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.