If you drive for 20 minutes (which only happens in a perfect world without vicious traffic) away from the West Bekasi tollgate, you will find Bantar Gebang district, part of which is a highland. However, the unique odor that greets you as you get closer to the highland whisks away the portrait of a mountainous land full of green grass, edelweiss and butterflies. The highland is apparently the Sumur Batu landfill, which is filled with mountains of trash.

The landfill, with its mountains reaching 15 meters in height, put people at a high risk of landslides. Despite a trash landslide happening in 2012, the Bekasi government does not seem to have a concrete mitigation plan and continues to leave the master plan and the standard operational procedure for waste management in question.

As a group of Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) scholarship awardees from batch 13 visited the 14.5-hectare site one month ago as part of their leadership program, the awardees learned that scavengers at Bantar Gebang had inherited their jobs from their parents. This disturbing revelation prompted the awardees to strive to break this chain. If the grandparents were scavengers and the parents were also scavengers, then it should be the collective responsibility of everyone to ensure that the children do not follow in the footsteps of their predecessors through proper education. This could perhaps be an alternative way to address the issues of the people of Bantar Gebang through their young generation.

The awardees made follow-up visits to the site and on July 20 held a breaking-of-the-fast gathering for about 70 people of Bantar Gebang. The breaking of the fast was not the main activity of the event. Instead, discussions with the parents and educative games for the children took place prior to food distribution for breaking the fast.

The discussion with the parents aimed at understanding the challenges they face, particularly pertaining to the issue of education for their children. According to the parents, they had previously been visited by companies and organizations, at the end of which the organizations distributed gifts. Yet, there had been no events that could provide an avenue for dialogue and an opportunity for them to communicate their problems and to find solutions.

Meanwhile, the games for the children were designed to widen their horizons to various professions and to prompt them to think of their future. Colored pictures related to particular professions were given out to the children as clues and they were asked to guess what professions they thought those clues were linked to. Each of them was then asked to write their dream profession on a provided colored sheet, give reasons for choosing that profession and stick it on the Bantar Gebang'€™s Dream Wall.

Furthermore, on one hand the discussion with the parents gave the impression that they supported their children to receive a comprehensive education, from elementary up to higher education, but on the other hand, during the educative games, some of the school-age children were found to be not attending school. It was then understood that the parents'€™ inability to provide school equipment (books, stationery, shoes, etc.) for their children was one of the hurdles.

Benazir Syahril
Indonesian Endowment Fund for Education (LPDP) scholarship awardees, Jakarta

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