Kahuripan Programme
a community empowered through
education
Still in preliminary stages, this description is taken from a
programme proposal submitted to donors.
Our neighbourhood
SNT
itself has been working formally in Kahuripan for about 3 years. Work began
under our health unit, which has thus far trained approximately 120 local
community health volunteers, attempting to ensure that each
neighbourhood unit (RT) has at least two such volunteers able to
make available primary care training. The relocation of one of our two
offices to one particular neighbourhood (known as Gunung Jati,
located in Kahuripan) has prompted further
involvement in this area. This programme is in preliminary stages
- seeking funding to make progress in two directions. We wish to
increase
breadth, expanding our work into an adjacent district, and then
we hope to increase depth, as we seek to further develop and empower those
communities with whom we have begun working. Activities are
divided between a specific focus on health, and participative
community education with a much broader application.
Health Training
Going wider
Increasing breadth.
The success of the community health volunteer training
programme in the district of Kahuripan - at the
request of women and community leaders in the adjacent district
of Cikalang,- has encouraged us to expand this into
a new district. While the programme aims to draw on the most
successful aspects of our previous programme, there will be
changes. Based upon our previous experience, we will still work
with designated community health volunteers who are currently
under-supported by the existing health infrastructure; but we plan
to improve on our first attempt. The most significant change is
that, rather than employing full-time nurses to conduct training,
much of the training will be carried out by those who have
shown the greatest promise as they themselves have gone through
our previous training. These women will be employed part-time.
Even so, we believe that the experience they gain will have long-term (full-time) impact
in their communities.
Going deeper
Increasing depth.
We feel a responsibility to further empower the women we have
trained in Kahuripan. We have found that in each
sub-district there are groups of women who have been motivated and
encouraged to effect change in their communities. They have
transformed local 'baby clinics', purchased uniforms,
conducted clean-up campaigns and, to top it off, they have been cited
by the government at the West Java regional level as
examples to be emulated. Our plan is to build on this momentum
and to encourage these women to address issues that they feel
are important. Hence the Title of this aspect of the programme –
'Empowering Community Health
Activists'.
...and
deeper still
Participative Community Education
As touched upon
above, we have further deepened our the work in Kehuripan
by physically relocating our office to one neighbourhood, Gunung Jati.
Interestingly enough, though centrally located in relation to
the region, this vicinity has revealed itself as possessing a number of families living in the some of the most extreme
conditions of poverty we have yet witnessed in our town. There
are several aspects to our Community-based Participatory
Learning Programme, based around the formation of Community
Learning Groups (CLG). The groups currently envisioned are
to be amongst residents whose voices are least heard. We are
planning a women’s empowerment project which aims to give
a voice to local women, beginning with literacy and life-skills
training. We will also work with teenagers who have dropped
out of school before finishing high school, offering
computer classes and guidance in reading. Another group of
children at risk, those in danger dropping out of school due to financial
constraints placed upon their families, will be sponsored to complete
their education (a school sponsorship programme).
We hope this will
also encourage families to take greater interest in the
education of their children. Local children will be further supported by a homework
club open to all local children and a Community Library
which will include books suitable for all ages, a resource
which also will be
used as a resource for each CLG, as we seek to encourage and
support a reading culture.
Finally
we are planning a pilot programme aimed specifically at developing
the potential of children with special needs. Due to the
nature of this programme, some of these children will of necessity
be drawn from outside the local area - and potentially from
throughout our town - but the hope is to include some aspects of
diagnosis and how to seek help for these children within the
health training to women throughout the two districts in which
we are working. The success of such, of course, will depend upon
whether such efforts are deemed valuable by local families.
