Rebuild Mbinudita is a program that affects all aspects of the lives of more than 250 families living in extreme conditions.
It is the centre of life for several thousand people in this very rural region, located far from everything, where no real road leads and nothing is accessible… Or almost!
As you know, Fair Future and Kawan Baik work in the outermost and very rural areas of eastern Indonesia. Mbinudita? This is the story of an old school made of earth, pebbles and bamboo, which collapsed one day in December 2019 due to a storm. A simple story of good friends, who decided to stay there for a long time!
The true story of the Foundation’s collaborators who cried on that day because no more school for this community meant that the children would no longer have access to any source of education, or knowledge. And for teachers, no more work! For the parents of these hundreds of children, it also meant a lot less chance of development and a less bright future for them!
Today, after building a new school, bigger, and stronger, with materials resistant to storms, bad weather, and earthquakes, Fair Future and Kawan Baik, as part of the program we named “rebuild MbinuDita“, continue to provide basic things for the lives of thousands of people there.
We built this school between 2019 and 2021, and today it has more than 120 children aged 7 to 12, all living in a very rural area, where no house has electricity or water nis direct access.
The program “rebuild MbinuDita” is to give access to clean water to all the inhabitants of the community (water is highly scarce here), but also to medical care to healthy food through the creation of organic gardens. These activities have no other objectives than to increase the quality of their life, to provide better health to people (especially children, vulnerable people, and pregnant women), access to health and medical care, and for people to be able to increase their income.
What the Foundation succeeded in doing, with the help of the people of the village, is absolutely out of the ordinary.
You have to imagine or try to do it: Here, we are in the middle of nature, at the top of a hill where a tiny path leads. It is there at the top where the old school was located! Without this old or new school, children would not have access to education. Or else they would have to walk between 5 and 8 kilometres one way, to reach another school, through the hills, without shoes, without water… Impossible, not when you are between 7 and 12 years old!
We built a school there! Almost all the materials used to construct this school were purchased and transported from Surabaya. This was the case for the metal structure of several tens of tons, all the bricks (more than 15,000), and other materials impossible to find here in Sumba East, in all more than two containers filled.
Also, today, a large number of villagers (more than 2,500 people, the majority of whom are children) have access to clean, non-lethal water thanks to our access to better health program #kawansehat-, which is part of the #waterconnections project. Here and for a few months -thanks to the Water Connections program-the, families are better, and the villagers, who are 100% farmers or farmers, are much less sick and are in better health. Vegetable gardens are created, and an economy is built.
Women and children spend much less time fetching water from wells far from homes. As a result, children spend more time in school, and adults have more time to do things they couldn’t do before. On the other hand, water remains the absolute priority of each of the 250 families of #mbinudita, well before everything else.
Today, we are building healthy sanitary facilities for the village and the villagers. Like all other families living in ultra-rural areas, people have never had access to toilets or a place to bathe or do laundry. The toilets we build are made using the Ferro-cement manufacturing process, directly on the sites of the neighbourhoods of houses, by the villagers and our field teams.
It should also be noted that the school, the ten sanitary facilities, and the more than ten 6,500-litre tanks were built by teams from the Fair Future and Kawan Baik Indonesia foundations and by all the villagers. We still have several sanitary facilities to make.
Who are the children who come to MbinuDita school every day?
They are now more than a hundred coming to their school every day. They still have to walk a bit, but much less than if there was no school, the one before was too far away so they rarely went there. They are children of rural families, poor but rich in local cultures and traditions. This school offers them the opportunity to learn in good conditions, with quality teachers who are also from the village and trained by the good friends of Kawan Baik and Fair Future.
They are between seven and twelve years old. They marvel at everything and play with a pebble, a piece of wood. They speak little and are shy, but we are there every day, so they know us well. And now we’re part of their life.
Today? What do we still need from the “Rebuild MbinuDita” program?
- Teachers need school supplies, books, notebooks, coloured pencils, pens, water-based paints, large sheets of paper for painting and drawing, and anything that can be used to teach, learn, and develop in a fun way;
- We also need you to help us keep the school in good condition and repaint it from time to time because the climate here is harsh. Improve the solar electric system by adding solar panels too, repair something that is broken;
- We need medical equipment because the MbinuDiuta school is also the social and medical centre of the region. Fair Future organizes medical care, visits, and distribution of vitamins or drugs specific to a disease as needed. In this, we still need funds to buy the necessary medicines to treat this population. These medical care activities are organized from the Foundation’s Base Camp in Rumah Kambera;
- As part of the “Water Connections” program, which aims to ensure that villages have access to clean water sources, toilets, and adequate sanitation solutions, we need construction materials to drill wells, build water tanks, bathrooms, and even showers as we have been doing for a long time in eastern Indonesia;
We thank you very much for your kindness and incredible participation in this project. This sum that Fair Future Foundation and Kawan Baik Indonesia were able to collect to build this school is something totally out of the ordinary, even magical.
We must now continue… School is not an end in itself, but a beginning!
Rebuild Mbinudita, this is this!
Water Connections Mbinudita, the beginning of the adventure – We have started a program to provide access to clean water and sanitation solutions to dozens of villages without direct water or sanitation solutions in East Sumba.
Water Connections is its name. It aims to forge water connections in rural areas of eastern Indonesia to get closer to where people live. And ensuring them direct access to a clean and healthy water source.
What is this image gallery about? Water connections are not just about giving water to an entire community! Water is defined by where we live and our needs. Things are so different between the modern world and the rural world, and the definition of water takes on another meaning. What do you need? What do they need? What do they want? Through our actions, we respond to their actual needs: to have clean water, to drink more, to eat better, to shower regularly, to grow vegetables, to germinate their seeds, and therefore to have a healthier, more harmonious life. . happier! We support an entire community of people around water, more than 250 families and 2,500 people, 70% of whom are children living in a highly rural area Water in quality and quantity thanks to the #waterconnections project as part of #rebuildmbinudita. Thank you so much for your interest Kawan.
