Yusuf Agopha was eight years old when I met him last August, and he should have been in school. He certainly wanted to be in school. Rattling around on his back, empty, was a Pokemon school bag, a burst of primary colours and cartoon characters that, according to his father, he eagerly donned each day. The Indonesian school year was more than a month old and classes should have been under way hours ago. But instead of sitting in a class, Yusuf was hovering nervously around our group, watching as we surveyed the new elementary school that the energy company BP had built for him and the other children of New Onar.
I was in New Onar because Yusuf, his family and 25 other families had moved into the fishing village six weeks before. It was the smaller of two such communities built by BP to house the more than 700 people it had moved from the future site of a $5bn natural-gas project in the far-flung Indonesian province of Papua. New Onar was, as a result, home to two-dozen freshly built $30,000 homes, whose running water, septic systems and mains electricity were at odds with the ramshackle thatched huts the villagers had left behind in one of the world’s remotest corners.
