Indonesia is the world’s largest island country, with 17,000 islands, but only the 14th largest by land area, at 1,904,569 square kilometres. It is the world’s 4th most populous, with 267 million people, and the most populous Muslim-majority country. Yet the number of Christians, at 11%, is greater than many Christian-majority nations. It is also home to Borobudur, the world’s largest Buddhist temple, built in the 9th century. Such is the fascinating diversity of Indonesia.
Duta Wacana Christian University (DWCU) is a university in Yogyakarta on Java Island, only about 30 kilometres from Borobudur, and 300 kilometres south-east of Jakarta. They run strong community service program through which DWCU students spend months living and developing community projects in rural village communities around Yogyakarta each summer. In the summer of 2013, a team from PolyU went to Yogyakarta to work with the DMCU team as well as a team from the Australian National University.
The PolyU team was led by Mr. Joseph Lam of the Department of Land Survey and Geographic Information (LSGI), and supported by Ms. Renee Leung of the Office of Service-Learning. The team specialises in land and resource management. It went around the village mapping out water resources (in the form of rivers and lakes) and their quality, providing much needed information to assist the villagers in utilising their natural resources for development. We were informed that maps with such detail and information for the region did not exist before.
During the project our students stay with the families in the village, sleeping in their houses, eating what they eat, and living as they do. It gives our students a most valuable experience. Not only is it radically different from the urban living that they are familiar with, it gives them an authentic taste of a foreign culture. Even though our students do not speak the local Javanese language and the villagers speak neither Chinese of English, they can communicate through the Indonesian students from DMCU.
Through this project we experience many of the joys and challenges of working with partners in foreign countries. DMCU is strongly committed and experienced in community service. They have very good connections to the local government and village headers, paving and smoothing the way for our team to getting to know the village and local needs quickly. Hence our team can work very efficiently and effectively. DMCU can also make the local transportation and accommodation arrangements for us, saving us a lot of work and uncertainty. With such a strong partner, risks also becomes much more manageable, even though the land is strange and unfamiliar to us.
However, DMCU having a strong experience and mature program also poses challenges for us. Their program requires their students to stay at the village for 2 months, with hundreds of students spread over some 20 teams scattered over many villages. They would like our students to match their students as much as possible, in the duration of stay, spread over the many villages, nature of work, etc. However, our team has only 20 students, and our schedule is such that we can only stay for about 2 weeks. Even lengthy and rigorous negotiations could not create a complete satisfactory result for both sides. Our program is also a credit-bearing course with specific learning objectives and assessment with real impact on the students’ academic records. But DWCU’s program is much less structured in academic learning and deliverables, which create different expectations and quite different working styles between the two sets of students. As a result, Hong Kong students tend to consider their Indonesian counterparts as too laid-back, while the Indonesians consider the HongKongers as too fast-paced.
And then there are the Australians. It turns out the students from Australian National University (ANU) are graduate students in anthropology. The have only a small number of students. The nature of their work is more of a field study than community service. That introduce yet more divergent dimensions. In the end, the Australian team work more or less independently from the PolyU team.
Despite all the challenges, our students had a very fruitful and enjoyable experience. They achieved their objectives in mapping out valuable water resources for the villages. Their maps, proposals, presentations, and the talks that they arranged for the villages were highly appreciated. They collaborated with their fellow Indonesian students, and interact with the Australians. They learned much about different cultures and ways of life, and found the overall experience highly satisfying. We found DWCU a great partner and we have been collaborating with them ever since.
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