It was early in the morning when Salamun rushed to Al Falah mosque in Krisik village, Blitar regency, East Java, to make an announcement on kerja bakti (community activity) to local villagers on Saturday.

Through the mosque’s loudspeaker, he called on neighbors to come together to build a 32-meter-tall landslide barrier on the slope of a hill where Pura Agung Arga Sunya — one of the three grand Hindu temples in the regency — stands.

Minutes after Salamun’s announcement, dozens of villagers from Wonorejo hamlet, one of four hamlets in the village, gathered in the mosque yard to depart together to the temple, located about 4 kilometers from the mosque.

They were apparently not the only group to participate in the activity, as Salamun and his neighbors were joined by residents of the other three hamlets, most of whom were Muslims and Christians, to help in constructing the temple’s landslide barrier.

Due to the high intensity of rainfall late last year, a landslide hit the hill at the Pura Agung Arga Sunya complex, threatening the foundation of the temple building.

Local Hindus in the village decided to raise money to construct a landslide barrier to prevent their temple from being destroyed by the natural disaster.

Around 200 villagers formed a 400-m-long human chain, stretching from the village road to the hill of the temple, to relay building materials for the construction because trucks could only drop the materials on the side of the road.

The residents decided to manually relay the building materials, including sand and stone, in order to save more time and money in constructing the barrier, the progress of which has reached 30 percent after construction started in June.

“Every Saturday and Sunday in the past month, our Muslim and Christian brothers and sisters have been helping us in the construction. They also helped us to build this temple back in 2001,” said Suwari, the Pura Agung Arga Sunya caretaker.

People of various religious beliefs had lived together in harmony in Krisik village for decades and helped each other regardless of their backgrounds, as was tradition among the villagers, Salamun said.

Around 350 families, 25 percent of the total population in the village, are Hindu. There are seven small Hindu temples spread across the four hamlets in Krisik as well as mosques and the Jawi Wetan Protestant Church.

“This is the least we can do; lending our hands to help them [build the barrier],” Salamun said, “The Hindu people have also helped us in building or renovating our mosques.”

Members of the women’s wing of the local chapter of Nahdlatul Ulama — the country’s largest Muslim organization — also assisted by providing free food for villagers working on the construction site.

According to the Indonesian Hindu Religious Council (PHDI), more than 30,000 Hindu people live in Blitar regency, which is home to the third-largest Hindu population in East Java after Banyuwangi regency and Surabaya.

Blitar is one of the country’s regencies with the largest proportion of Muslims, with 92.8 percent of its 1.14 million population adhering to Islamic teachings, according to 2014 data posted on the official Blitar administration website blitarkab.go.id.

Local residents of the Hindu faith only comprise 0.54 percent of the population, making them the smallest religious group in the regency.

Lestari, the head of the Blitar chapter of the PHDI, said the principles of interfaith harmony had been properly maintained in the regency, as reflected by the actions of local residents.

“We have been upholding local values and traditions, including mutual cooperation and helping each other,” Lestari said.

Similar examples of interreligious harmony can also be seen in other villages in the regency. In Gaprang village in Kanigoro subdistrict, for instance, the villagers built a mosque, a church and a Hindu temple close to each other.

The locals named the road on which the three worship places are located “Masgapur road”, a portmanteau of masjid (mosque), gereja (church) and pura (temple).

In Balerejo village in Panggungrejo district, five different religions are practiced: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Protestantism and Catholicism. Despite the differences, they have lived in harmony side by side for a long time. Helping each other to build their places of worship is an ordinary village activity.

“When I was an elementary school student, I remember seeing Hindus in Balerejo village buying some bricks for Muslims who were building mosques,”

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