Situbondo, this is the city where I and the rest of our team, consisted of me, Wenjun (student from Adelaide), Michael (student from Brisbane) and two other employees of Tunas Hijau, spent a week of educating and raising awareness regarding environmental issues and related matters. Essentially, our main assignment was to establish proper students’ as well as teachers’ perception when it comes to environment and also to change their mind towards a more sensitive approach in dealing with some basic environmental issues.
We set off for our journey at the main bus station where we caught a bus heading directly to Situbondo. To my surprise, when we were waiting for some more passengers to come, I could not stop wondering how many vendors were coming in our bus to offer food, toys or just asking for money… There were probably more than 30 people in an hour. It was tremendous to watch them. When we finally got our bus running, we enjoyed heavy raining and thus water leaking in our bus straight on our heads. This journey was full of fun, the way local bus drivers drive is just crazy! They all should have been competition riders! I am serious!
After reaching Situbondo, we were accommodated in our hotel for another week. The following day we went to visit the crux of the matter – our targeted school! We were properly introduced to the staff and also had a tour throughout the entire school facilities. I have to say, that all this school is very clean and well maintained. We also visited some classrooms and to my great surprise we got so much attention from students, they were literally crazy about us. They were so eager to take photos with us, to pose with us etc. It was my craziest time in Indonesia so far. The entire staff of this school was very kind, nice and so pleasant! After a few hours our environmental education got under its way. We started preparing our computer rooms where almost all our presentations were taking place. We spent four days of presenting to students as well as teachers topics such as global warming, air pollution, biomass energy, climate change and environmental education as such. Presenting to students is something I am familiar with, however presenting to teachers startled me a little bit. These teachers are supposed to have sufficient knowledge about these topics and hence I wanted to make sure that my job would be done properly without any discrepancies.
All in all, presentations went really well, teachers and students were really cooperative and keen to obtain knowledge from myself resulting in a smooth way of presenting. To be honest, initially I was really scared of presenting these topics to teachers, but later I was so comfortable in presenting that it represented something what I was looking forward to everyday.
The whole trip was concluded by a short trip to the beach about 30-min drive from Situbondo, where the rest of our team and I took a boat trip and were enjoying the beauty of the Indonesian coast. Afterwards we came back to our hotel to pack our stuff and headed back to the school to say bye to everyone. We all got many gifts from the school’s staff, shook hands and set off for the back journey to Surabaya.
This "business" trip was definitely worth it, I made a lot of new friends, got to know new places and kind people and saw a different way of education and surely I presented environmental issues to teachers for the first time in my life. It was actually so interesting to be on the other side of this teaching process, teachers were listening to me; it was not me who had to listen to them! So cool! I am sure that there will be many more projects like this, let’s see what is going to happen soon.
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