By Santillane and Perrine
Hi! Our names are Santillane and Perrine, we are French volunteers working with EBPP for the next four months. Our mission here is trying to improve EBPP’s communication strategy to try and reach a wider audience and thus collect more funds to keep the projects moving, especially education. Today we want to talk about our first experience in Desa Ban, East Bali.
We reached EBPP office at the foot of Mounts Agung and Abang in the early morning and started to climb towards the high perched EBPP schools. Whilst David had been telling us about the village for a week before our arrival, the inaccessibility of the communities still was beyond what we had imagined. As we were driving through the different sub-villages, the roads kept on getting steeper and bumpier until we reached Manikaji school.
We spent the day meeting EBPP’s teachers and students at all the schools, all working in harmony and respect. The educational team’s ability to create programs and environments totally compatible with the students’ needs certainly was most striking. As life in the mountain remains highly dependent on successful agriculture, with children playing an important part in improving their family and community’s future, both at school and after school hours. EBPP’s teacher know how to adapt to those constraints because most of them come from those communities and thus understand the children’s’ situation.
Wednesday’s fabulous workshop on permaculture, given by the dryland permaculture expert Pak Krisna Waworuntu, was the perfect example of how EBPP finds appropriate solutions to the needs expressed by the community (read more later about the permaculture project). The high attendance and the commitment of the children were proof of the relevance of their help. We had not fully understood EBPP’s “Learning by Doing” methods until then. EPBB helps the community help itself by providing sustainable answers to community-exposed problems, that are always implemented by the community itself.
It may have been our very first time observing that kind of system from a nonprofit organization. Very inspiring! Thank you David and Komang for this meaningful experience! •
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