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Jakarta Post

Water for life

Precious harvest: A group of women sort the valuable cashew crop that now offers employment to many in Bali's arid northern zones

Trisha Sertori (The Jakarta Post)
Karangasem, Bali
Thu, June 16, 2016

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Water for life

Precious harvest: A group of women sort the valuable cashew crop that now offers employment to many in Bali's arid northern zones.

The picture perfect beauty of Bali’s bountiful rice fields and deep green rain forests captures just one side of the island’s topography. Once the central mountain ranges have been breached from the south, an arid landscape of stunted trees and soil parched dry under a cloudless sky opens up.

During the province’s six-month dry season, local communities in some areas of Bali’s north once faced four-hour long treks in search of water.

Muntigunung is one of these communities. Made up of a collection of family groups spread across a 10-square-kilometer area of steep, rocky hills and deep, dusty valleys, Muntigunung is home to 5,500 people, who until recently had very little to hope for in life.

The women and children’s drudgery to secure water each day left them exhausted and without the energy to work or the time to go to school. Dire poverty and little access to education and other opportunities was the result of the annual drought in the communities of Muntigunung.

Like many of Muntigunung’s population, Abu has never learned to read and write. Now in her early 50s, she shucks cashews as she talks of the changes brought into her life through the support of the Muntigunung Development Program.

“I never went to school. My four kids never went to school. They are married now, and I have no grandchildren yet. But those kids will go to school. They will be the first to go to school,” Abu says.

Having started 12 years ago under the auspices of the Dian Desa Foundation, the Muntigunung Development Program has since secured stable water supplies, improved cashew harvests and trading opportunities (under the Muntigunung Community Social Enterprise), developed Rosella plantations for tea, salts and jubes, lontar palm sugar and bamboo and given rise to Mayan knotted hammock production and, most recently, batik manufacturing.

Anton Soedjarwo

All of these community enterprises were aimed at solving Muntigunung’s primary need for water, says Muntigunung Development Program and Dian Desa founder Anton Soedjarwo. The 69-year-old engineering hydrologist has worked in community development since the early 1960’s, and received the 1983 Ramon Magsaysay Award for community leadership in Yogyakarta. This prestigious award is considered Asia’s Nobel Prize.

“Our strategy was based on studies done 12 years ago that identified water as the number one issue and the most important social program for releasing the communities from that unnecessary burden caused by lack of water and thus creating better lives,” Soedjarwo says.

The hydrologist points out that ground water in Muntigunung is found at 120 meters deep in the lower regions, which sit 80 m above sea level, and thus on the higher slopes that tower 980 m above sea level, drilling for water is unrealistic.

“Due to the geographical situation, the only sustainable technology involves utilizing rain water. With wells, you are talking about major drilling and the cost of bringing it up and pumping it,” says Soedjarwo, adding that existing water tanks have now been restored, community reservoirs formed, and large sheds built, the rooves of which provide additional water catchment area and the interior of which is now a community enterprise workshop space.

Today 60 percent of Muntigunung’s population has water available daily throughout the dry season.

“Theoretically we can say that during the dry season each person has 25 liters of water per day available, so they can wash, cook and drink. In the past women and children would spend three to four hours daily getting water; now they are released from that and can lead more productive lives and open the doors to a new horizon,” Soedjarwo says.

These women who once lugged water for their families were also found in the streets of tourist zones, such as Ubud and Kuta, begging for a living. Without water, education or any of the basic tools needed to create employment, these women, often with their children, were forced to seek an income any way they could.

The Muntigunung Development Program has released many of them from that cruel life.

“I admire these women and their fighting spirit. They are motivated. They used to tell me their life as beggars robbed them of their dignity, and embarrassed them. At the bottom of their hearts, they didn’t want to be begging. They are happy working,” says Soedjarwo.

Soedjarwo and his team, with support from program partners such as hotels and businesses, offer a three-pronged approach to community development, with the “first line” addressing a community’s primary needs such as water, the second developing community economies through adding value to existing products as well as creating new industries, and thirdly education.

For the people of Muntigunung, the program reveals a new horizon for the future.

— Photos by JB Djwan

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