Sukatenang Preserves Bekasi Identity

KOMPAS/STEFANUS ATO

Students of the Alam Prasasti School, Piket Indah Village, Sukatenang Village, Sukawangi, Bekasi Regency, West Java, play together in their school garden on Tuesday (24/11/2020) afternoon. These students are children who have dropped out of school, orphans, or children from poor families.

Development in Bekasi regency, West Java, has not automatically improved the residents’ welfare. Increasingly extensive development is gradually eroding space for kampung activities as well as the region’s identity.

Over a dozen children were playing, running after each other in an open field on Tuesday afternoon (24/11/2020). The goats and ducks, feeding not far from the field, seemed to respond to the children’s joking and laughter by bleating and quacking.

The children were playing in a field belonging to Alam Prasasti School in Piket Indah kampung of Sukatenang village, Sukawangi, Bekasi regency. They are students of the nature school.

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Near the school is farmland through which a river flows quietly. The boats of local residents occasionally sail down the 5-meter-wide waterway. The nature surrounding the kampung offers a source of knowledge for the school’s 85 students. The majority of these students are orphans, disadvantaged minors or problem children at school or at home.

Muhammad Hanif, 17, from South Cikarang, is one of the dozens of students who have regained their zeal for studying. “I used to be stubborn and I disliked my teachers and lessons. I quit in junior high school and transferred schools seven times, but never graduated,” he said, chuckling.

Hanif is just one of many students who had once lost their hopes because of poverty.

Since he enrolled at Alam Prasasti School in March 2019, Hanif has changed drastically. The school’s flexible, nature-based learning program has made him feel more settled about furthering his studies and has steadily chipped away his behavioral issues. As the school’s oldest student, he is now an example to his juniors. He also developed a dream of becoming a computer programmer.

Hanif is just one of many students who had once lost their hopes because of poverty, or because their parents had abandoned them when they were small, or otherwise came from broken families. At the nature school, even with all its limitations, they now cherish individual dreams.

KOMPAS/STEFANUS ATO

Komarudin Ibnu Mikam (49), Founder of the Alam Prasasti School, Piket Indah Village, Sukatenang Village, Sukawangi, Bekasi Regency, West Java.

Character building

The nature school’s aim to offer hope to a generation of children who were marginalized due to poverty and other problems is inseparable from the role of its founder, Komarudin Ibnu Mikam, 49. After decades of working at various nongovernmental organizations, community organizations and political parties, Komar decided to devote his life to developing Bekasi from the kampung up.

Komar founded Yayasan Bangunan Peradaban Mulia (noble civilization development foundation) in 2016. The nonprofit education foundation focuses on Bekasi’s younger generation and character building through religious teachings, culture and preserving their kampung roots.

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Komar’s background as a cultural figure of Bekasi informed his decision to open the nature school with its cultural and kampung focus. He had noticed that the increasingly progressive development of Bekasi was gradually destroying the local identity.

“The intellectual inheritance of the Bekasi people is being depleted as a consequence of modernization and development. Our different artistic and cultural values are vanishing imperceptibly,” he said.

In a kampung, nobody feels alienated [...] because all residents belong to a single unit.

One such asset of kampung people is their sociocultural tradition of building independent settlements through mutual assistance. Kampungs have no walls that inhibit neighborly interaction.

“In a kampung, nobody feels alienated [...] because all residents belong to a single unit. Besides social values, children are also taught to solve their problems independently through various traditional games. This is the educational model of kampung-based development,” said Komar.

KOMPAS/STEFANUS ATO

Students of the Alam Prasasti School, Piket Indah Village, Sukatenang Village, Sukawangi, Bekasi Regency, West Java, study together in a room without walls, Tuesday (11/24/2020) afternoon.

In his view, Bekasi’s identity can be preserved only by starting with the younger generation. Inculcating sociocultural values at an early age will guide the children’s character and outlook as they develop. He decided to open a nature school because it did not require large funds.

The teachers don’t get paid apart from a transportation allowance.

Its teachers are recruited from among the local residents and comprise religious figures, regional officials and senior high school (SMA) graduates.

“The teachers don’t get paid apart from a transportation allowance. We allow some SMA graduates to teach here. As they [teach here], we are facilitating their pursuit of higher education,” Komar said.

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Its students include school dropouts, children from poor families, those with problems at home, or those who had problems at their previous schools. He also approaches children of farm workers and farmhands to join the school’s lessons after helping their parents with work.

Some of the students, particularly orphans, board for free at Komar. Other students are also attending the school for free.

The marginalized children can now smile. They seem to have found new life, enjoying the protection and renewed attention they receive at the school, after perhaps having been overlooked by the government; especially given that the intellectual development of the nation, pursuant to the Constitution, is the responsibility of the state.