The Pirates of IndonesiaKelly McEvers takes readers' questions about piracy on the Strait of Malacca.

(Continued from page 2)

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Lyme, Conn.: I found it interesting the economics of pirating. If they don't/can't make expenses they could go into debt. It would be interesting if there was some way pirating could be made economically unlikely to make a profit. I also found it interesting that the big city life motivates some pirates. It almost seems as if the city would offer should more lucrative employment the pirates would leave their careers. Might this be a possibility?

Kelly McEvers: If you're uneducated and have no connections in a place like Singapore, it's not very likely you'll be able to get a job. Indonesia is the world's 4th largest country (while Singapore is a city-state of just a few million people), and in this region most of the people live beneath the poverty line. Needless to say, there is fierce competition for jobs that pay a living wage.

I have friends in Indonesia's captitol, Jakarta, who have the same job I do, the same education level, and make about a third as much as I do. They have to commute to work hours each day, just to live in a place they can afford. This is the situation in a country that's just now struggling out of its corrupt past.

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Kelly McEvers: A little more about the series on Marketplace: It's called "Working," and for two years we have profiled individual workers in the global economy. Check out other profiles at http://marketplace.publicradio.org/segments/working/.

All of this was the brainchild of Homelands Productions (http://homelands.org/), a truly great and inspirational group of people.

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Arlington, Va.: Why pirates? Why weren't you sent out to look for Russian mafia, or Japanese yakuza? Was Marketplace looking for a Robin Hood story?

Kelly McEvers: In this series we've profiled all different kinds of workers in the global economy. I've done a sex worker in an oil-boom town, a smuggler, a war fixer, and a cadaver handler. Others have included miners, pop stars, circus people, and land-mine clearers.

The idea is to find surprising people who do jobs that are somehow connected to us.

Marketplace definitely doesn't give you the idea of the story before you report it. They trusted me to find a pirate and tell his story—whatever that story might be.

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washingtonpost.com: What surprised you most during your search?

Kelly McEvers: The fact that no one talks about piracy in this region—even though it's practically a way of life. It took me a while to understand, but in some ways this was a matter of pride for Indonesians. If they admitted there was a problem, then they were admitting a larger problem with their country. And, they were admitting that they might need outside help to solve the problem, as the U.S. and Japan have been suggesting for years.

Also, there's the terrorism angle. For years the Bush administration warned that Southeast Asian militant groups might be able to work with pirates. This is why U.S. officials advocated U.S. intervention. Needless to say, this did not go over well in the world's most populous Muslim nation, where people were already furious about the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

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Reston, Va.: Who are these pirates when they get back to land? Do they blend in with the rest of the Somalis? Are they well known among the rest as pirates? Do they live like kings?

Kelly McEvers: I wasn't in Somalia. But I can tell you that you would NEVER know Agus was a pirate if you saw him walking around, on the streets of Batam, Indonesia. That's the thing: These guys are just regular guys.

As for the bigger-time guys I met, the ones who hijack entire ships, they act like guys with money: SUVs, prostitutes, drugs. But even that is not all so out-of-the-ordinary. Many a company boss or government official behaves the same way. In most countries!

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Falls Church, Va.: So pirates are just "individual workers in the global economy"?

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