The road out of poverty

(News Terupdate) - I Ketut Alit grew up without access to education.

Like 99 percent of the other 3,000 people from a remote village balancing on the saddle between Mount Agung and Mount Batur in Bali’s North East, Alit was illiterate.

Born into Ban, which covers 19 sub-villages, Alit never imagined life outside his rugged mountain home; a home where disease was the common lot, grinding poverty the only way of life known and iodine deficiency induced retardation endemic.

That’s if you lived; infant mortality stood at between 30 to 50 percent of children under one year, mothers had never heard of maternal health clinics, nurses never visited, and the national census ignored the existence of these people.

Just over a decade ago, one man decided to spend his life changing these statistics. Englishman David Stone had kicked about much of the world, working as an engineer in Nigeria, the Caribbean, England at odd times and the Arab Emirates before arriving in Indonesia in the late 1980s.

He started out in Jakarta teaching English in the land that felt like home on arrival.

“I was the best teacher they had,” says Stone with not a droplet of false modesty.

He has a quirky ego that drives him to claim being best at all he has done, perhaps it is this character flaw that gave him the push to pull off a miracle for Ban’s forgotten people by developing the East Bali Poverty Project (EBPP).

“Ban was the poorest village in Bali. There were no roads to Ban back in 96. No one had ever heard of the place. It was not on any map. We had to hike in.”

What he first noticed was the people were all tiny with high cheekbones and everyone had impetigo sores.

“The high cheekbones are a sign of malnutrition. The only crops farmed were cassava and corn,” says Stone. Cassava blocks iodine absorption in the body causing goiter and, more damagingly, cretinism in new-borns starved of iodine in the womb.

It was these children and adults with vacant eyes wandering the village that led Stone to contact UNICEF in the late 1990s and begin the newly formed EBPP’s iodine and vitamin supplement program in Ban.

“At first UNICEF didn’t believe we had this problem. Poverty in Bali didn’t exist according to the Government. Within an hour we had photographed 10 people with cretinism. They just kept coming out of houses.”

With UNICEF, he continues, we have gone from the highest rate of goiter to the lowest, explaining goiter is the hallmark of iodine deficiency.

“UNICEF was fantastic – real heroes,” says Stone, who while quick to pat himself on the back, is quicker to cheer on the many people who have been the rocks in addressing poverty in Ban.

Stone saw the poverty swamping Ban was based on lack of education, access to health and markets, a collective memory lost under the volcanic eruption of Mount Agung in 1963 and a cassava diet coupled with fouled water supplies. Turning around these problems could only be achieved if the villagers wanted a change, explains Stone.

Asking more than 1,500 people across Ban what they needed and collecting data on their daily lives gave Stone and his team consisting of Ketut and Komang — local lads from the region’s accessible lower slopes — the information that would lay the foundations for change.

Alit was one of the first children from the Ban’s sub-village of Bunga to start school. Bunga, with its handful of homes, was to be the pilot. Today, at 19 years of age, Alit is not only literate, he is also a teacher in the remote Darmaji school, still inaccessible after rains.

“I was really proud and happy when I started school. Back then, the nearest school was two hours walk away. My parents worried about me going so far to school. In the rainy season the kids would get sick, so we gave up,” Alit says.

Alit soon learned to read and write and is now a teacher. Schools now dot the slopes of Ban and most children have access to education.

Literacy has changed Alit’s family income potential. Understanding prices in the market means his family receives true value for their produce.

“Today we have a road to the outside world. I know there is another world.”

The road has acted as a financial boon to Ban’s farmers who husband cattle as a cash crop.

“In the past, people had to walk the cattle kilometers to the roadway to be trucked to market. The farmers were earning around US$80 per cow. Half the income went on transport and middle men. Now they sell their cattle for up to 10 times that amount,” says Stone.

Recently they took a herd to market and made almost $5,000, giving them the means to buy more calves, Stone adds, highlighting the importance of market access in poverty reduction.

While the cattle of Ban have long been a valuable source of income, they were once also the cause of the annual “sickness season”.

Water tanks, built to catch the precious wet season rains, were fouled by dipping buckets, explains Stone.

“The dipping buckets had cattle faeces and other contaminants, so the tank water was riddled with E. coli. If you or I drank it we’d be dead. Now we have a program of building sealed water tanks and water is boiled for 20 minutes.”

The EBPP also laid kilometers of water piping underground to collect fresh spring water that bubbles up from the mountains depths. This has given access to water to most of the people in the region with reservoirs placed strategically so no one walks distances for water.

As the communities in Ban have improved their health and education, their choices in life have grown. All schools offer karate lessons with a former Indonesian champion, Mangku Wayan Pajek. Three students are hoping to head to the Indonesian championships later this year. Other children are focusing on the arts, with volunteers such as Israeli Esia Simantov sharing his drama and music skills fine honed at Tel Aviv University.

“We want the kids to have the very best training. This gives them choices for the future. Some are learning sports massage and others are showing great promise in yoga. These skills will allow them to make a good living anywhere in the world,” says Stone, as he cheers on the karate kids practicing kicks.

Like other organizations working quietly across Indonesia, the EBPP and its founder, David Stone, has proved poverty can be alleviated.

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