Last week I visited a friend’s palm oil plantation 2 hours from the city of Pekanbaru, Sumatra, Indonesia.
My friend is an Indonesian who has started about 10 schools in different parts of Indonesia. Each of the schools she has started is a proper school offering standard education to poor Indonesian children. However, she is concerned about the many millions of Indonesian children who live in farms and plantations and who are unable to attend school because the nearest school is just too far away. The population density in these rural settings is too low to justify the establishment of proper schools.
She is familiar with Goducate literacy centers and wanted me to see first-hand the situation in rural Indonesia. I took a 2-hour car ride on a winding, pot-holed road from the modern city of Pekanbaru. Then I had to transfer to a motorbike for the 2 kilometer ride to the plantation. It was definitely more exciting than a roller-coaster ride in Disney World! I reached the plantation “headquarters” after sunset. Most of the kids were at the “headquarters” because of the TV set there. At 11pm, the generator set was switched off, and then I went to bed.
The next morning I surveyed the community of about 20 workers and their families who were housed in simple barracks. There were about 20 school-aged children in the community. The nearest school was an hour’s walk away. It was a private school, whose fees many could not afford.
This challenging situation is common to many parts of Asia. How can Goducate help these poor people to educate their kids? I don’t know, but I know that we cannot ignore this problem.
