Breakdown of Setelah banjir reda, kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah sehingga halaman kembali rapi.
Questions & Answers about Setelah banjir reda, kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah sehingga halaman kembali rapi.
Bahu-membahu is an idiomatic expression meaning “shoulder to shoulder; working together; helping each other”.
Literally, bahu = shoulder. The reduplicated form bahu-membahu paints a picture of people standing shoulder to shoulder, cooperating.
Grammatically, you can treat it as part of the predicate (like an adverbial of manner):
- Kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah.
= We worked together to clean the trash.
You don’t inflect it like a normal verb:
- You don’t say membahu-membahu or berbahu-membahu.
- You just use bahu-membahu as it is, usually after the subject:
Mereka bahu-membahu memperbaiki rumah.
The comma separates a fronted adverbial clause from the main clause.
- Setelah banjir reda, kami bahu-membahu…
= After the flood subsided, we…
In Indonesian, when a subordinate clause (time, reason, condition, etc.) comes first, it is standard and recommended to put a comma before the main clause.
If you reverse the order, you usually don’t use a comma:
- Kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah setelah banjir reda.
(No comma needed.)
Reda means “to subside, to die down, to calm down”. It’s used for things like:
- hujan reda – the rain dies down
- amuk massa reda – the mob’s rage subsides
- rasa sakitnya reda – the pain subsides
With banjir reda, it suggests the intensity of the flood has decreased / the situation has calmed down.
Alternatives:
- banjir surut – the water level recedes/goes down (more physical and specific to water level).
- banjir berhenti – sounds odd; we usually say hujan berhenti (the rain stops), not banjir berhenti.
So:
- banjir reda – the flood has calmed / is no longer severe.
- banjir surut – the water has gone down.
Both can be used, but reda fits well for the general situation improving.
In this sentence, setelah and sesudah are practically interchangeable:
- Setelah banjir reda, kami…
- Sesudah banjir reda, kami…
Both mean “after”.
Nuance:
- Setelah is often felt as slightly more formal/written,
- Sesudah is slightly more colloquial in everyday speech,
but many speakers use them interchangeably without thinking about it.
You can safely use either in this context.
Sehingga introduces a result clause:
- …membersihkan sampah sehingga halaman kembali rapi.
= …cleaned the trash so that as a result the yard became tidy again.
Compare:
- sehingga = so that / and as a result (result, not purpose)
- supaya / agar = so that / in order that (purpose, intention)
- jadi = so / therefore (more conversational, often starting a new clause)
You cannot normally replace sehingga with supaya here, because the second clause is not an intention but a natural result.
You could say, more casually:
- …membersihkan sampah jadi halaman rapi lagi.
But sehingga is more neutral and standard for expressing consequence.
membersihkan = “to clean (something)”, transitive, requires an object.
- Kami membersihkan sampah. – We cleaned the trash.
- membersihkan halaman – to clean the yard.
bersih-bersih = “to do cleaning / to clean up”, more general and usually intransitive.
- Kami bersih-bersih setelah banjir. – We did some cleaning after the flood.
In the sentence:
- kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah
the focus is that they cleaned a specific thing (the trash), so membersihkan is the natural choice.
Bersih-bersih sampah would sound odd or redundant.
Yes, sampah covers trash, rubbish, garbage, waste in general. It is usually treated as a mass noun in Indonesian:
- membersihkan sampah – to clean up the trash/waste
- banyak sampah – a lot of trash
You don’t need a plural marker. If you want to emphasize many pieces / various kinds of trash, you can say:
- sampah-sampah – bits of trash / all kinds of trash
But in most contexts, plain sampah already implies “trash” in general, like English “garbage”.
Halaman has two main meanings:
- Yard / courtyard / front yard / garden area (around a house or building)
- Page (of a book, website, document)
In … sehingga halaman kembali rapi, the context is a flood, trash, and cleaning, so halaman clearly means yard / outdoor area, not book page.
For “page”, context and collocations change:
- halaman buku – page of a book
- halaman depan koran – front page of a newspaper
- halaman web – web page
A near-synonym for “yard” is pekarangan (more specifically the land/yard around the house).
In this sentence, kembali means “back (to its previous state)”:
- halaman kembali rapi
= the yard is tidy again / the yard is back to being tidy.
Nuance:
- kembali highlights the return to a former condition.
- lagi means “again” and is more casual and very frequent in speech.
You could also say:
- halaman jadi rapi lagi. – The yard became tidy again.
Both are correct. Kembali sounds a bit more neutral or slightly formal and is very common to express “back to normal”:
- Situasi kembali normal. – The situation is back to normal.
- Ia kembali sehat. – He/She is healthy again.
Both orders are possible:
- Kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah.
- Kami membersihkan sampah bahu-membahu.
Differences:
- (1) puts bahu-membahu right after the subject kami, which slightly emphasizes the way “we” worked (together).
- (2) feels a bit more like “we cleaned the trash, and we did it together”; the focus is first on the action, then the manner.
In everyday use, (1) is very natural and commonly heard, but (2) is also acceptable and understandable.
Indonesian verbs don’t change form for tense (past, present, future). Time is shown through:
- time expressions: setelah (after), kemarin (yesterday), nanti (later), etc.
- context.
In:
- Setelah banjir reda, kami bahu-membahu membersihkan sampah…
The word setelah (after) and the fact that the flood has already reda (subsided) tell you this is about a past sequence of events.
If you wanted to be even clearer, you could add a time phrase:
- Setelah banjir kemarin reda, kami… – After yesterday’s flood subsided, we…