Dejavato and my work here

Ok everyone, this post will elaborate on the actual work I’ve been doing here and which I resume, now that the holidays are over. First of all you need to know more about Dejavato, my hosting organization.

The Weltwaerts program through which I am spending this year here uses existing volunteering and exchange organizations. There is one sending organization in Germany (in my case ICJA) and one hosting organization in the host country. The sending organization deals with the flights and finances as well as the volunteer’s preparation before leaving Germany. Once the volunteers have arrived in their host country, their hosting organization becomes responsible for them. The hosting organization deals with the project site, the host family, the visa and any problems the volunteers might have while in the host country.

Dejavato is my host organization. It was founded by Ketut Purwantoro (I will refer to him as Mas Ketut, Mas means “older brother” and is the polite form of address to an adult male still without children) in 2005 and has since then been receiving volunteers who work in its project sites. Dejavato has three types of volunteer programmes: short term workcamps (2 weeks to 1 month), mid term (2 to 6 months) and long term (9 to 12 months).

In the short term projects Dejavato usually receives a large group of volunteers from nearby countries who then perform manual labor at the given project sites. Most work camps so far have involved Korean volunteers and included renovation and construction tasks. I myself will soon join one of Dejavato’s workcamps in Wonosobo with Paula, another German volunteer and 8 Korean volunteers as well as some Dejavato staff. We will live for two weeks in a mountain village and renovate and repaint the local middle school building. In the afternoons we will also do after-school English lessons with the children and in the evenings it will be our job to gather grass and feed it to the goats.

The mid term projects are often involve much smaller groups of volunteers, usually individuals or pairs. They stay in host families near the project site and their activities are centered around education and caretaking. For example Dejavato will receive two Austrian volunteers in March. The are already a little older and both qualified nurses; they will work in a Semarang hospital for two months.

The long term volunteers specialise almost completely on education projects. Every weltwaerts volunteer at Dejavato is in one of these projects as the BMZ requires a 12 month commitment to do this volunteer service. We are stationed in middle, high and disabled schools. In the disabled schools the volunteers emphasis is on play and spending time with the children. In the middle and high schools on the other hand the volunteer enters the classes alongside the local English teacher as a teacher assistant.

So more about my own school. My project site is an MA, short for Madrassa Ahliya which means it is equivalent to a normal high school, except that it has a special focus on Islamic religion. My students have several subjects like History of Islam, Reading the Quoran, Arabic language, and Islamic theory which are not offered at state high schools. Right now there are around 450 students and three grades, 10, 11 and 12. Of each type there are four classes, so all in all there are 12 classes at my school that I see regularly.

My school has three English teachers in all but one of them only comes every Sunday. I usually follow Bu Laily into the class and we do each lesson together. She and I will usually work through the school cirriculum 50-50. We go through the workbook which has chapters on tenses, special gramatical cases, and word groups. It also focuses on genres of texts. I do the reading with the students to help their pronounciation and also help to explain some of the material in the workbook (oftentimes material is mentioned but not explained). One example of this was the differenc between “other, others, the other, the others, another” for which the Indonesian language has just one word “lain”. Another was the explanation of how to use the relative pronouns “who, whom, that, which, whose” which was quite difficult as the Indonesian language just uses the word “yang” for all of these cases. When my Indonesian/English explanation skills fail, Bu Laily is always there to help and clarify what I am trying to communicate.

Every so often I also include a programme of my own which is outside the cirriculum. In it I try to prepare the students for their national examinations in which they answer questions in a “listening” and a “reading” section In those cases we might do dictations, which I then correct and hand back or my self-written dialogues which Bu Laily and myself perfom infront of the class while the students answer questions about them. I also give vocabulary tests on words and word groups/phrases which occur often in the texts they will see in their national examinations.

My less eduational but still useful way of helping the students is the fact that I am a bule (foreigner). They are very interested in me and so pay extra attention in classes. Sometimes at the end of the week I will tell them a little about German/European culture or we will sing English/French songs together and then translate them into Indonesian.

After school we have extraciricular english classes “English Extra” with me. I get to make that programme myself, so we might do some more dialogues or different types of texts. Often however, we review the lesson material for those students that still don’t quite understand it.

So, now it’s back to correcting dictations, vocab tests and preparing lessons. I hope you all had a great Christmas and new year. I will do my best to keep the reports coming.

Arnaud