development, education, passion - all in IHF Bali

I learnt about International Humanity Foundation online. From a background of economics in college, I chose to come to a Southeast Asian country – Indonesia - to see the difficulty and potential of the economic and social development in one of the poorest places, and Bali in particular because I was interested in the huge economic inequality on an island thriving with tourism and traveler-oriented services - so far, Bali and IHF have delivered all my expectations.

Living in a small Indonesian village proved to be even more difficult than I thought. The level of underdevelopment is far worse than anything I have ever experienced. I have complained about the inconvenient living conditions and the often malfunctioning wifi. I have biked up the mountains on a recruitment trip and seen for myself the kind of mistrust the locals have in a US-based NGO like us. I have been constantly surprised by the local kids’ excitement upon seeing a foreigner and their lovely ‘hello’s and ‘good morning’s.

Volunteers at IHF Bali started an art project to decorate the center. We asked the kids to draw the ‘IHF hand’ on a piece of paper, write down their names and decorate the drawing as they wish. The kids dived right into it and created many remarkable drawings. Their creativity and imagination surprised me. Moreover, I was pleased to witness their excitement over such a small art project. Every day after the English classes, most volunteers complain about how hard it is to discipline the small kids and get them to focus on the class material. We college students are used to sitting in a lecture hall, staying concentrated for couple of hours and taking in as much information as we can. However we forgot that it is more important to encourage creativity in children. Many of them may not be good at following instructions, especially after a full school day, but they are eager for opportunities to show their individuality. In a collectivist country like Indonesia with strict cultural and religious constraints on personal choices, the small projects we create might give the kids the best moment in their day.

More than everything, I am deeply touched by some kids’ eager for knowledge and passion for English learning under an incomplete and shockingly corrupt public education system. This makes me realize that the free education provided by IHF Bali is working against the social norm and that we have a long way to go to prove our legitimacy and credibility. When we talk about NGOs and volunteering work in the US and other developed nations, we focus on the generosity of the donors and the sophisticated process of recruiting qualified volunteers, yet we have often forgotten the importance of reaching out to the locals and working our way best into the cultural and religious traditions in the area we work in. These traditions, however little merit they may have, are far more powerful in a country like Indonesia than our optimistic western ideology of free education, democracy, equality, and individual merits.

Many NGOs like IHF are great international efforts to relieve poverty and provide education opportunities, nevertheless we all need to realize that the overarching goal of our work is to serve the ‘local’ community, to benefit the ‘locals’, and through a long and hard time to influence the ‘local’ values in a positive way. And this is the hard part: to establish our trustworthiness in a remote Indonesian village and to get them to welcome our good intentions, however unrealistic they might seem to an Indonesian person. I am yet to reach this goal, but this one month experience at IHF Bali has definitely made the picture clear to me. I am very grateful to have had this opportunity.