People don’t really talk about their religions here in Bali. 

And I have guessed that all the Balinese students in this program were Hindus as I knew that ninety seven percent of Balinese population is Hindu. 

However, today I figured out that there are some Muslim students in our group. It would be impossible to distinguish who’s Muslim or Hindu if they didn’t tell me. 

America is supposed to be the symbol of Freedom(and freedom of religion.) But the fact that the country was built with the values of Christianity and the dominated religion has always been Christianity AND the impact of 9/11 didn’t help Americans to accept the values of other religions. Recently, there has been burning of Quran in South and Islam has been targeted as the “bad religion” despite of the fact that Islam is the fastest growing religion in America.

Once Mohammed Ali said, “Rivers, ponds, lakes and streams - they all have different names, but they all contain water. Just as religions do - they all contain truths.” I definitely agree with Mohammed Ali. Religions in the world have different names and somewhat different values and ceremonies, however, they all have same purpose; to love and take care of nature/human. 

About two weeks ago, wise Agung Rai told us that Balinese people don’t talk about religions because they serve nature and human, not the name tag of any religions. That results as they have an interesting combination of Buddhism and Hinduism as their major religion. I hope that in the near future more people will have open mind towards the other religions in the world.

What a day!

Our group decided to meet at the edutel at 7 in the morning today and head to the elementary schools in singaraja. We’re separated into 3 groups with 2 people. Deny and I went to two elementary schools (one private and one public.) One private catholic school we planned to visit didn’t allow us to interview people there. During the field research, we figured out that the illiteracy isn’t a huge problem in the city schools. All the students who we met was available of writing and reading. The transportation system was lack but wasn’t needed by the students beacause most of them live in walking distance from the school. We realized our assumptions about causes of childhoold illiteracy had many errors, but we concluded that we would’ve satisfied our assumptions if we targeted schools in the village, not the city in singaraja.

We took a short break for lunch and gathered with other group members. After a delicious meal, we headed to professor who’s working with kindergarten for poor children in the village. She and her assistant(canadian volunteer guy) gave us some inspirational speech about indonesian education system and how difficult it is to change the mindset of teachers and goverment officials who don’t support the new ways of teaching. They also offer free afternoon and sunday programs for village kids to learn English.

There was a huge lesson I learn during the field research today. To work on community development project like this, communication becomes such an issue. In my case, I mainly depended on Deny to interview teachers and student since none of them spoke fluent English. I can’t imagine how difficult it would be if we actually start to talk to community leaders to propose our ideas and explain them. I now have much more respect for volunteers who’re engaging in NGOs in developing world. There has to be a lot of miscommunications and efforts to be made to understand each other.

today i’m feeling just great. i’m finally over with the diarrhea and fever. Also painful headache is gone. Today, we finally handed in our contract and decided the topic of our research project. We chose childhood illiteracy even though I would never imagine this education issue would be my project since i was thinking of doing environmental issue such as waste and pollution in singaraja, but illiteracy seems like pretty interesting issue to tackle. There is a huge Indonesian population who are illiteracy and there should be a solution to prevent future balinese generation from being illiterate. We will start our first field research tomorrow. i’m very excited because I’ve never done researchs like this. I hope we make mistakes and fix the mistakes we made during breakdown and assumptions so that we can improve our point of view tomorrow.

the idea of social entrepreneurship hasn’t developed well in Singaraja yet. I’m guessing the traditional community bases society, which is symbolized with Subak, the compound of dozens of families working and living together in the same area, has led people not needing to rely on any other services other than their community. However, the communities also recently have confronted social problems such as HIV/AIDS, education, water insecurity, waste management and so on. During the afternoon, our group went out to seek social enterprises in Singaraja. It’s really helpful to have local students who’re knowledegable about the institutions in the Singarajan society. Without them, we could’ve found none since many of them don’t have any websites to present themselves. First institution we went was the small school for poor children but unfortunately it was already closed. Second one was working on awareness of HIV/AIDS issues in Singaraja.(Although its main office is in Denpasar.) They have a huge problem with its financial stablity since they”re hugely depending on the donation for its budget>

Last night, I had the worst diarrhea in my life. I couldn’t sleep more than an hour and woke up and went to bathroom every hour. Bali belly is such a dangerous thing. Today, my group worked with the topics of poverty and lack of monetary resources. We practiced the excercise so-called ‘breakdown.’ It was tough but interesting excercise. We analyzed the causes of the problem one by one so that we can actually find the specific problme we can fix. Bandi, Ayu, Tyrene, Andrew, Deny and I were belonged to same group. We set gambling and corruption as the two major causes of the problem. Gambling causes alchoholism and financial insecurity since the percentage of winning gambling is much lower than having regular jobs. It is not a sustainable resource of money. Alcoholism leads to family abuse because Alcohol addiction makes people to abuse their family members or spouses. The prostitution often occurs due to the family abuse since the children who got abused during their childhoold have much higher potential to participate in prostitution. And this results as the high illiteracy rate because they don’t have time to go to school when they’re engaged in such activity. Thus unemployment raises since people can’t write or read so that they can’t get a job. Then this leads to prostitution because women were often forced to be engaged in prostitution when family is suffering from poverty. This bad cycle goes on and on.

Help people to find out what their capabilities, but not tell them what to do. This is necessary attitude for people who want to change the world with development of the foreign country. We have to understand that everyone has a different perspective viewpoint in the subject. 

1. whoever comes is the right people.

2. whenever it starts is the right time.

3. whatever happens is the only thing that could have.

4. when it’s over, it’s over.

today, we arrived at the city of singaraja, where we’ll finish our 3-weeks long project in this class. after playing some games, we were separated into many groups to talk about global/local issues in the world. I joined Jordan’s ‘pollution’ group. We had a really interesting conversation. The main cause of problem is the lack of knowledge and education about the pollution. Due to this, balinese people often lean on government, which doesn’t do anything about pollution neither. Also most of people don’t have water-purifying system in their houses so that they either buy water bottles from store or boil tap water to drink water. Waste management system is also very poor compared to the developed cuntries. People often burn their waste or throw them out on the street. 

2nd day at sudaji village. We visited elementary school and climbed/swam at the waterfall. After that, we played soccer with local kids. What a busy day it was. Even though it wasn’t great day for my feet, my heart truly enjoyed today’s activities. Kids in school were just so naive that I can’t stop smiling. Yoga we did this morning was also fun. I know that yoga is one of the most painful things from the past experience but can’t deny that it brings you the inner peace of your mind and balance of your body. Hiking was the climax. We lcimbed through jungled and Rice patties to get to this magnificient-looking waterfall in the village. I’m exhausted now and going to bed.

I haven’t taken any social entrepreneurship classes (yet). So that’s probably why I was really surprised that people pointed out many critical points about Green School. From my perspective point of view, Green School is the most interesting school I’ve ever heard of  and in which has so many potentials to help more locals and education (future of) Balinese society. I know people pointed out that the school’s financial resource is mainly depending on rich international source, thus school focusing on enormous architectures and fanciful infrastructures; however, I strongly believe that the school is having first graduation next year and its financial foundation is somewhat unstable hence needed to be fixed. Moreover, It has already employed almost tens of thousands of local balinese and helped its economy. I believe it’s on the stage of getting sustainability in the society and I’m looking forward to observing the growth of this school.

I have a strong feeling that I’ll learn A LOT during this dialogue. This will be one of the best things that happened to me. I’m already learning a lot while listening to different opinions from different people. People who are doing this program is so nice and intelligent.

Today, everyone was excited about the dinner with prince as I was. His family has maintained as the royal family for five generations. It had survived through the five different types of governments including communist regime. It has adjusted to traditional and democratic governments established in Indonesia.

Agung Rai is surely the great figure in Ubud community who contributed his life to support the future of the community and its people with his great effort and artistic talent. But what I was interested in most about him was neither his talent nor success but his respectful attitude towards his community. He was wearing this very Indonesian clothes. His clothes were related to nature and his parents. Also his hat and belt symbolized the control and focus of his force. He gave us a inspirational speech about the way of living which is very different from most people’s in the developed world. The life in huge cities in any world is always have to be busy and complex. In a competitive capitalistic society, people were taught to think as ‘Time=money.’ however, what Agung Rai told was totally different one. He emphasized that time should be consumed to make relationship with people(or nature), but not money. According to him, Balinese people don’t hesitate to spend their time with strangers talking about things which seem unimportant to us because they want to have a relationship with people and get to know each other. It was great speech.

First day in Bali. We arrived at the Denpasar airport around 4p.m. Professor Horn and her driver were waiting for us near the arrival entrance. It was very humid and hot(obviously..) weather. We were separated into 8 groups and moved to the homestay place in Ubud. The scenery of street of Bali was just beautiful.