often her route is several kilometres long. Some women favour the residential areas, other the crowded markets. Wherever they go they do a good business. Within a few hours all the prepared jamu is sold and with her plastic bottles empty trudges home. Tourists don't often see the jamu gendong mainly because they generally finish their routes rather early in the morning. But they are as characteristic of Indonesian cities as rice for breakfast.

One is seldom out of sight of a jamu shop in Indonesia whether in teeming Jakarta or in a little village in upland Sumatra or Bali. The aggressive commercial manufacturers have blanketed the country with their gaudy billboards, awnings, painted store fronts, magazine advertisements, free samples, pamphlets, free movies on village soccer fields and in short all the gimmicks of modern advertising.

No little village warung however small is without at least one or two of the most popular kinds of jamu and many stock an amazing variety. There are three giants in the industry and dozens of smaller companies. Together they produce somewhere around 200 million packets of jamu each year worth around U.S. $15 million. But this is still only a small percentage of the entire jamu industry which has a gross value of somewhere closer to U.S. $1 billion. This latter figure of course counts the jamu gendong and the market sellers of jamu ingredients.