Hera Diani, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta
When the Dec. 26, 2004, tsunami hit Phuket, Thailand, 10-year-old Tilly Smith managed to save her family and 100 other tourists. She warned people after seeing the indications of a natural disaster she had learned about at school back in England.
At about the same time, on Aceh's Simeulue island, a boy named Anton, who had been taught by his grandfather what to do when an earthquake happened, told fellow islanders to run for higher ground. Unlike other parts of Aceh, where thousands of people died because of the tsunami, only eight people died on Anton's island.
Teaching safety precautions and natural disaster signs to school children helps them play an important role in helping the public, as the two above examples show.
Unfortunately, in Indonesia, a country prone to a variety of natural disasters, only a few schools have incorporated disaster mitigation classes into their curriculums -- and children suffer the most when disasters occur.
Harkunti P. Rahayu from the Bandung Institute of Technology's Disaster Mitigation Center said her office had conducted training with teachers and schools since 1997 but people remained ignorant about disasters.
""For example, we conducted classes and implemented disaster risk mitigation initiatives in Bengkulu after a 2000 earthquake. In the two-year program we also trained engineers and construction workers,"" she said at a seminar on Wednesday commemorating International Risk Reduction day.
She said only a few schools had added the disaster risk management program into their curriculums and buildings were still not constructed to withstand earthquakes.
""It's really frustrating. People seem to suffer from short term memory loss over disasters,"" Harkunti said.
The series of natural disasters that had struck the country over the past two years, however, had made disaster risk management programs more popular, she said.
Around 850 teachers from all over the country have taken part in the training program, she said, but they were finding it difficult to implement the program at their schools.
""They said it's difficult to insert the program into the already tight and heavy curriculum. And there is the classic problem of funding,"" said Harkunti.
Bambang Indriyanto from the Education Ministry's elementary and secondary education directorate, said disaster risk management training for teachers had been conducted since 2001.
""With the new competence-based curriculum, each school has the autonomy to make their own curriculum. We delegate this to school and local administrations to include the program,"" he told the seminar.
It requires a lot of money, he said. New school buildings in Yogyakarta that will be able to withstand at least a 6 Richter scale earthquake will cost Rp 1.3 trillion (US$136.8 million) he added.
""We have to formulate policies that are in line with disaster risk management,"" he said.
