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A better future: Lakoat Kujawas nature school educates children and adults in NTT
The independent school helps village children and their parents learn while also having fun.
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Passing it down: The nature school Lakoat Kujawas often brings in village elders to share ancestral knowledge with residents. (Lakoat Kujawas/Courtesy of Bakti Armin Septiexan)
T
he village of Taiftob is located on the slopes of Mount Mutis, North Mollo, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT). It is the location of Lakoat Kujawas, a school founded by writer Dicky Senda and a few friends. Now a respected hub for many students who have dropped out of other institutions in Taifto and the surrounding areas, including Kapan, Soe and Kupang, Lakoat Kujawas offers a social entrepreneurship community that focuses on arts and culture. It takes the form of what is known as a “nature school”, where children study in an open environment surrounded by nature and the curriculum focuses on life skills in relation to the environment and culture.
Lakoat Kujawas has a community library, an archive room and constantly runs programs with farmers and weavers from Mollo to teach students nature-based entrepreneurship skills. The idea is to develop these children into a driving force behind the country’s ecotourism industry and nature-based businesses, which sell everything from woven fabrics, coffee and honey, to organic sambal.
Founder Dicky Senda returned to his hometown of North Mollo in 2016. An author by trade, he moved to Yogyakarta to study in 2005. After a decade, he came back home with a goal.
"My parents said to me, 'Why do you want to go home? Your job there [in Kupang] is good. There's no work here.' But that didn't stop me at all. I want to share the knowledge I have – knowledge that I got while traveling abroad – with my friends here. That’s why, together, we launched Lakoat Kujawas," Dicky told The Jakarta Post.
Even though he’s lived far from home, Dicky's heart has always remained in Mollo. He often writes about his hometown in his poems and short stories. This is how Dicky became more aware of the problems that plagued lives in the village.
Dicky mentioned issues of human trafficking in the village. He also mentioned the village’s overwhelming cases of stunting and malnutrition. In a 2019 joint report by the National Team for the Acceleration of Poverty Reduction and the Australian government, North Mollo was found to have a stunting rate of 64.70 percent.
