Community Stories: Together Facing Educational Problems in Asmat

My name is Blandina Kaanubun and I am a teacher at the YPPK Warse Elementary School, Asmat Regency, Papua. I have taught at this school for 4 years.

My fellow teacher and I carry out learning and teaching activities as usual. The children came to school, went to class as usual, so did the teachers. Although the number of students is very small, it does not make me discouraged to continue to carry out my duties as a teacher. Even if the children don't come to school for unreasonable reasons, the other teachers and I can't do much, we can only adapt to the conditions of the people in Warse village.

In reality, some children go with their parents to look for sago, some children do not come to school because they have no clothes and there are even children who do not come to school with the excuse of being lazy. It's no wonder that even when children enter junior high school, they still can't read. My friends and I have done many ways to get our children to come to school, but it's still the same.

In 2018 Wahana Visi Indonesia (WVI) began to serve in the Warse, Akamar, and Birak villages, but at that time what I knew was that WVI was still focusing on health issues.

Although WVI is not focusing on education, I see that every time Wahana Visi Indonesia carries out activities in these three villages, the children are very enthusiastic about participating in each activity because they want to get prizes.

Seeing the WVI method, we teachers also try to do the same thing at school. We provide cakes for children at school with the hope that this way the children will come to school, and children are indeed starting to come to school diligently because of the gift.

Another problem that I found in our school is the lack of teaching staff, both in terms of the number of teachers and in terms of teacher quality. The lack of study space, the way teachers teach which are far from creative and the lack of reading materials such as books are also problems that I found while I was teaching at YPPK Warse Elementary School.

I have seen a change in children's attendance at school since WVI started to carry out activities that directly involve the school, even children who had never been to school before starting to return to school because children know that if WVI does activities, they will get prizes.

What makes me happy with WVI's presence is that there are activities that involve teachers, one of which is myself who was sent by the school to take part in capacity-building activities for elementary school teachers.

Following the three-day activity, I got a lot of new things given by the resource persons as well as through success stories from several teachers from other schools. The new thing that I still remember very well is making a reading ability percentage tool, which during my teaching time, I and my fellow teachers had not or never done anything at school.

My big hope is that by participating in this teacher capacity-building activity I can practice it with children and become a facilitator for fellow teachers at YPPK Warse Elementary School.

Written by: Blandina Kaanubun, Beneficiary of the Wahana Visi Indonesia  
Translated by: Aqueta Alexandra Kroons, Intern Wahana Visi Indonesia