The children look happy at the dusty school. They are short; a lot shorter than children in the USA, but this is typical in Indonesia. Some of them are barefoot, but many wear flip-flops made up of plastic sheets and rubber. They all wear identical uniforms: dusty tan button-up collared shirts with pants for the boys and skirts for the girls. The children are told to make their clothes last as long as possible so that they will not have to pay for new ones, as they have little money to spare.
Most of the children live in the indigenous village right across the street, but some of them have to walk 2 hours down a mountain road to get home from school every afternoon. Since it is after school, only about 50 students are left. Normally the kids have classes separately, but now they all squished into one classroom. They sing us three songs and dance. In return, we sing them two songs on the ukulele — “Someone to Lava,” and “You are My Sunshine.”
Each child gets a new simple notebook and a new pen. I teach them addition and subtraction. When I check their work, the 12 year-olds and the 6 year-olds have similar mistakes adding and subtracting simple numbers, which makes me question how much the older ones learned in six years at their school. Normally, the older kids would do much better than the younger ones! They look happy, but it doesn’t look like they are learning much.
