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a href="http://">Award winning: Sepi sits next to the wood fired autdoor stove of the family’s home in Karangasem, Bali.Sepi’s family of three, her mother Kerim and sister Nengah are registered as poor and have a Surat Miskin (document proving their poverty).

A Surat Miskin allows, on paper, for free medical assistance and schooling. However in the case of Sepi’s family this document that should allow for Sepi and her sister to attend school without charge,
and her mother to receive the medicines she needs, is not completely successful.

“Our family has had the Surat Miskin for many years, but we still have to pay for school. In the beginning PEMDA promised to help and in primary school we only had to pay for the building fee and uniforms. I got two scholarships to middle school and again only paid for my uniforms and the [school] building fee. Now I am at high school we have to pay IDR 110,000 each month and each semester we have to pay IDR 105,000 for books. Each year we pay more than Rp 1 million for the building fee and uniform. There is no scholarship. Mum sells rubbish from the sea or little cakes to get the money needed. There was one time Mum had no money so she could not pay my fees. She had to sell two goats and we borrowed from neighbors. It’s very hard to pay for school, but I like school — I love education,” says Sepi.

Her goal is to become a journalist. As part of her prize in the Anne Frank Photography Award, Sepi was invited by Radio Nederland to write a story of her time in Holland.

“They gave me a laptop computer, but it’s not working now — perhaps because we have no electricity to charge it properly. I wrote five stories for Radio Nederlands, but I have never heard back from them. I emailed them a long story about my time in Holland, but without response,” says Sepi who started writing three years ago. “I wrote about my daily life, my inspiration was Anne Frank’s Diary, so I write in diary form, as she did,” says Sepi of her writing style.

In the future Sepi hopes to make a career from the written word. “ If I become a journalist I want to tell of the poverty in the hills around here [northeast Bali], because people in the hills here are so far from the cities and education, and I want to tell people who don’t care about the poor that there are kids out there without parents, crying, begging for compassion. Their lives remind me of my own childhood — that was me. I want the Government to understand it’s hard for us to find food. The Government needs to be aware of the life we have and give more compassion to the children of these mountains — there is no water and no food,” says Sepi of her goal to become a journalist.

—JP/Trisha Sertori