Speaking up: Children learned to name basic parts of a human body in Indonesian by using pictures.

The huge numbers of refugees entering Atambua, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), following the referendum on independence in East Timor in 1999 led to many children dropping out of school and put a halt to their education.

Fourteen years later, children of the former residents of Indonesia'€™s then province still face difficulties in exercising their right to an adequate education.

For those who live in resettlement sites in Atambua, near the border of East Timor (now Timor Leste), access to education remains a primary concern.

With Portuguese and several other languages as their mother tongues, many of the children remain unable to fully join in school activities. Meanwhile, teachers are unqualified to teach the students the basic Indonesian language skills necessary to succeed in the mainstream educational system, aggravating the problem.

Reading difficulties are common and are associated with poor academic achievement, leading more and more East Timorese children to drop out of school.

'€œGiving these children pre-primary school education of sufficient intensity and duration is the key to enable them to acquire basic skills, including language, for mainstream education,'€ Natalia Belac, a teacher and the founder of Early Childhood Education Center (PAUD) Gabriela in Silawan village in Belu regency, said during a recent visit.

On one warm and sunny day, nine children aged between 4 and 6 were taught a lesson titled '€œRecognizing our own body'€. Sitting in a circle, the pre-schoolers learned to recognize basic parts of a human body by using pictures. Each child in turn pointed a finger and named the body parts of a robot painted on a blackboard.

'€œCould you show me where the robot'€™s head is?'€ asked Natalia. It took minutes before several of the pre-schoolers raised their hands to answer the question.

Enthusiastically, Natalia taught her students the names and functions of each body part. '€œThis will help them understand better about their bodies and how they work,'€ she said.

During class, children learned to identify colors, numbers, shapes and the elements of nature. They also played a few fun games.

A lack of basic Indonesian language skills is one of the obstacles hampering learning in resettlement locations in Atambua because many children of the refugees speak other languages that they learn at home.

At PAUD Gabriela, for example, most of the children speak Tetun Porto and Bekais, an East Timorese local dialect, given their parents are from Balibo, East Timor.

At first, it was not easy for Elisa Madeira Marguez, 40, a teacher and the founder of PAUD Sinar Libas, to teach her pupils, as most spoke Tokodede, the mother language of their Liquisa-born parents.

'€œThey could not understand what we talked about because they speak a different language, so we faced difficulties in integrating them and introducing them to the curriculum,'€ she said.

Teacher Natalia Belac: '€œGiving these children pre-primary school education of sufficient intensity and duration is the key to enable them to acquire basic skills.'€
PAUD Gabriela and Sinar Libas are two community-mobilized pre-school education centers that received support from Save the Children Indonesia under its Literacy Boost program.

Save the Children Indonesia'€™s program manager in Belu, Didiek Eko Yuana, said that the children of former East Timorese refugees had limited opportunities to receive an education and experienced many problems in educational advancement due to poor basic language skills.

'€œIdentified barriers to East Timorese children'€™s access to education include obstacles to enrolling in an early childhood education and barriers in obtaining quality education,'€ he said.

According to Didiek, the children'€™s lack of access to education will hamper the Belu administration'€™s target to eliminate illiteracy unless there is more effort to help mobilize communities to start and support their own centers. '€œIt will also hinder the children'€™s opportunities for educational and personal advancement in the future,'€ he said.

NTT is one of four provinces, the others being Papua, West Nusa Tenggara and West Sulawesi, with the highest illiteracy rates in Indonesia, 2010 data from the Education and Culture Ministry shows.

In 2004 and 2005, 46,477 people between 15 and 49 in Belu, a regency populated by around 300,000, were illiterate.

In 2012-2013, Save the Children launched Literacy Boost as a pilot project in the regency to accelerate literacy skills, particularly in reading fluency.

Literacy Boost is designed to improve the quality of early childhood education, comprising education in pre-primary schools and early classes (grades 1 to 3) in primary schools.

Under the program, pre-school teachers are trained with skills necessary to deal with children with different mother tongues and an array of relevant topics, including the stages of early childhood development, active learning methodologies and individual student evaluation. In general, interventions are provided for pre-school-aged children and focus on social, cognitive and fine motor skills development.

Save the Children Indonesia'€™s education advisor, Lusi Margiyani, said that children with a pre-primary school education would make significantly larger gains in primary education compared to those who did not obtain such an education.

'€œThey are already familiar with learning,'€ she said.

Unfortunately, pre-primary school education is not compulsory in Indonesia. It is estimated that more than two-thirds of children under 6 do not have access to that type of education.

'€œLet'€™s make sure children have adequate access to quality pre-school education so they can grow with enjoyment of reading and success in school'€.

'€” Photos By JP/Elly Burhaini Faizal