Singaporeans look down on Indonesia

I am an Indonesian who is studying in Singapore. I am writing this letter to encourage all Indonesians to be more hard-working and be more mindful of the future. We have to compete with other countries in the world and show them that we can compete with them when it comes to quality human resources.

We have nearly 240 million people, so we have a big pool of potential talent. The reason why I am writing this letter is because I get reminded all time by my humanities teacher here, who frequently points out all the bad things about Indonesia, and also about Indonesians, but unfortunately her points are quite true.

There was one day she said that most the Multi-National Companies (MNCs) are interested in building their headquarters in Singapore, because Singapore has a lot more skilled workers. And she also mentioned that most MNCs are wary of setting up in developing countries like Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries.

Then she continued, for example, in Indonesia, although Indonesia has a lot of people to employ in the manufacturing sector, the workers are not skilled, they do not have the ability to carry out tasks that require some knowledge of Information Technology (IT) or most any other work that requires intelligent analysis. She has actually spoken poorly of Indonesia on numerous occasions.

I know that Indonesia's economy is not in a good situation, but at least we can improve our education. One way to solve the education problem is that we have to promote compulsory learning in school instead of working at the early age. Do not encourage working overseas as a maid. We should encourage them to continue their studies, at least until senior high school, and then, they can get better jobs in the future.

Actually, when my teacher looks down on Indonesia, I always feel so angry toward her. It is humiliating for me as she mentions these things to all the other students, most of whom are Singaporeans, and I am the only Indonesian in the class.

There are still so many other ways that Singaporeans look down on Indonesia. I hope we can improve in our education by promoting more and more scholarships to study overseas. Besides improving our education level, it can also improve our economy eventually.

I hope the government will consider all of my suggestions and I am confident that we can do it for our country.

FENTY ANG Singapore