Informal education a wise path for street kids

Anti, 13, is delighted she no longer has to hit the streets every day to poke through trash to help her parents make ends meet “My parents said I must go to school now,” Anti said with a smile. Anti, who lives in Ciputat, Tangerang, told The Jakarta Post she had been working as a scavenger since she was eight years old.

“I used to pick up plastic and cardboard and sell it to the trash pickers coordinator. The coordinator then paid my parents for the items I had collected,” she said. Anti now studies at Bengkel Kreatif, a shelter managed by Nanda Dian Nusantara, a non-government organization active in child protection. According to Desi Handayani, the coordinator of Bengkel Kreatif, about 80 children from poverty-stricken families regularly took lessons and played at the shelter.

Desi, along with students of the Indonesia Islamic University, teach these children how to read and write as well as other life skills. “I am proud that most of the children who start here go on to formal schools. Those who do not go to school yet and are still scavenging are following educational package programs here,” Desi said.

“When I began teaching at this shelter in 1999, most of the children who came here worked as scaven-gers and had never gone to school. However, they were highly motivated to learn. Some came with very dirty clothes because they had just finished picking through trash,” she said.

After a while parents began to notice the positive impacts of the study activities at the shelter and began to tell their children to go to school, Desi said. “It is hard for parents to pay their childrens school fees. But after seeing how much their children had improved after studying here, they dream their children will have a better life than to just become scaven-gers,” she said.

Muhammad Joni from the National Child Protection Commission said the best long-term solution for street children was to teach them in shelters without forcing them off the streets. “No one can bari them from work-ingon the streets if no other solution is offered,” Joni said, referring to the Social Ministry program to get children off the streets before 2011.

The Jakarta Social Agency has announced it will ask police to imprison parents who allow their children to work on the streets, stating that these parents are exploiting their children for economic gain. “The agency does not have the right to say all street childrens parents are guilty,” he said. “Street children are proof of the states failure to handle poverty. Im-prisoning the parents of street children will only hurt the children,” Joni said.

Roostien Ilyas, another member of the National Child Protection Commission, said she once ques-tioned a mother who let her son beg while she sat near him. “The mother answered angrily that when she begged no one gave her money, but if her son begged people were more willing to give. She said if she could only have a job she would never let him beg,” Roostien said. source : The Jakarta Post