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span class="inline inline-left">Education for all: Selva, a Sri Lankan refugee boy, listens as his teacher, Cecep, explains about human anatomy at a school in Bogor, West Java, on Tuesday. UNHCR“I like English,” 8-year-old Selva (not real name), a Sri Lankan refugee, said when asked what his favorite school subject was.

“I don’t like Indonesian language,” he added of his least favorite.

Despite the statement, however, Selva spoke Indonesian very fluently, with traces of a Sundanese accent.

His teachers at SDN Megamendung 02 state elementary school in Megamendung, Bogor regency, said Selva often translated Indonesian language for his parents, who could only speak Sri Lankan and a little English, and he had been trying to teach his younger sister Indonesian.

Selva is presently living with his Sri Lankan parents and two siblings in a lodge near the school.

They arrived in Indonesia three years ago, have been receiving accommodation and financial support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its local partner the Church World Service (CWS), and are still hoping to gain entrance to Australia.

Refugees may wait for months or years in Indonesia, a “transit” country, before destination countries like Australia accept them, Mitra Salima Suryono, public information officer at the local office of UNHCR, said Tuesday.

As of December 2011, according to the UN body, there were 1,006 refugees and 3,233 asylum seekers in Indonesia, most of whom were Afghan nationals.

Mitra said they were mostly single, but others brought their families — children and wives — with them.

“We pay these women and children special attention, as we consider them to be a particularly vulnerable group,” she told journalists on the sidelines of an event in which the UNHCR donated several human anatomy models to SDN Megamendung 02.

The school is one of seven schools nationwide — six in Bogor and one in Jakarta — hosting seven refugee children in total.

In comparison, there are 109 children under the age of 18 out of 341 refugees that the UNHCR and CWS have helped to reside in Bogor and Jakarta, pending their acceptance into their destination countries.

Mitra said it was not easy to find schools willing to educate refugee children, citing language barriers and procedural issues.

She hoped the government would ratify the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which requires host countries to provide equal treatment to refugee children as they treat their own citizens in regards to basic education.

Indonesia is among the few countries that have yet to ratify the convention, which has been signed by a total of 144 countries.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Michael Tene said Indonesia was reluctant to ratify the convention because it was “outdated”; drafted before 1951 when most refugees fled their countries due to political persecutions. “But now, most leave their home countries due to economic reasons,” he added.

Michael said ratifying the convention would burden Indonesia with a number of obligations, when it was not even a country of destination.

“But, we’ve adopted the main principals of the convention in our system to handle refugees, such as in the way we don’t treat them like criminals despite their illegal entrance into our country and that we won’t forcibly deport them,” he said.

Lucky for refugee children, there are people like Cartim, the SDN Megamendung 02 principal, who welcomed Selva at the school,

“There shouldn’t be discrimination in education; everyone deserves equal rights,” Cartim said.