Goducate … Go And Educate! – Page 99 – Helping Asians Help Themselves

2013-09-102013-09-11

Sing Your English expands in Pekanbaru

Goducate’s Sing Your English (SYE) program aims to help Indonesians (and other nationalities) to speak English. Indonesian students learn English in school but after 12 years most of them can hardly speak a few words or sentences of English, although they have hundreds of English words/phrases in their heads. There seems to be a “traffic jam” between the head and the mouth. This is probably because in schools the focus of the teaching of English is to help their students to pass their English exams, which puts more emphasis on written rather than spoken English.

SYE aims to clear this 10 cm “traffic jam” between the head and the mouth, through its fun songs. After over a year of testing SYE programs in many schools and organizations in Batam and Pekanbaru in Indonesia, we believe that SYE does clear this “traffic jam”. Children confidently sing the songs and speak the words and phrases learnt (albeit in a sing-song manner). Their fear of speaking English is removed and replaced with the fun of speaking English.

We will be expanding our program to many other schools and organizations , both in Batam and Pekanbaru. On Sept 9 we invited 50 community leaders in Pekanbaru to a seminar to introduce them to SYE. The response was overwhelming.

At present we have 9 Filipino community development workers (CDWs) stationed in Pekanbaru but we will soon need many more. Thankfully, there are 40 CDWs being trained at the Goducate Training Center in Iloilo, Philippines, and many of these will join our Indonesian SYE team.

SYE team doing demo for community leaders

2013-09-062013-10-04

Goducate visits North Sulawesi

Last week a Goducate team visited the North Sulawesi province of Indonesia to explore the possibility of making its capital, Manado, a hub for the deployment of our community development workers to help needy Asians in eastern Indonesia help themselves. North Sulawesi has four regencies and four independent cities. According to its latest census, it has a population of 2.3 million, with the Minahasan being the largest ethnic group. Manado itself has about 450,000 inhabitants. It is partly surrounded by mountains, and it has a tropical rainforest climate, with average temperatures of 24-30C.

The outcome of the visit is that Goducate will supply consultants and workers trained in agriculture and English to a local organization that is trying to alleviate poverty there. Through our partnership with this organization, Goducate has already been training farmers in Java, Sumatra, Bali, Kupang, Sumba, and Nias islands in emerging sustainable agricultural technologies.

While we were there I conducted a seminar for a group of 125 women in the town of Tondano on food security. The topics included Moringa production, processing, and utilization; container gardening; and systems of rice intensification. The last topic, which highlighted rice ratooning, direct seeding, and rice-fish integration, was included because of the vast ricelands surrounding the 4,278-hectare Lake Tondano. Ratooning is a method of harvesting a crop such that the roots and lower parts of the plant are uncut, to give the ratoon or the stubble crop. This technique enables the crop to mature earlier in the season, and can reduce the cost of preparing the field and of planting, but it is a technique that cannot be used perpetually because the yield of the ratoon crop decreases with each cycle.

2013-09-032013-09-03

Goducate encourages adoption of Moringa in Sabah

When we started our de-worming program in Sabah in March, 2012, we felt that it ought to be accompanied by the provision of nutritional supplements to the students and to the villagers at large. This is because in these poor communities, access to nutritional foods is limited. Toddlers often do not get sufficient milk or good nutritional food, so they grow up underweight and malnourished. The school-going kids are often infested by intestinal parasites, which cause poor physical development and malnourishment. Adults, especially women who go through multiple pregnancies and are breastfeeding their children, often end up anemic and weak.

What we want to provide is a sustainable solution to the nutritional needs of the community. In July 2012, we started to educate our teachers in Sabah about Moringa, a plant containing many nutrients. Teaching about theory is accompanied by cooking demonstrations using Moringa leaves as the main ingredient.

We recently received Moringa seeds and started to plant them in the compound of our main literacy center, but a recent flood wiped out our seedlings. Learning from this painful experience, our teachers now grow the seedlings on elevated racks.

We’ve also started to distribute these plants to those of our literacy centers located inland, for the teachers there to replicate the nursery and then hand out these Moringa plants to their students’ families, and we hope, eventually, to the rest of the community.

Riding on the activities of our de-worming program, our teachers decided to bring along free Moringa chicken porridge when they give out the de-worming treatment. This way, the students not only learn about the nutritional benefits of Moringa, they also get to taste it.

Students from one of our literacy centers even decided to turn a small plot of land behind their class into a Moringa nursery where they grow and look after the plants themselves.

We have noticed Moringa trees growing around the houses of some of our students, which indicates that some of the locals have adopted this plant as part of their diet. We hope to learn from these few villagers what made them adopt Moringa so readily, to help us expand acceptance of this plant across all the villages we serve.

Having meal of chicken porridge with moringa