By Jacqueline Lee | GlobalGiving InTheField Representative
Jacqueline Lee is an InTheField Traveler with GlobalGiving who is visiting our partners’ projects throughout Southeast Asia. Her “Postcard” from the visit in Indonesia:
On the day of July 17, I was able to visit the first, and still the only, library provided by Yayasan Usaha Mulia, or YUM, and donors like you in the community of Cipanas, Indonesia. The families there consist of farmers, labor workers, and vegetable sellers at the markets.
When not in school, local youth have the opportunity to get tutored and participate in activities at the library like educational games, creative arts & crafts, and movies – when I arrived the children were making school schedules to take home. These included coloring, drawing, and cutting out shapes to make it their own while learning the days of the week. These youth were ages 6-12. The older kids were working on the computers, and the younger ones were drawing pictures. It was fun to see how each group of younger children had a general theme they decided to draw – one group drawing a home and another drawing elephants and fish.
The library was colorful, encouraging creativity, safety, with the walls filled with books, dictionaries, novels, and more. I also saw the “boxes of books” which is part of the mobile library program for other communities' schools. YUM’s goal is to add more schools to its current 2 where it provides books. These are the first “libraries” in these communities.
I asked the librarian what he did before working at this one, and he said he was a teacher at the government schools. He said the schools lacked expression and creativity for the children, so when he was introduced to the opportunity at YUM, he was happy to join.
I am told that one of the youth that has been through YUM's programs has now been accepted to one of the best universities in Indonesia. This is a huge achievement. I had such a wonderful time meeting the community and children through YUM. To read more about my experience, be sure and check out: JacquelineInTheField Blog.
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