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Kiswanti empowers children through her library
Nostalgia: Kiswanti poses under the bicycle she used to distribute books around her village when she started the Lebak Wangi Reading Room library in 1997
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ostalgia: Kiswanti poses under the bicycle she used to distribute books around her village when she started the Lebak Wangi Reading Room library in 1997. The bicycle is hung from the ceiling of the library on the second floor of the reading room in Parung, West Java.
Recognizing the empowerment that literacy and proper reading habits can bring, Kiswanti, a 54-year-old elementary school dropout with strong determination, is seeking to educate youngsters in her village
On Saturday afternoons, you will see a group of young children from different religious denominations, including Islam, Protestantism and Catholicism, sitting down in the Lebak Wangi Reading Room in Parung, West Java, to participate in weekly creativity and literacy classes.
The children begin by praying according to their own religious beliefs before starting the lesson of the day, whether it be a writing class or recycling activities, facilitated by around 20 committed volunteers, most of whom are university students who live in the area.
The library is owned by Kiswanti, who lives in Parung with her husband, a builder. It provides educational activities focused on literacy skills for both youngsters aged 6 to 18 and adults alike — so parents do not have to be bored while waiting for their children at the library.
“We focus on six skills: reading and writing, numeracy, finance, science, culture and civics,” Kiswanti told The Jakarta Post during a recent interview in her library.
The activities for the children comprise reading comprehension, education on wise spending as well as mathematics courses. The adults, meanwhile, can take part in lessons on how to read fairy tales in an interesting manner, for example. Occasionally, the library also invites speakers to teach the adults entrepreneurship skills, among other lessons.
According to Kiswanti, the literacy lessons for children focus on sharpening problem-solving skills through reading, while also instilling good manners through the library’s fun activities.
“For instance, we will take the children along to have a lunch with senior members of our neighborhood unit. While teaching them to respect the elderly, during the lunch we will also ask them to identify the ingredients of the food items served there, like cassava and potatoes. Then we will return to the library, open up a biology book and find the Latin names for the plants,” Kiswanti explained enthusiastically.
The library received a grant worth Rp 100 million (around US$7,100) from the Education and Culture Ministry through its Literate Village Program to fund its activities for 12 months. Students of the library’s reading and writing classes are now also working on a project to document the social history of Parung through interviews and literature studies.
Kiswanti’s hard work has apparently paid off. She started the reading classes with local children modestly, with only a few books in the small terrace area of her one-storey home in 1997, when she and her husband settled in Parung for the first time. At that time, she also had a bicycle — that she still keeps in her house — which she used to travel to the village, bringing books to local children and conducting reading classes with them.
Now the library has around 8,000 books.
After 20 years of relentless effort, she has received many donations from supportive people, and was able to move her library and course center into a two-storey, 4 by 10 square meter space.
Kiswanti has been consistent in her efforts to teach literacy skills to the children in her neighborhood after she found her life’s purpose in an unexpected way back in 1997.
“When I first moved here, I was so concerned to see children spewing out dirty words at one another as if they weren’t so good mannered. Then I remembered my mission in life,” she said.
Kiswanti was born on Dec. 4, 1963, and grew up in Bantul, Yogyakarta, in a poor family. Her parents could not afford to send her to school, but she had an uncle who worked with the late activist YB Mangunwijaya on the banks of the Code River. It was her uncle who told her stepfather to encourage Kiswanti to read and be a literate person so she would not be deceived by others.
.img_assist_custom-780x510.jpg "The joy of learning: Sofiah Nuramalla, 18, who has flourished academically from the activities at the Lebak Wangi Reading Room in Parung, West Java, reads in the library.")
Encouraged by this advice, Kiswanti began to visit the SDN Kepuh 1 state elementary school in Bantul to read school textbooks in the library. Certain teachers were so moved by her determination to learn that they agreed to collect money to fund her education so she could finish elementary school.
Unfortunately, she could not continue her education afterward, but her belief in the importance of reading persisted.
“I always saved money to get newspapers, magazines and secondhand books. Thankfully, I have a husband who is willing to support me. So when I worked as a domestic helper for a Filipino family in Jakarta for a few months in 1987, I eventually convinced them to pay parts of my salary in the form of books,” she said.
The books she collected during that time helped her set up the library in 1997. According to Kiswanti, observing how unfortunate some of the children in Parung were reminded her of her own bitter childhood.
“In the 1980s, people were treated with such contempt for being poor. I was also ostracized and bullied for being poor during my childhood. This is why I don’t want these children to share my fate and try to empower them through strong reading habits, as well as other literacy aspects,” she said.
She added that she continuously updated her library collection through the money she collected from fines for returning books after the due date, as well as the prize money the students received from winning various competitions.
Eighteen-year-old Sofiah Nuramalla is one of the stellar students of the library. Currently pursuing a degree at a local nursing academy, she won various fairy-tale recitation competitions organized by Permata Bank and the Maritime Affairs and Fisheries Ministry in 2010 and 2012, respectively.
“I love the classes in this library because they go beyond just forming my reading habits — they are also delivered in a fun way, like for instance, integrating the reading lessons with handicraft ones — asking us to read an Indonesian fairy-tale book and create a handicraft based on that. I’ve also found lots of great friends here,” Sofiah said, as her eyes lit up.
- Photos by JP/Sebastian Partogi
