Lisa Siregar

Firdaus founded Rumah Masa Depan 10 years ago to help underprivileged children who could not attend school. (Photos courtesy of Rumah Masa Depan)

One Stop Shop for Jakarta Street Kids

A foundation serving underprivileged children in Tebet, South Jakarta, seeks not only to empower its charges but also provides them with shelter.

“It’s a one stop service — a home, school and activity center,” said Firdaus, the founder of Remaja Masa Depan, which translates as Future Teens. Located behind the busy main road of Tebet, South Jakarta, the foundation started as a teaching alternative for children unable to attend school, but now also offers an orphanage and is in the process of enlarging its rumah singgah (drop-in center), where all are welcome to stop by and play or simply rest.

“We have a social psychology session at the rumah singgah where we encourage children to continue school and, if possible, leave the streets, because we can provide a place for them to live,” Firdaus said.

Having grown up working on the streets of Jakarta himself, Firdaus knows how difficult such a life can be. When he was a child, he sold home-baked cakes on the streets to help his family earn money. Even while studying history at the University of Indonesia, Firdaus needed to work part time as a night security guard, which left him exhausted much of the time. “I was so thin back then,” he said.

The idea of running a school for street children first occurred to him when the Asian financial crisis hit Indonesia in 1999. Back then, he said, school was expensive and the free-school policy had not yet been established. “I was worried about a lot of children who were close to having to stop going to school because their parents had lost their jobs.”

Enlisting a group of friends, he went to the banks of Ciliwung River and found 40 children whose parents could not afford to send them to school anymore. Firdaus already worked teaching English at a building in Gudang Peluru, in East Jakarta, so he and his friends rented space there and started teaching their new students a Ministry of Education-approved alternative program for non-formal education. Kejar Paket B is equal to middle school level.

Thus was born Remaja Masa Depan, which Firdaus said is a non-formal, free school for children that is accredited by the ministry to issue certificates to its graduates.

“The certificate is just the same as those issued by formal schools and can used to apply for jobs.”

It wasn’t easy to set up the center, Firdaus said, and the hardest time was the year after the school started.

“It was a classic problem, we needed money,” he said, “at least Rp 1 million ($100) a month.”

He wrote letters to local newspapers for publication in the attempt to obtain loans for the project, and a woman, whose name he declined to give, made a sizeable donation. The group has since also received help from the government and from expatriate organizations, including the American Women’s Association and the Australia New Zealand Association.

“But the biggest funding source, about 60 percent of it, comes from individual donations,” Firdaus said.

In 2003, the foundation set up a separate orphanage which is now home to 45 children. Then, in 2006, the group purchased land in Tebet and began construction of a small three-story building to house the school and rumah singgah, using a donation from ANZA. The current enlargement of the rumah singgah is being funded by a donation from the Priscilla Hall Memorial Foundation, set up by Hall’s family under the auspices of ANZA to help underprivileged children in Indonesia.

These days, the organization needs at least Rp 35 million per month to operate, as it employs 12 staff members, schools 130 students and cares for 45 at the orphanage. Firdaus said he is grateful that, 10 years after the project began, it has become a trusted foundation and continues to receive donations.

He is also proud that the school has been accredited.

“Of the hundreds of alternative schools in Jakarta, only three to five are approved by the ministry, and we’re one of those,” he said.

In the building on Jalan Tebet Dalam IV, the school day starts with classes for junior high school students from 6:30 a.m. until noon, then continues after a lunch and prayer break with classes for senior high school students from 1 p.m. until 5 p.m. The students range from junior to senior high school level, and there is an average of 20 to each class. Those students include street beggars, household workers, trash pickers and those who simply failed to score a good enough final exam grade (NEM) to attend a public school.

Firdaus has learned his own lessons over the 10 years that the project has been active.

“Back when we started, we had a problem with absences,” he said. “A lot of students skipped classes because they had to go to work.”

To solve the problem, he established a rule that students would have to pay Rp 25,000 for any month in which they skipped a class without reason. Rewards of a pack of instant noodles and a bowl of rice are given every month for students with perfect attendance records.

“And we do random cross-checks of absence letters that come to us from their parents,” he said. The numbers of frequent absences has since dropped.

Although it currently only teaches junior high and high school level, the organization also helps younger children from the orphanage to access education.

“We help them to go to public elementary schools and pay for their books and uniforms as we can’t teach them ourselves yet,” Firdaus said.

Irwan, 12, is one such student, and has lived at the orphanage for three years. Although not an orphan, his family had little money as his father works as a delivery man and his mother is a housewife. Before moving to the orphanage, Irwan sold bottled water at Ancol, in North Jakarta.

“A cousin told my dad about this orphanage, and dad told me to come here,” Irwan said. He now attends 6th Grade and visits his family in Ancol every two months.

Two former students of Remaja Masa Depan who have already finished their high school studies are also about to continue on to university, again with financial assistance from the foundation.

Lili is about to start studying literature at PGRI, a public university for teacher trainees at Jagakarsa, South Jakarta. Currently, she teaches Indonesian to the students at Remaja Masa Depan and is one of two chaperons at the orphanage, who keep the students busy after school hours with music, traditional dance and martial arts practice.

“I am one of the oldest, so I watch and take care of the young ones,” Lili said. Many of the children, she said, have long been deprived of attention and crave someone to love them.

“We just have to understand them and know what they want,” she said.

In the future, Firdaus plans to set up a mobile classroom, where a teacher in a van can visit children at sites further away from the school and tutor them so they too can earn school certificates.

He said he would always try to fight for the best interest of underprivileged children and sharply criticized those who say that even poor children, if they study diligently, can get into good public schools. Children from poor families are unable to compete, he said, as they lack support from a healthy living environment, suffer from poor nutrition and seldom have the parental support needed to study.

“Those pejabat and DPRD [government officials and local legislators] don’t understand, because when they were children, they didn’t know how it feels [to be poor].”

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