Assisting Villages

Developing Sumba

Coming back home after graduating college is one expectation of Stube-HEMAT for the activists. Working for local village and involving in its development will contribute to the increase of society welfare. Although he admitted honestly that working as a village facilitator is done due to lack of available jobs in Sumba, eventually he loves this job.

This is the experience of Yonatan Kura, often called Yoga. Now he has worked for Village Empowerment Agency as a village facilitator in Loko Kalada village, Loura sub-district, Southwestern Sumba, since May of 2015. His job is facilitating activities in the village, providing knowledge to the village apparatus, and become a representative of the sub-district in the village. His time on Stube-HEMAT and youth organizations when he was a college student, gave much-needed experience on his job. For a village, Yonatan works with three other village companions, but not often he was asked to facilitate other villages.

On his interaction with society, there’ll always be ups and downs. “Indeed, it is not easy to work with a society full of different backgrounds, such as “gap” quality among village apparatus, for example, the village chief is a middle-school graduate, the village secretary is a high school graduate, and other village apparatus, on average only graduated from primary-school, worse the village is one new branch of decentralization system so the infrastructure is still minimal. What is supposed to do? The input that was given to them is to prioritize construction on connecting roads, buildings, dams, and irrigations”, he explained further. He is always grateful for his village’s geographical landscape having hills, fields, and farms with very potentials to yield rice, corn, and cashew and the spirit of the people to work on their land manually, several water springs at Wai Lobura, Weekapalia, and Analoko that provides irrigation for 2.000 hectares of land in the village and also for neighboring ones. Even there is a waterfall and a river having potency for tourism. Still, the location of the village that is quite far from the city resulted on slow development. The road is still hardened soil road that is dusty during the dry season and muddy during rainy one.

It is human when he often feels upset when explaining something to the people, but they don’t want to listen to the instructions, instead they consider him to swank as a “know-it-all” youth among older. I don’t have a thought to despise them; however a village facilitator has enough knowledge from what he/she had learned. Other else, it is funny when they admitted that they have understood, but after the session ended, they asked about it. Even so, the village chief always opens minded to any of views or opinions from the village facilitator. Those become a challenge for village facilitator to provide appropriate instruction.

Once he had ever experienced difficulty adapting village regulations, for example, UU 6/2014 about Villages. However, the situation has changed; slowly he enjoys what he does because he wants to learn. Initially, he works on budgeting to village development report manually, but nowadays it has become easier with the existence of an application called Village Monetary System. Further, he has experienced temptations in form of money abuse in infrastructure construction, but he rejected it due to a belief that development itself is made for the village, therefore the quality must be excellent, if it is not, those who pays the price is the society itself, instead he mobilizes the people also to monitor the construction.

Yoga invites college students, especially those who majored in farming, governance, social science, and education, to come back to their villages after graduating and to join village development, because they are the ones who will build the village, no one else.

Today, Yoga is waiting for the birth of his child from his marriage to a Javanese woman, who also has participated programs in Stube-HEMAT Yogyakarta. Sure, there must be challenges in uniting two different cultures in his family, however let’s pray for his family to be able to grow and be blessing for others.