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Jakarta. Accustomed to the chronic flooding that regularly hits their part of the capital, residents of Kampung Melayu in East Jakarta are anticipating yet another sodden Idul Fitri to mark the end of a wetter-than-ever Ramadan.

“This Ramadan, we’ve been flooded seven times already,” Muhammad Haris, the head of urban hamlet Rw. 01, told the Jakarta Globe on Sunday.

As with other residents of the banks of the Ciliwung River, those in Kampung Melayu are wise to keep track of the rainfall much further upstream, in places like Depok and Bogor in West Java, which determines whether the river will overflow.

“We usually have around six hours of warning in which to prepare for the surge,” said Amir, another resident.

The latest warning came on Saturday, when reports came in that the water level at the Depok floodgate had reached the critical 200-centimeter mark.

To ease the load there, officials had to open the floodgates, leading to the overflow further downstream. In that incident, the flooding began at 3 p.m. on Saturday and inundated 112 homes, before subsiding at 2 a.m. the next day.

During the Globe’s visit to the neighborhood, residents were still clearing mud from their homes.

“Last night the water reached as high as 2 meters,” Amir said.

“We all stayed indoors and had the bare minimum of food to break the fast, because we couldn’t cook. When aid groups showed up at 9 p.m., we were starving.”

For five years now, most of the homes in Kampung Melayu haven’t had any furniture on their ground floors.

“All homes here have an upstairs floor or attic,” Haris said.

“As the flooding became more frequent, we figured there was no point having couches and tables on the ground floor, so we usually just sit on the floor.”

Haris, who has lived in the area since the 1950s, said the neighborhood was prone to flooding even then.

“As the years went by, the water levels kept getting higher and higher,” he said.

“If in the 1950s it was only ankle-deep, nowadays it’s more than 2 meters high. And it’s also more frequent, at least twice every month, while back in the day we only got flooded between December and February.”

Haris said this year’s Idul Fitri would likely coincide with another flood, not the first time it has happened.

“People will have to wade through the water in shorts, then wash and change before joining the mass prayers outside Hermina Hospital,” he said.

“Then they’ll go back home and wait for the water to recede. People will do the door-to-door Idul Fitri greetings then we will wash the mud out of our homes.”

The families here are among the 7,000 who will soon be moved from the banks of the Ciliwung.

“The president has recently approved a Rp 100 billion budget [$11.1 million] to [dredge and rehabilitate] the Ciliwung,” Pitoyo Subandrio, the head of the Public Works Ministry’s Ciliwung-Cisadane Agency, told the Globe.

Of that figure, Rp 60 billion will go toward acquiring land for flood channels in Bidara Cina and Kebon Baru in East Jakarta, while the rest will be used for initial work for cleaning up the Ciliwung, including adding more floodgates in Manggarai and Karet in South Jakarta.