Indonesians’ Focus on Language Is Often English

NYTimes.com

Kemal Jufri for The New York Times

Children learning to prepare coffee at Kidzania, an amusement park in Jakarta that lets children try out jobs; both Indonesian and English are used there

By NORIMITSU ONISHI


JAKARTA, Indonesia — Paulina Sugiarto’s three children played together at a mall here the other day, chattering not in Indonesia’s national language, but English. Their fluency often draws admiring questions from other Indonesian parents Ms. Sugiarto encounters in this city’s upscale malls.

But the children’s ability in English obscured the fact that, though born and raised in Indonesia, they were struggling with the Indonesian language, known as Bahasa Indonesia. Their parents, who grew up speaking the Indonesian language but went to college in the United States and Australia, talk to their children in English. And the children attend a private school where English is the main language of instruction.

“They know they’re Indonesian,” Ms. Sugiarto, 34, said. “They love Indonesia. They just can’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. It’s tragic.”

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.

The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.

The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation’s official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though.

“These schools operate here, but don’t offer Bahasa to our citizens,” said Suyanto, who oversees primary and secondary education at the Education Ministry.

“If we don’t regulate them, in the long run this could be dangerous for the continuity of our language,” said Mr. Suyanto, who like many Indonesians uses one name. “If this big country doesn’t have a strong language to unite it, it could be dangerous.”

The seemingly reflexive preference for English has begun to attract criticism in the popular culture. Last year, a woman, whose father is Indonesian and her mother American, was crowned Miss Indonesia despite her poor command of Indonesian. The judges were later denounced in the news media and in the blogosphere for being impressed by her English fluency and for disregarding the fact that, despite growing up here, she needed interpreters to translate the judges’ questions.

In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.

Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. “If you spoke Javanese, you were below,” he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. “If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top.”

Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English.

“During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung,” said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. “It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.”

With Indonesia’s democratization in the past decade, experts say, English became the new Dutch. Regulations were loosened, allowing Indonesian children to attend private schools that did not follow the national curriculum, but offered English. The more expensive ones, with tuition costing several thousand dollars a year, usually employ native speakers of English, said Elena Racho, vice chairwoman of the Association of National Plus Schools, an umbrella organization for private schools.

But with the popularity of private schools booming, hundreds have opened in recent years, Ms. Racho said. The less expensive ones, unable to hire foreigners, are often staffed with Indonesians teaching all subjects in English, if often imperfect English, she added.

Many children attending those schools end up speaking Indonesian poorly, experts said. Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages and also owns the local franchise of Kidzania, an amusement park where children can try out different professions — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status.

“Sometimes they look down on people who don’t speak English,” she said.

She added: “In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. That’s sad.”

Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed “a negative pride” that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.

“Sometimes the parents even ask the baby sitters not to speak in Indonesian but in English,” Ms. Ariani said.

It is a sight often seen in this city’s malls on weekends: Indonesian parents addressing their children in sometimes halting English, followed by nannies using what English words they know.

But Della Raymena Jovanka, 30, a mother of two preschoolers, has developed misgivings. Her son Fathiy, 4, attended an English play group and was enrolled in a kindergarten focusing on English; Ms. Jovanka allowed him to watch only English TV programs.

The result was that her son responded to his parents only in English and had difficulties with Indonesian. Ms. Jovanka was considering sending her son to a regular public school next year. But friends and relatives were pressing her to choose a private school so that her son could become fluent in English.

Asked whether she would rather have her son become fluent in English or Indonesian, Ms. Jovanka said, “To be honest, English. But this can become a big problem in his socialization. He’s Indonesian. He lives in Indonesia. If he can’t communicate with people, it’ll be a big problem.”

Inside Indonesia - The right to choose

Terence H. Hull and Ninuk Widyantoro

Indonesian women are still waiting for reproductive health rights Mila Shwaiko

Since 2001 a group of NGOs led by the Indonesian Women’s Health Foundation (YKP) has lobbied the Indonesian government for reform of arcane and confused laws related to abortion. They are motivated by concern about reproductive health rights, and specifically the need to prevent the thousands of deaths associated with septic abortions each year. They were able to persuade a majority of political parties to support their efforts in 2004, and in the dying days of Megawati Sukarnoputri’s presidency, they gained parliamentary approval for a draft amendment to the health law that would have made abortion both safer and more easily available.

To the surprise of activists the amendment was not signed by the outgoing president, and thus lapsed when Susilo Bambang Yudoyono came to power in late 2004. Finding themselves back at square one, the NGOs and their allies in the DPR (People’s Representative Council) brought the amendment back to the legislature in 2005, but found that the politics of the situation had changed dramatically. Islamist politicians who had accepted the earlier change suddenly announced that they were opposed to abortion, and would now fight the amendment. Over the life of the 2004-09 DPR, amendments to the health law and particularly the clauses related to abortion made little progress, to the frustration of both the YKP and their DPR allies. The story of why this legal quagmire persists says a lot about the nature of democratic reform in Indonesia, and about the prospects for efforts to improve the status and health of women.

A contentious history

In Indonesia, as in many other countries, abortion is not simply a public health problem. It is a touchstone political issue, setting up conflicts of identity, morality and social control. Abortion has never dominated political debates, but it has been an irritant to the body politic since Independence. The law against abortion was contained in the Criminal Code (KUHP) passed early in the twentieth century, and that in turn was modelled on the Dutch Criminal Code from the nineteenth century. It was seldom applied, even though abortion was widely carried out by dukun (traditional healers) and was not rare among medical professionals in cities. Rather, the law was applied selectively and usually only when a woman had died during or after the procedure.

The story of why this legal quagmire persists says a lot about the nature of democratic reform in Indonesia, and about the prospects for efforts to improve the status and health of women

In the 1950s contraceptive technologies were crude; there were only a handful of doctors trained to assist women with fertility control. Meanwhile, politicians like Sukarno accepted high fertility rates as a symbol of national potential, in terms of both workforce and identity. A decade later, family planning started to be seen as a priority at the same time that the invention of the oral contraceptive pill made birth control cheaper and more effective. Abortion was still considered to be problematic but in Jakarta groups of doctors campaigned to prevent septic abortion deaths. From the mid-1960s, abortion was firmly on the agenda of the Indonesian Association of Obstetrics and Gynaecology (POGI). In 1974, for the United Nations Population Year, the association published a special issue of its journal on abortion with papers showing the dangers of the procedures done by untrained dukun, and calling for reform of laws to allow doctors to provide safe terminations of pregnancy.

The association showed that hospital maternity wards were straining from the pressure of septic abortions and that doctors struggled with the implications of not offering women a safe alternative. In the absence of protective legalisation from the DPR they sought protection from the courts to avoid prosecution for what was regarded as a vital medical need.

Hospital maternity wards were straining from the pressure of septic abortions and … doctors struggled with the implications of not offering women a safe alternative

Ironically considering later developments, it was the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that provided assistance for abortion services in the early 1970s. The organisation supplied vacuum aspiration equipment for procedures that were called menstrual regulation (MR). The assistance covered training for paramedics and doctors to carry out safe procedures during the first fourteen weeks of pregnancy. This aid was possible because officials in the Indonesian family planning program made a technical distinction between inducing a delayed menstrual cycle and performing an abortion. For doctors carrying out the procedures, it was clear that in most cases a pregnancy was well established. But in the absence of a positive pregnancy test the patient and the doctor could assume that they weren’t terminating a pregnancy but simply bringing on menses, making the Criminal Code provisions irrelevant, at least in their minds. Students in medical schools were taught the new techniques, and over the course of the 1970s it became easier for urban women to find a doctor who would provide a safe abortion as long as it was called an MR.

For the next two decades, it appeared that the stipulations of the criminal code had been overcome by a combination of new technology and assiduous coalition-building. Doctors and lawyers pressed the Attorney General, justices of the Supreme Court and government ministers to accept MR as a medically approved procedure, while maintaining criminal sanctions against abortions carried out by dukun or other unqualified people. Word spread among the medical profession that they were safe from prosecution so long as procedures adhered to high medical standards and no harm was done to patients.

This informal compromise might well have progressed to clear legalisation in Indonesia but for the rise of conservative forces in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bringing the cancellation of development assistance for MR and the rise in policies actively opposing abortion. Protection for doctors performing medical terminations in Indonesia weakened when the international debate changed direction with the so-called Mexico City Policy introduced by President Ronald Reagan.

This informal compromise might well have progressed to clear legalisation in Indonesia but for the rise of conservative forces in the United States in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bringing the cancellation of development assistance for MR and the rise in policies actively opposing abortion

Anti-abortion forces in Indonesia itself were also gathering momentum, as Islamic groups targeted family planning as a way to oppose the New Order government. These criticisms were muted when Suharto had a firm grip on power but, while they were not strong enough to inhibit the contraception program substantially, they did draw attention to the abortion provisions in the Criminal Code and pushed government ministers and others to condemn routinely the immorality and illegality of abortion. Few people were willing to speak up for what many saw as an extremely problematic procedure.

Dilemmas of reform

Advocates for family planning and safe abortion faced a dilemma. On the one hand, they agreed with many of the criticisms levelled against the authoritarian government. On the other hand, even though many of them shared the religious beliefs and values of the critics, they were even more concerned about the welfare of women. As a result, they embarked on a complicated strategy to coopt the largest Islamic groups in support of the women’s reproductive health agenda while at the same time lobbying government departments to change the legal framework surrounding abortion. Throughout the 1990s, activists pursued a program of workshops, publications and public discussions to promote their aims, often with funding from international NGOs, UN agencies and sympathetic units within the government.

Both these strategies were moderately successful at first. Activists from Nahdlatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah were enlisted to promote improved reproductive health care for women, including access to safe abortion. Fundamentalist groups remained antagonistic, but the fact that family planning activists were able to show Islamic support for their campaign for access to safe abortion meant that it could not simply be dismissed as a western plot. In this way, reproductive health came to be re-defined as a central issue for socially minded Muslims, and the call for legal change less of a trigger for political conflict.

The first opportunity for reform came in 1991, when the DPR considered a draft law concerning health. While this draft was more aspiration than black letter law, it opened an opportunity for abortion to be shifted from a criminal issue to one of medical regulation. Working with the Department of Health, activists pressed for a statement that would make abortion legal if performed by licensed, trained medical personnel. But at that time, reviews of laws in the DPR’s committee system had become increasingly fractious. When the draft health law was examined by legislators they immediately challenged both the language and the content of the clauses touching on abortion. Transcripts showed arguments from Islamic and military factions questioning the propriety of any steps that would legalise abortion; these groups didn’t even want lawmakers to consider the use of the word. Officials from the Department of Health and advocates of reproductive health were shocked to see the law that emerged from the DPR. The so-called rubber stamp turned out to be a sledgehammer. The word aborsi, used in the Department of Health’s draft, had disappeared completely from the 1992 Health Law and it was clear that the new reference to ‘certain medical procedures’ would not address the problem of unsafe terminations of pregnancy. What these procedures might refer to was unclear, since they were described as being intended to save the life of a mother and/or her foetus – clearly a nonsense when talking about abortion.

… reproductive health came to be re-defined as a central issue for socially minded Muslims

It was only in the wake of this fiasco that a serious attempt was made to estimate the annual number of induced abortions. Along with our colleague Dr Sarsanto Sarwono, we reviewed the numbers of specialist obstetricians, general practitioners, midwives, nurses and traditional midwives. Then we made guesses about how many pregnancy terminations might be made on average by the members of each group, taking into account that many practitioners might not do any procedures, while others were offering abortions as their main mode of practice. This calculation produced an estimate of 700,000 procedures per year for the mid-1990s.

Such a figure was large in comparison with the estimated 5 million births annually at the time, but within months newspapers were quoting experts who took the estimate as a base and inflated the numbers upwards, on the speculation that any estimate would have been conservative and numbers would be rising rapidly. Before long the newspapers were regularly publishing statements that Indonesia had well over one million induced abortions annually.

Whether it was 700,000 or 1.2 million, it was clear that most abortions were provided to married women, not the stereotypical unmarried teenagers. Also, it was likely that large numbers of procedures were conducted by people who had no medical training, sometimes in ways designed simply to provoke bleeding, so women could go to hospital emergency rooms to seek professional help legally to complete the abortion.

A more reliable estimate of abortion numbers was made by Dr Budi Utomo and his colleagues in 2000 and 2001, using an innovative approach to monitor the practices of a sample of service providers in both urban and rural settings. This survey produced a minimum estimate of two million women seeking medical intervention for pregnancy termination in 2000; over half of these procedures were induced abortions, and around 800,000 were alleged spontaneous terminations needing some medical attention. Again, it didn’t take long before experts, including staff of the Department of Health, were quoting much higher figures, and newspapers were misquoting the two million figure as the total number of induced abortions.

Campaigning for change

Fired up by the figures, activists pressing for legal change were increasingly hopeful that lawmakers would reconsider the situation. Prominent among them were the feminist activists inspired by the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development calling for human rights-based reproductive health. They hoped that President Abdurrahman Wahid’s government (1999-2001) and a rejuvenated DPR would embrace these ideas, and they were delighted when the president appointed a young, energetic woman as the Minister for Women’s Empowerment, a portfolio that she insisted must include family planning. At the start of 2001 the Women’s Health Foundation (YKP) was formed with support from all major political parties and a key official from the Ministry of Health. By July this coalition had begun the task of drafting the clauses needed to re-define the position of abortion in the health law.

The so-called rubber stamp turned out to be a sledgehammer

During the New Order, laws had been drafted by government departments or ministries and passed on to the legislature for what was usually very minimal debate and rapid endorsement. After reformasi, the DPR committee responsible for health matters decided to take the initiative and draft a law on reproductive health to be presented to the government. In June 2002 the Minister of Health was approached privately to elicit his support for the draft law. He gave his blessing to the initiative and delegated the Director General for Community Health to assist. But while the director general was a long time supporter of family planning, he was less than helpful, claiming that the department had received threats from conservative religious leaders who were concerned about the moral implications of abortion. If it was easy to terminate a premarital pregnancy, they had argued, immorality would flourish. He found it hard to refute their logic.

The YKP responded by proposing to undertake research on the demand for abortion, which they knew was likely to show that most procedures were sought by married women whose contraceptive methods had failed. This would have been an easy enough task if they had had access to the records of the largest network of abortion clinics in the country, the Indonesian Planned Parenthood Association (PKBI). Ironically, at that time the head of PKBI was none other than the Director General for Community Health, who instructed the clinics not to participate in the research. But the YKP was closely connected to the doctors working for the PKBI, many of whom agreed to participate in the study but without reference to the PKBI name.

While the researchers were in the field, YKP staff then approached parliamentarians to discuss the need for amendments to the 1992 law. They met with Commission VII of the DPR, the committee that had produced the original law, but whose composition had now changed. The commission chair immediately put the amendment on its agenda, but discussions dragged on for two years. In February 2004, commission members finally signed a Letter of Agreement supporting a draft law, including the abortion amendment, to be sent to the full DPR for confirmation. A plenary session of the DPR passed the law and sent it to the president for final endorsement.

With the distraction of the elections that year the draft remained on the desk of President Megawati until August, when she called in members of the YKP to have lunch with her and to discuss the implications of the amendment. The president said she would sign the law as soon as she received a routine letter of support from the minister of health. The relevant paperwork went to the minister, and he passed it on to the legal department of the ministry. In the meantime Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono won the second round of voting in the presidential elections by a substantial margin. There had been no letter from the minister, despite many reminders from the YKP, so outgoing President Megawati did not sign the bill. When Yudhoyono was sworn in on 24 October 2004, the draft Health Law amendment had expired. The amendment would have to make its way through the DPR again. In the meantime, many strong supporters of health reform had failed in their election attempts or had retired, and the mood of the parliament had substantially shifted.

Whether it was 700,000 or 1.2 million, it was clear that most abortions were provided to married women, not the stereotypical unmarried teenagers

Things changed even more dramatically in August 2005, when the Islamist group Hizbut Tahrir sent a message to the president calling on him to stop any proposal to legalise abortion in any form. While only a very small group, Hizbut Tahrir was able to command public attention with a coordinated media campaign and public protests across the country. Its members claimed that the only possible solution to unwanted pregnancies was a return to Islamic law. Despite the strong language of the attack, Hizbut Tahrir had little influence in parliament. Nonetheless, when the amendment was discussed in the newly formed DPR Commission IX for Population, Health, Labour Force and Transmigration, it was totally revised, introducing many negative references to abortion as a concept, and complex descriptions of conditions under which women might obtain abortions from trained medical staff.

For four years the parliamentarians and advocacy groups argued back and forth about the best way to handle their conflicting preferences. Human rights advocates have called for the legalisation of abortions carried out by trained medical practitioners operating in certified facilities and using safe standard operating procedures, including professional counselling and follow-up provision of effective contraception. Moral arguments put by religious critics focus on the restriction of terminations to women who can be proven to have been raped, and the imposition even in those cases of strict limits in terms of the duration of the pregnancy (often referring to six weeks after the last menstrual period, which would imply only two weeks after the woman might be able to confirm her pregnancy accurately with reference to a missed menstrual period). The draft also stipulated that religious leaders would be required to confirm the need for an abortion. It did not specify if that person would be of the same religion as the woman or her medical practitioner.

In early September 2009 it appeared that history was poised to be repeated, with the draft health law either dying with the retirement of the outgoing DPR, or through the impossibility of ever implementing a poorly drafted law. Remarkably, on the evening of September 14, the near empty chamber of the DPR voted to adopt the proposed Health Law, including somewhat changed clauses on abortion (articles 75-77). The six week stipulation remains, but making exceptions in cases of medical emergencies. Pre and post abortion counselling by a competent provider is required, and procedures require the approval of the woman’s husband, except in cases of rape. Only certified medical practitioners are allowed to carry out abortions. It is unclear what type of medical professionals will be certified; that is up to the Minister of Health.

What does seem likely is that traditional healers, uncertified medical personnel and individual women will continue to use dangerous methods to terminate unwanted pregnancies. Clause 194 stipulates that those caught doing so will be subject to a one billion rupiah (A$130,000) fine and a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. Were that to be applied rigorously to the one million or so cases of abortion each year the legal system would never be able to cope with the trials, or the punishments. The reformed Health Law has again failed to protect or serve the women of Indonesia. ii

Terry Hull (terry.hull@anu.edu.au) is Professor of Demography at the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, Australian National University.
Ninuk Widyantoro (Ninuk_who@yahoo.co.id) is a practicing psychologist and women’s reproductive health advocate in Jakarta.

Asia Times - Trees of Profit

Image by IceNineJon via Flickr

By Muhammad Cohen

HONG KONG - Cutting down Asia's forests has for decades been an easy way to get rich. Now a trio of pan-Asian "serial entrepreneurs" hope to prove planting trees can be a moneymaker, too. Paolo Delgado, Paolo Conconi and Victor Yap started Project Oikos last year hoping to profit from concerns about global warming. But their primary goal is to educate Asians about the benefits of tree planting and protecting forests.

The trio launched a website, www.projectoikos.com, where people can buy trees priced at US$10 and dedicate them to loved ones or special events. Buyers get a certificate (save paper and don't print it) that includes the dedication and a tracking number to identify their tree.

Project Oikos is one of several services that allow people to buy
trees for a variety of reasons. Equinox Publishing, a sponsor of WWF Indonesia's NewTrees planting program for corporate customers (see In a haze, Indonesia slows deforestation Asia Times Online, September 26, 2009), recently released My Baby Tree, a smart phone application as a retail version of the NewTrees corporate. Buyers can purchase a tree, locate it via an online map and give it a virtual watering by shaking their phone.

Different from many other online tree planting programs, Project Oikos aims to move beyond the virtual experience. "As we kept on digging we found that while planting trees does make a difference, the reality in this ever growing world is that the act of planting trees alone is not enough to make a substantial change in the world's environment," Delgado, who calls himself the project's creative director, said.

Delgado, a Philippine native educated in the US who worked in China before basing himself in Manila, and Conconi, an Italian citizen who worked with Danone in France before moving to Asia in 1992, germinated the idea over drinks in Beijing last year.

"We are both quite professionally driven and tend to forget things that are not alarmed on our phone calendars," Delgado said. "We were laughing about all of the silly, last minute gifts we purchased for girlfriends, when we forgot birthdays or anniversaries while off on some business trip somewhere.

"Buying a star was one of the most memorable, as it was last minute, reasonable, doable by Internet, and turned out to be hugely romantic - this was back in the '90s. Paolo [Conconi] then said, 'What if we sold trees'?"

That turned out to be a prescient suggestion. "I grew up active in the Boy Scouts, then became an avid mountaineer and scuba diver," said Delgado, whose family links to Boy Scouts of the Philippines (BSP) span three generations. "When you grow up around these influences, you become quite aware of the environment and our impact on it."

Those scouting links led his family's logistics company, Delgado Brothers, to partner with BSP and Coca-Cola on "Go Green", a project to plant 200,000 trees across the Philippines using saplings grown in BSP nurseries. The connection gave Delgado a potential source for trees and a process for planting them. Yap, a Hong Kong native who has worked with a variety of multinationals, joined the team to provide international marketing expertise, and Project Oikos was born.

The name Oikos traces to ancient Greece. "Oikos was the basic family unit, the shared center of an individual's world," Delgado explains. "In today's globalized world, we believe the environment has become our modern oikos. It is the center of our world, and we all should care for the well being of our shared oikos."

"Everyone is screaming about the environment and how we need to reduce this footprint, recycle that plastic, but for a lot of the developing world - particularly Southeast Asia - there is not enough information out there for individuals to understand exactly what the problem is and what they can do to assist ... This is why at Project Oikos we put a focus on developing an experience that we hope can change mindsets."

Down and dirty
Project Oikos doesn't only want participants to buy trees, it wants them to pick up a shovel and plant them as part of events it stages to build public awareness. "We involve local environmental groups, so that they too can gain some exposure and be part of the resource group that the public has access to," Delgado said.

Because trees absorb carbon wherever they grow, plantings don't need to be in wilderness areas. "There is that saying, 'if a tree falls in the woods and nobody hears it ... ' [and] similarly, 'if a tree is planted and nobody knows it ...' Planting areas need to be in line with our focus on creating awareness," Delgado said. "We try to pick high visibility areas that can generate media impact as well as drive up participation."

For example, in the Intramuros area of Manila, Oikos staged plantings following a scandal that revealed decades-old trees were cut there. Another large planting took place at Manila's Smoky Mountain, the former central garbage dump that was transformed into a low-income housing area.

Planting events have been held in several areas of the Philippines and Malaysia, where co-founder Conconi now lives, in partnership with environmental groups, schools, community organizations, government and publications. Conconi says Project Oikos hopes to expand its base of corporate clients to build joint marketing campaigns. Targets include high profile polluters such as airlines, using trees to offset carbon emissions from passengers' travel.

"We feel that Project Oikos is a great CSR [corporate social responsibility] investment," Delgado says. "With the global financial crisis still reverberating through most companies, we offer an inexpensive alternative to traditional corporate gifts; we can be a part of company-client bonding experiences, and we fulfill CSR requirements."

Although it's traditionally non-profit organizations that offer CSR programs, Oikos' partners decided to make theirs a for-profit venture. "What we knew that we wanted was the ability to run Project Oikos like a business, with good professionals at each location for the activities," Delgado says. "We wanted it to have the freedom to invest in local organizations that were already in existence and making a difference in their own way.”

"We also felt that it would be wonderful to someday have Project Oikos work like a sort of investment fund, where MR = MC [marginal revenue equals marginal costs; the point at which profits are maximized], where we are answerable to investors for returns and growth,” he said. “It may be developing awareness today, but perhaps something related but different tomorrow. In this way, we keep ourselves sharp and efficient. I guess with these sort of ideas, a for-profit was the best way we knew how."

Project Oikos' founders are looking to clean up in every sense, and, everyone, including Mother Earth, can profit from their success.

Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air, a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal, financial crisis, and cheap lingerie. Follow Muhammad Cohen’s blog for more on the media and Asia, his adopted home.

Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Brown Bag Lecture Series

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Southeast Asia Program Brown Bag Lecture Series

Wednesday, September 23 – “Personal Narratives and Historical Experience in Southeast Asia”, Roxana Waterson (Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore), 12:00PM-1:30PM, Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave, Ithaca.
(http://www.einaudi.cornell.edu/southeastasia/calendar/index.asp?id=11501)

Interest in personal narratives and life histories has been growing in recent years, but attention to this form of research material in anthropology has always been patchy. As an anthropologist with long experience of fieldwork in Indonesia (specifically with the Sa’dan Toraja people of South Sulawesi), Roxana Waterson realized that some of my older acquaintances who were born near the beginning of the twentieth century had lived extraordinary lives. They had experienced all the dramatic social transformations that accompanied successive political developments as Indonesia moved from colonialism, through wartime occupation by the Japanese and the struggle for Independence, to the emergence of a new nation-state. The possibility of
identifying as “Indonesian” developed along the way as well. She became interested in the potentials of life narratives – not just of the famous, but of ordinary people - to provide insights into the interface between personal experience and great historical events. Her recently published book, Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (Singapore University Press/Ohio University Press, 2007), draws together several such life narratives, as recounted and reflected upon by anthropologists working in different regions of Southeast Asia, with a view to exploring more fully the potentials of this kind of research for social scientists. In this talk, Professor Waterson shall discuss some of these life narratives, and their contributions to ananthropology that seeks to do justice to personal experience.

Indonesian President Calls Hotel Bombings Acts of Terror

By Brian Padden Jakarta 17 July 2009

Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono says the two bombs that went off in the Marriott and Ritz Carlton hotels in Jakarta, killing eight people and wounding at least 50 more, are acts of terrorism.

Rescuers evacuate the body of a victim of the bomb explosion outside J.W. Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, 17 Jul 2009

Police pushed back crowds as paramedics carried out the bodies of five people who died in the blast at the Marriott hotel in an upscale business district in south Jakarta. A second bomb exploded at the nearby Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Witnesses say they heard loud explosions and saw clouds of smoke and dust shortly before eight in the morning.

Iwan, a waiter who was working at a Ritz-Carlton restaurant where one bomb was reportedly detonated, survived unharmed. He says he does not know whether it was a bomb or not in the restaurant, but there was a powerful explosion.

Police say the bombs exploded inside the hotels. The perpetrators were somehow able to avoid extensive hotel security. Jakarta's police chief says several suspects were staying at the Marriott hotel, on the 18th floor where undetonated explosives were found.

The two hotels are connected by an underground tunnel but the president's spokesman, Dino Pati Djalal says it is too early to speculate on how the bombs were planted.

"The minister for security affairs has stated that this is something of, a bomb of a high explosive, that is how he described it," he said. "But exactly what kind, what type, and how was it exploded and what is the modus operandi, that all remains to be determined."

Although those responsible have not yet been identified, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called the bombings terrorism. He says no matter what nation or religion, terrorism cannot be justified, whatever the motive or reason.

This is the first terrorist attack in Indonesia in four years and the second time the Marriott Hotel was bombed. That last attack in 2003 was blamed on the Islamic terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah, which also was responsible for attacks around the country that claimed more than 230 lives over the past nine years.

The president, who won re-election last week, also said security officials had received intelligence of plots to disrupt the election and prevent him from being inaugurated. He says there were plans to take over the election committee headquarters and statements that there will be a revolution if Yudhoyono wins.

He did not say what group made these threats.

A number of international business leaders who were meeting in the Marriott, including American James Castle, were injured in the blast. A New Zealand businessman was killed and an Australian trade official, Craig Senger, is missing and feared dead.

The British soccer club Manchester United, which was booked to stay at the Ritz Carlton starting Saturday, has canceled its visit to Jakarta.

No Indonesian Left Behind

What's going on here? FSI can't keep current instructor/s? More instructors needed? Communication gaps need to be filled? Extra hands needed for Obama visit in 2010? State Department is really doing more long-range planning about Indonesia? More Indonesia analysts in US government agencies (including CIA) finally going to use the flood of Bahasa Indonesia materials in their virtual or print originals?

I remember the years in the pre-internet age at the (now defunct) USIA when I was the only one in the 'foreign affairs community' reading Indonesian newspapers at my desk and scrubbing the ink from my hands afterward.


Hmm, no course in Indonesian listed on FSI's language page at http://www.fsi-language-courses.com/ . Go look. Hmm, there's a link to the How to Learn Any Language site at http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/e/index.html . Just looked. No Indonesian there either. Pitiful. Getting bored, I went to the FSI search-this-site page at http://fsi-language-courses.com/site_search.asp. Typed in keywords Indonesian, later Indonesia. Result:

Your Search - indonesia - did not match any files on this site. Suggestions:

• Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
• Try different keywords.
• Try more general keywords.
• Try fewer keywords.

Good luck, Indonesians.

For sure, you can always do-it-yourself. Starters -- http://www.learningindonesian.com/ or
http://www.seasite.niu.edu/Indonesian/ .

The following ad just appeared on Cornell's SEAP-L list --


Language And Culture Instructor: U.S. Department of State, the Foreign Service Institute, Arlington, VA

The Foreign Service Institute is currently recruiting a Language and Culture Instructors in Indonesian.

The Foreign Service Institute: The Foreign Service Institute is the Federal Government's primary training institution for officers and support personnel of the U.S. foreign affairs community, preparing American diplomats and other professionals to advance U.S. foreign affairs interests overseas and in Washington.

In your position as Language and Culture Instructor you will:

Teach speaking, reading, listening comprehension and writing (if required) skills to a full range of students at all levels of language proficiency

Requirements: Native or near-native fluency in Indonesian language and culture. Must have US work authorization.

Salary: $ 50,408.00 - 79,280.00 (starting salaries vary and may be based in part on superior academic achievement and/or previous work experience).

Application Deadline: Applications will be accepted Friday, June 05, 2009 to Friday, June 19, 2009.

Contact Information: (703) 302-6813, Maria Garza, FSIJobApplications@state.gov

To Apply: Go to www.usajobs.opm.gov (before June 19, 2009) for the detailed vacancy announcements and information on how to apply, job announcement FSI 09-24. In order to receive full consideration for the position, please read and follow the instructions carefully.

For more information and more job announcements, also check out: www.usajobs.opm.gov

Prawet Jantharat Ed.D.
FSI-School of Language Studies
Language Training Supervisor
(Burmese, Indonesian, Lao, Malay, Tetun and Thai)

Tel: 703-302-7292, Fax: 703-302-7055 jantharatp2@state.gov