DOING LOTS WITH LITTLE ON MAGIC ISLAND
Our Jakarta Embassy is the ’world’s largest Australian diplomatic mission … designed for 500 staff.’ What do they do? If just 14 media releases this year is a guide, one tiny NGO far away seems to be making a better fist of showing we care.
Jacob Nulik is a retired Indonesian forage agronomist with a doctorate from Australia. He lives in Kupang, the old Portuguese trading port on the southern tip of Timor. Most days he can see the low-lying island of Semau (117 square km) to the northwest just a 30-minute ferry trip away.
‘But even I wouldn’t go there,’ he said. ‘It was called Magic Island and full of spirits. That didn’t bother Colin Barlow. He went straight in.’
The Australian scientist’s impressive scramble through Semau’s dense bush and ancient coral ridges to the dry plains inland was not a demo of Okker bravado but intellectual curiosity.
Indonesia stretches 5,100 km west-east; Semau is only 830 km from Darwin but more than twice as far from Jakarta. Government support goes down as the klicks from the national capital go up.
Dr Barlow, who died last December aged 90, was no casual tourist but the ‘world’s leading authority on smallholder cash crop economies.’ His wife Dr Ria Gondowarsito is an Indonesian sociologist.
The couple had enough clout and contacts to run scholarly seminars about Semau but wanted change to be real and sustained. Back in Canberra they hustled donations from mates and NGOs like Rotary, mustered volunteers and did the unusual:
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‘He asked the people and he listened’, explained Deborah Kana Hau (right) co-founder with Barlow of the Nusa Tenggara (Southeast Islands) Association (NTA). ‘We worked from the bottom up.’
So much time goes on slow talk which annoys hustlers, but the decisions tend to stick because they’re owned by the locals.
The NTA says its mission is to reduce poverty which has a knock-on effect. In practical terms, this means having more income can lead to better access to water and sanitation, schools and kindies and health clinics.
What started as a minor project in 1988 now has 26 staff (including two Australians) and 120 volunteers; a third are locals.
ANU economics professor Stephen Howes wrote: ‘If the province was a country it would be one of the poorest in the world. Income per person is one-third of the Indonesian average’ currently around $4,600 a year.
He calls NTA ‘one of the most effective NGOs in Eastern Indonesia, and perhaps in the developing world.’ All this on tiny sums and big commitments.
If only politicians were as generous as individuals. Australian Government documents show aid measured as a proportion of Gross National Income hovers around 0.2 per cent, The OECD country average is 0.32 per cent. This ranks the Lucky Country 21 out of 29 donors.
The heaviest cuts were last decade under Coalition PM Tony Abbott. There’s been some repair. In this year’s budget taxpayers are giving slightly more aid to Indonesia - up from $307.3 million to $326.1 million.
This year NTA will get $277,000 (previously $150,000). Twenty per cent of the grant must be raised by the NTA.
Semau’s needs were basic and solutions low-tech. With no reticulation, women spent up to three hours a day lugging water from wells to homes using two 20-litre buckets on a yoke.
The symbol of Outback Oz is a windmill and a tank, filled from a bore or runoff from homestead rooves. This idea only reached Semau with the NTA. Now more than 1,000 concrete tanks have been built. The materials are gifted if the locals do the labour.
Another regular whinge was roaming livestock chomping crops and angering neighbours. Walls had been built from lumps of coral, but no barrier to agile goats.
So ‘living fences’ of green stakes which took root laced with the Australian standard repellent of barbed wire keep the bovids at bay.
The knowledge flow has been hastened by Indonesians studying in Australia. Evert Hosang (right) got a scholarship to the University of Southern Queensland where he researched maize DNA for a doctorate.
On Semau farmers buy hybrid seed every season because insects destroy their granaries. So using the Australian principle of high-rise sealed silos he got an Indonesian factory to make 20 kg drums to store enough home-grown seed for a hectare of ground.
But it had to be dry and farmers don’t have moisture meters. So he’s taught them to put a handful of maize in a dry plastic water bottle laid on its side in the sun. When no moisture settles inside the container the corn’s dry enough to store in silos, though with the ‘i’ pronounced as ‘e’.
A bonus from foreigners fixing faults is the shaming of local governments to lift their game and care for their own. Since the NTA arrived Semau now has some decent asphalt roads and a network of power lines.
Schools are being built but finding well-qualified teachers who’ll work for a pittance and tolerate poor living conditions limits kids’ learning. So does stunting.
Jakarta is now getting serious about prevention by distributing supplements. Around 77,000 littlies in the East Nusa Tenggara province (pop 5.4 million across 500 islands) grow slowly and sickly largely because their mums were undernourished when pregnant.
The NTA is seeking a replacement for Barlow who used his wallet for his trips and sought no fees.
Howes wrote that in the government’s hands the NTA’s budget ‘wouldn’t pay for a single in-country consultant employed by the Australian aid programme for a year. That’s value for money.’
Locals say Australian government officials rarely visit except for audits, but they see many volunteers.
To Nulik (right) and his Indonesian colleagues, Barlow was driven by altruism: ‘He was an ambassador for humanity’. That was his Aussie magic.
First published Michael West Media 28 May 2023:
https://michaelwest.com.au/indonesia-our-biggest-and-closest-neighbour-needs-our-aid/
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