Bali's poorest of the poor on road to better welfare

Bali's poorest of the poor on road to better welfare

Jacqueline Mackenzie, Contributor, Desa Ban, Bali

Bali's tourism industry appears to be recovering, with holiday
bookings looking promising. But while visitors enjoy the infinity
pools and spa packages, they may not realize that they are just a
hundred kilometers from one of the country's poorest communities.

The people of Desa Ban, in the district of Kubu in Karangasem,
East Bali, have an average income of Rp 500,000 a year. They have
been living the hard life since long before the Bali bombings of
October 2002.

But their lives are being improved by the work of the East
Bali Poverty Project (EBPP).

Arsil Majid's drawing graphically shows the "before" of his
community's life: a child urinating in front of his house,
another with the bloated belly of malnutrition and a third with
diarrhea, while pigs and dogs roam freely.

The "after" is Arsil himself, plus his dozen classmates:
freshly bathed and glowing with enthusiasm.

The "between" is EBPP. Its founder and chairman, British
engineer David Booth, is beaming from the back of the classroom,
waiting to take me on the next leg of our tour of the project's
sizeable achievements.

"They are the pride of their communities, in fact we've just
had our first graduates from elementary school given scholarships
to junior high school in Singaraja," says Booth.

We've been up since before dawn to make this trip to Desa Ban,
where around 9,000 people live in 19 isolated hamlets scattered
across 7,000-odd hectares of arid, mountain slopes.

We're only a couple of hours' drive from Bali's cultural
center, Ubud, where visitors still search out "traditional" Bali
between the galleries and boutique hotels. This part of Bali is
traditional all right, but there's nothing exotic about it.

As you leave the bitumen on the lower slopes and wind your way
in 4WD up the precariously narrow dirt roads, you'll be struck by
evidence of continuing poverty at every bend.

There's the obvious lack of infrastructure, from roads to
sanitation to health care. Most houses are still unventilated
single rooms with bamboo walls and dirt floors. The low rainfall,
granular volcanic soil and poor farming techniques support a diet
based on just cassava and corn.

"There's not just no money here," Booth says between potholes.
"There was also a poverty of ideas because they're so isolated.

"Lots of people have never been outside their hamlet."

Yet here and there are inspiring signs of real changes. One
dry hillside bears healthy crops of tomato and eggplants. At a
mountain saddle there are water pipes cut into the rocky slope to
create a clean water supply from a natural spring. Roads between
a number of hamlets, that until recently could only take trail
bikes, have been made passable for 4WD vehicles through a clever
use of simple concrete and volcanic sand strips, with verges
stabilized by a species of deep-rooted plant called Vetiver
grass.

And when you finally arrive at one of the high mountain
hamlets, and walk the extra kilometer to the next ridge-top
hamlet, you see the focal point for the greatest change in
decades -- a simple, new school building.

In fact, it's really the community's center. Teachers, labor
and most building materials were all drawn from the community.
The project providing just 4 WD transport for materials and a bit
of know-how.

"When we started in '98 we surveyed the villagers" says Booth.
"Their first priority was education. At the time, the nearest
government schools were four to six kilometers away. In some
hamlets, just about everyone was illiterate."

Many agencies, including UNICEF, see education as the best
means of lifting children out of the cycle of poverty. But
getting parents in poor communities to keep children in school is
the big challenge.

"I extracted three promises from the parents -- that they send
their children to school every day, that the children are bathed
every day and that they motivate and support their efforts at
school," Booth said.

As you walk through the classrooms, it's clear the school
curriculum has had to address much more than the three Rs.

As the students' drawings show, more than half the kids were
sick and malnourished when the project began. Too far from the
nearest community health center (Puskesmas), parents cannot
identify what ailed their children, but they describe fever,
cholera, diarrhea, and chronic skin and stomach problems as
almost constant family companions.

With many early marriages and no effective family planning
measures, the birthrate remained high. This put ever-greater
strains on ever-smaller resources, and the cycle of high maternal
and infant mortality, with underlying constant malnutrition, was
complete.

"Malnourished kids can't learn. So one of our first measures
was to given the children get a nutritious meal, milk and a
multivitamin tablet every school day," Booth said.

But the community had an additional affliction. Nearly 85
percent of elementary school age children had iodine deficiency
disorder. The soil and the salt these people use is particularly
low in iodine. As well, their cassava-based diet actually stops
iodine being absorbed.

In adults, lack of iodine turns the thyroid gland into a
goiter and can cause miscarriages. In children it stunts growth
and retards mental development. Before this project, most
villagers didn't know what caused goiter, the many miscarriages
or the intellectual impairment.

"When asked, some said it was because they had eaten too many
eggs, some women thought they'd pushed too hard in childbirth,
others said it was because they'd spoken ill of neighbors or
family," said Booth.

Again through the schools, they have explained the real cause
and distributed iodized salt. With UNICEF and local authorities,
they have given iodine capsules to the main target groups, women
and children. But as part of their policy of long-term,
sustainable solutions, the project is trying to move the
community away from a cassava-based diet.

When you visit the learning gardens in four of the hamlets,
there is plenty of evidence the community wants to expand its
menu. There is a bed for each school student, full of tomatoes,
eggplant, carrots and potatoes.

"We were lucky enough to get help from Australian experts in
permaculture. They showed us organic farming can be suitable even
in our dry region and even the steepest slope can be stabilized
and used productively," said the senior coordinator for farming
programs, Rosmara Dewi, one of the poverty project's 26 full-time
local staff.

"We've got a garden close to each of our four schools, and
they've greatly improved kids' nutrition. We've also planted
Indian Moringa trees, whose leaves are very high in vitamins A
and C, iron, calcium, plus potassium and protein."

Between the terraces are hedgerows of the same Vetiver grass
used on the roadways. Its long, tough, fibrous root systems trap
water, control erosion and discourage pests.

The kids water and work their plots each school day. They keep
seed banks after harvesting, use companion planting and spray
neem oil for pests, improve the soil with buffalo manure and
castings from worm farms -- all techniques they're tested on as
part of their integrated curriculum.

It's been so successful the parents want to copy the
techniques on their own land. But the project's decided adults
must contribute to community gardens and show they understand
organic farming before they earn a "starter pack" of worm
castings, Vetiver grass, seeds and seed potatoes. They also have
to sign an agreement to repay the community in kind within a
year.

Along more of the project's road works, we come to an even
more isolated hamlet, where the project's clean water efforts are
on show.

"Our big survey found some 1,700 families had to walk three
kilometers each way to one of the area's few natural springs.
Even then the flow is unreliable and water's usually polluted,"
Booth said. "They can only carry about 40 liters each time on
small trolleys along the narrow steep tracks to most hamlets."

Most villagers relied on rainwater runoff into large open
vats, often polluted with algae and bird-droppings and rarely
boiled before consumption, creating lots of avoidable disease.

The community, with the project's help, is gradually replacing
these with sealed 4,500 liter storage tanks, which use the same
bamboo-cement "appropriate" technology as the roads. But they
want a long-term solution to clean water too, getting water from
the underground rivers that feed the key springs in the area.

"Eventually I would like a pipe system to fan out to central
locations to minimize the traveling time from the most distant
villages, eventually providing safe drinking water for over 600
families," Booth said. "My wish list includes solar pumps, expert
help, and a lot of participation from the people themselves."

If the people in this little-known corner of Bali share even a
fraction of Booth's energy and determination, their lives will
continue to improve in real and sustainable ways.