Summaries below were produced to capture the overall dynamics of Indonesia’s social protection issues. For professional use, please refer to the original articles in Indonesian. The summaries may contain errors and misinterpretations. Read more

Having been running straight toward one goal for the past years, I am now standing at the starting point. Since I got involved in an NGO based in Japan, my concern about poverty reduction and international development has started to grow up. Particularly, studying at the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) was one of the best choices I had ever made. Soon after receiving my degree in Law and leaving the Kagawa University, I was provided great opportunities to study a number of fresh issues and cutting-edge approaches on an area of poverty reduction, with my passionate colleague from all over the world. Now, I am at the starting point of my career as a poverty reduction specialist.

I am now on holiday at a small village in the Northern England, and leaving for Cambodia on September 25th. My first work as a professional will be with the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) at the International Labour Organisation (ILO). I will have been working in Phnom Penh until the middle of March 2010. Without doubt, this is a challenging mission for me; therefore, I will gain the largest input if I can complete it at the end.
As William Wordsworth used to love a little village, Grasmere, I enjoy peaceful atmosphere in this neighbour village, Windermere. Although the wind makes feel a little cold, it will passionate me to become a professional more and more.

“What’s education”

Today was the last day for me to teach kids at an institute where I was working for 3 months. My students were almost 30; 10 to 14 years old, and none of them were kinds of stupid. All of them have both good abilities and weak points. I have never said, “Don’t do that!” or “Do that as I said!” although some co-workers told their kids like that. But there is a question. ‘How do you know whether you are right or your kids are right?’

When I taught one of my pupils how blood ran inside us, he told me, “It is similar to our society y. There are many elders being thrown away after retiring while the younger are working hard.” He thought fresh bloods as younger people and old bloods thorown out of bodies as older people.

My boss thoughts he was not good at studying but I didn’t. In fact, it was not easy to teach and make him concentrate. Now we have to think about the reason why it was difficult. The thing is he had a lot of questions and interests everytime and wanted to ask those. He had his own ideas. I love answering those.

Anyway, this work has given me some ideas on education. Thanks and good luck to my kids.

We had a big event in Ehime. Almost 40 students who were interested in environment, international issues or students organisation itself gathered and stayed for the past three days in Rainbow Highland there. We shared our experiences and information of volunteer organisations members joined. This extremely fantastic event motivated all of us.