East Timor's schools rising from the ashes

East Timor's schools rising from the ashes

Pandaya, The Jakarta Post, Dili, East Timor

The Maliana State High School in the western regency of
Bobonaro looks like a complex of ghost houses.

Most of the half a dozen buildings built during the Indonesian
rule are in a state of neglect almost three years after the
school was severely damaged in a fire in the 1999 violence.

Walls are blackened. Wooden supports are missing and the roofs
crumbled beyond repair. The basketball court is thick with dirt
and trash.

Reconstruction has just begun, starting from the front
building, where the classroom activities are in progress amid the
noise of hammering and sawing.

The school was only one of the countless buildings and
residences destroyed by pro-Indonesia militias after most East
Timorese voted for independence in a UN-sanctioned referendum in
1999.

Rebuilding the gutted school building in Maliana and buildings
elsewhere throughout the territory is but a small part of a host
of problems that the impoverished newly born state, where almost
50 percent of the 800,000 population are illiterate, is
struggling to solve.

The Xanana government is giving education and health the
highest priority, allocating 20 percent of the US$77 million in
the 2002/2003 budget to the two sectors. Much of the money in the
education sector will go to school reconstruction.

Armindo Maia, the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports,
said that 90 percent of the 700 existing school buildings were
destroyed in the 1999 tragedy.

"Reconstructing and building new schools is a top priority,"
Maia told The Jakarta Post. His ministry office was among those
burned down and has just been rebuilt.

The government has spent $13.9 million to rehabilitate 550
schools and build 10 new schools as well as buy 80,000 desks over
the past three years. About the same amount will be made
available in the upcoming fiscal year that will begin in July.

Recruitment of new teachers is another headache, especially
for the secondary and college levels. During the Indonesian
administration, 80 percent of elementary school teachers were
Timor natives. But the proportion reversed at the higher level.

"We have to recruit a lot of teachers for the secondary
schools and universities but few are qualified. So the best thing
we could do is to recruit college students of the 6th semester
and above to fill the shortfall," Maia said.

Instructional materials are yet to be written and distributed
in line with the government's policy to rework the education
system and reintroduce Portuguese as the official language along
with Tetum in place of Bahasa Indonesia.

At present, the secondary school and university retain the
Indonesian language and curriculum of 1994 for "universal"
subjects, such as mathematics. Typical Indonesian subjects, such
as history and civics have been omitted and replaced with
subjects of local content.

In Indonesia, the curriculum is considered outdated and will
soon be dumped. The new curricula will be competency based
instead of the traditional teacher-dominated classes.

The preparation of the instructional materials has been
complicated by the multitude of languages used in the classroom.
The government's policy to use Portuguese in the classroom has
sparked confusion because the teachers, and more so the pupils,
only speak broken Portuguese, which is used by a mere 5 percent
of the population, according to official statistics.

Portuguese textbooks are yet to be imported from Portugal and
some teachers yet to be sent to Portugal to learn the language.
Bahasa Indonesia, which is spoken by 42 percent of the population
is a "working language" and will have to be phased out.

Sending teachers on scholarship overseas as part of the huge
undertaking to provide higher education for its populace does not
seem a big problem now as many wealthy countries have provided
Timor with grants as a token of support and sympathy.

Indonesia is among the favorite countries to send students on
scholarship. Currently about 1,200 East Timorese students are
studying in Indonesia, 100 in Australia, 20 in the Philippines
and 300 in Portugal.

Literacy campaigns, which had been started in outlying areas
during the Indonesian rule, will be resumed with assistance from
Brazil.

"We hope that within 10 years' time the illiteracy rate can be
reduced to 20 percent," Maia said.

East Timor, one of the world's poorest countries with a per
capita income of $478, is further debilitated by a high
unemployment rate of up to 80 percent, according to one version.

"Unemployment is definitely one of our biggest problems. Just
imagine the average income is a mere $1 a day," said Helder da
Costa, an economics teacher with Timor Lorosae University.

Education is so complicated that the UN Transitional
Administration of East Timor chose to steer clear of it. Now,
Timorese leaders have to deal with it alone.