Children at dump abandon school to make ends meet

The Jakarta Post ,  Bekasi   |  Wed, 10/08/2008 10:25 AM  |  City

Wahyudi looks utterly out of place, like a whale in a shopping mall, dressed in a blue and white school uniform, standing in the massive dump.

He skillfully navigates his father's dilapidated motorcycle through a narrow lane lined with big trucks, filled to the brim with garbage from Jakarta households.

Wahyudi, 13, lives in Bantar Gebang, Bekasi, Jakarta's biggest dump site, which amasses 6,000 tons of garbage, equivalent to a six-story building, every single day.

The roar of the motorbike vies with the buzzing of dozens of flies, which swarm around him. He whizzes through the 108-hectare dump -- the size of 100 soccer fields -- before he reaches the main street on his way to his school, four kilometers away.

Wahyudi is one of 500 children in this poor community whose parents understand that poverty and lack of education create a perpetual cycle. The other 1,000 school-age children living at the gigantic dump site, however, do not even go to school.

"Only me and my friend, Ike, come here from the dump," said Wahyudi, who is now in 8th grade at SMP 31 junior high school in Bekasi.

Yayasan Dinamika Indonesia (YDI), an education foundation in Bantar Gebang, has 264 children studying throughout their pre-school, kindergarten and elementary classes. However, fewer than half of them manage to complete primary school.

"From the third grade, students start to quit," Nasrudin, YDI's chairman, explained, adding, "many children start thinking about quitting school when they think they are literate enough to brave the world.

"It is an inevitable consequence of their family's struggle with poverty," he said.

Last year, only 11 students graduated.

"I preferred trash picking to attending school," Nasidi, 19, a trash picker who finished only up to elementary school explained. "Trash picking makes money. Nowadays, I can earn up to Rp 500,000 a week," he said, lying lazily, taking a break on the floor in his neighbor's wooden hut.

In 1995, the International Program for the Elimination of Child Labor (ILO-IPEC) in cooperation with YDI, formerly known as Bintang Pancasila Foundation, set up a basic education program tailored to the needs of child trash picker.

"At first, we offered cash incentives for children who attended school," said Nasrudin, who continues running the school without assistance from the organization.

Circumstances are not much different at SDN Cikiwul IV elementary school, the nearest state school to the Bantar Gebang dump. About half of the 343 students there are the children of trash pickers.

Teachers say it is hard to get parents to help their children study at home due to illiteracy and long work hours. Therefore, children in the first or second grade often do not receive adequate attention and their efforts to learn how to read and write are wasted.

Ade Tarsiah, 38, a first grade teacher at the school, said she often helped students from trash picker families to do their homework, because there was nobody at home who would.

"They bring the paper back blank, but I feel bad about scolding them in front of their friends," Ade said, explaining that many of their classmates, whose parents are all literate, live in better residential areas.

The local government has now eliminated tuition fees in primary schools, including the SDN Cikiwul IV. However YDI schools still charge each student Rp 8,000 a month.

When it comes tiem to pay, most parent's stonewall and, "only a few pay their children's tuition fees," said Nasrudin. (hwa)

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