Oakland couple improves schools in Bali

 

inShare0 Balifornian Tours and Travel Blog works with several organizations to enhance educational opportunities and to give back to the island, remain sustainable, lower our impact, and build environmental and cultural awareness and respect.  Projects like Bali's Green School and The Colbert's foundation are emmensely important to us and we do all we can to help.  Please contact us to learn more and see how we can incorporate charitable elements into your own tour.  Most of our tours contain elements of ecotourism and charity.  We encourage you to bring donations of clothing, children's toys, tools, etc. to donate to impoverished villages in Bali and throughout Indonesia.  We want your tour to be as rewarding and memorable as possible. ~ ed.    By Dave Newhouse Oakland Tribune columnist From The Mercury News Dennis and Nancy Colbert, of Oakland, are at that stage of their lives -- late 60s, three children, seven grandchildren -- when they're expected to retire, decelerate to a much slower speed, and go softly and quietly into old age.  Not the Colberts, who refuse to act like other seniors. Preferring an accelerator-to-the-floorboard state of mind, they're actively making a huge difference 10,000 miles from home on the Indonesian island of Bali.  They've dedicated themselves to improving the educational quality of Bali schoolchildren, first- through sixth-grades. The Colberts renovated four elementary schools in poor rural areas, and added learning centers to all four schools through their nonprofit Balinese Children's Education Foundation. What a positive influence the Colberts have been in Bali, not only improving dilapidated school buildings, but also impacting 500 students, who attend school until noon, then voluntarily return in the afternoon for two hours of reading, learning English, and playing educational games.  The couple's fascination with Bali didn't begin with the musical "South Pacific." Nancy's sister, Christina Welty, had retired in Bali. The Colberts visited her there in 2000 and found they couldn't stay away. "The beauty is just inspiring," said Nancy.  "And the people are very warm and gracious," added Dennis. Bali's population is 2.5 million -- 90 percent Hindu, 6 to 7 percent Muslim. The island is 90 miles by 60 miles, mostly rice paddies. A Bali night club bombing in 2002 killed 171 and injured 274. But the Colberts insist the island is peaceful. Dennis was shocked upon first seeing the neglected schools. Seeking something to do as a retired business executive, he found it in Bali. The schools needed extensive repairs, and they needed books. The Colberts came up with the money to buy 2,000 books, while also setting up libraries. And through their foundation, they hired six teachers. "Their (school) curriculum is totally dictated by the government," said Nancy, a former schoolteacher who now advises college students stateside. "They teach to the test."  "A lot of teaching by rote," noted Dennis.  Thus critical thinking isn't emphasized.  And so the Colberts decided upon learning centers.  "We were very considerate," Dennis said. "Here we are from the United States, knowing this was their culture. So we asked how could we help. The Balinese were receptive."  Bali adults, mostly parents of schoolchildren, filled in holes in classroom floors, laid tile, patched walls, painted and replaced broken windows. Suddenly, going to school was exciting. The Colberts visit Bali three times a year, staying three, four weeks each trip. When they leave Bali, the students bow, take the Colberts' hands, and put their foreheads against their hands -- an ultimate show of Balinese respect that gets the couple teary-eyed just talking about that emotional scene. "The greatest thrill is that we're helping these children by adding a little bit to their education," said Dennis, "and by our relationship with the children."  "One of the satisfactions is to find something that we truly love at this point of our lives," said Nancy. "I can't imagine anything that would bring us more pleasure."  The Colberts, who've been married 46 years, wanted to join the Peace Corps as newlyweds. But it didn't work out. Now, in a sense, it's finally happened.  "We've enjoyed the fact that we can be on the ground, working," Dennis said. "And we're thinking of setting up some more libraries at other schools." The Colberts funded most of the early schoolhouse repairs. Then came their foundation -- they're the only board members. Their website is www.balieducation.org, and all donations are tax deductible.  "Our goal was not to teach the Balinese children English, but to get them to appreciate and enjoy reading," said Dennis. "Now the children want to take books home at night to read."  Two senior citizens, changing the world.



NYT article about Bali's wonderful Green School

Balifornian Tours and Travel Blog works with several organizations to give back to the island, remain sustainable, lower our impact and build environmental and cultural awareness and respect.  Projects like Bali's Green School are emmensely important to us and we do what we can to help. Please contact us to learn more and see how we can incorporate this into your own tour.  Most of our tours contain elements of ecotourism and charity.  We encourage you to bring donations of clothing, children's toys, tools, etc to donate to impoverished villages in Bali and throughout Indonesia.  We want your tour to be as rewarding and memorable as possible.

Green Column

Bali School Makes Sustainability a Way of Life

By BETTINA WASSENER

Published: January 2, 2011

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SIBANG KAJA, BALI — Half a world away from Cancún, Mexico, and the international climate change talks that took place there last month, a school here in Indonesia is staging its own attempt to save the planet.

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It is small-scale and literally grassroots — and possibly in some respects more effective than the tortuous efforts of politicians to agree on how to stop global warming.  In the midst of the lush, steaming jungle of Bali, along a pitted road, past scattered chickens and singing cicadas, Green School has two dozen buildings made of giant bamboo poles. There are no walls, and there is no air-conditioning. Just gracefully arched roofs, concrete floors and bamboo furniture. There is a big, grassy playground, complete with goalposts made — yes — of bamboo; a bamboo bridge across a rock-strewn river; vegetable patches; and a mud-wrestling pit.  But there is also a computer lab, a well-stocked library and an array of courses drawn from an internationally recognized curriculum and taught in English.

More than 200 children from 40 countries, including Indonesia, are learning math here, as well as grammar, science, business studies, drama and Bahasa Indonesia, the official language spoken in this country of 240 million. The students, whose levels range from kindergarten to 10th grade and who represent 40 nationalities, are also learning to grow and thresh rice and how to make ceramics and paper from materials found on the school site. They get dirt under their fingernails and mud between their toes. Visitors are advised to wear comfortable shoes. High heels are not recommended.  If all this sounds a little bit hippie and idealistic, that is because it is. A little.

But then, Green School, the brainchild of John Hardy and his wife, Cynthia, is also realistic and practical, designed to give children not just a sense of how to live sustainably, but also to leave them ultimately with the skills to enter academic institutions anywhere in the world.

“We want to create future green leaders — we need green leaders,” said a sarong-clad Mr. Hardy, picking his way along a dirt path last month. “We want to teach kids that the world is not indestructible.”

Mr. Hardy himself — sarong notwithstanding — is no mere dropout, tree-hugging beach bum. True, he says, he “ran away” from his home in Canada in 1975, to go to Bali. But he is also an entrepreneur, and the upmarket jewelry business he and his wife built over the years was worth enough, by the time they sold it in 2007, to allow the Hardys to set up the Green School.  The original idea had been to retire quietly. But then Mr. Hardy saw “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 documentary about the campaign by Al Gore, the former U.S. vice president, to educate people about climate change.  “Al Gore ruined my life,” Mr. Hardy, who is now 61, likes to say.  The movie prompted him to scrap plans for a quiet life and to try to do his part to change the way young people — and ultimately society as a whole — behave toward their environment.

Environment-studies courses and nature excursions have, of course, long been popular in U.S. and European schools. But Green School, Mr. Hardy and its teachers believe, is unique in that it completely immerses children in a world of sustainable practices throughout the school day — with the nonflush compost toilets, the (easily bearable) lack of air-conditioning and the fact that virtually everything in the school is created from bamboo, rather than steel, glass and concrete.

“There are lots of schools that have elements of ‘green’ teaching, but I don’t think that anyone has been ambitious or foolhardy enough to try anything on this scale before,” said Ben Macrory, a New Yorker who moved to Bali in 2008 to take on the job of Green School’s head of admissions and whose 4-year-old daughter, Maggie, attends the school. “Every experience the children have here is about how to live with only a minimal impact on the environment.”  Yes, there are trade-offs. Schooling is only available from nursery school through 10th grade, with plans to extend teaching for the remaining two years by 2012. Also, students have a more limited choice of languages or other standard courses than might be available at Western schools or other international schools on the island of Bali.  But that has not prevented the appeal of Green School, which is in its third year, from growing.

Many of the students have come from other schools in Bali, and an increasing number come from families who have moved to Bali recently — often in large part because they want to send their children here.

“The atmosphere is magical,” said Barbara Friedrichsen-Mehta, who visited the school with her husband, Rajesh, and their daughters Lena and Vinya last month. The family is considering moving to Bali, once their institute for innovative music has been established in Singapore.  “We’ve always missed the educational vision in most of the international schools in the many places we’ve lived, and done a lot of home schooling for that reason,” Ms. Friedrichsen-Mehta said. “But this place is creative, innovative and multicultural. And the girls really, really liked it.”

The mystique of Bali — its arts, ubiquitous temples and gentle climate — helps to draw families to this place. And the slightly offbeat profile of expatriates on the island means parents are open to novel concepts like a school without walls that grows its own vegetables.  “No boring people move to Bali,” Mr. Macrory said. The island attracts entrepreneurs, artists, healers and some staff members from nongovernmental organizations, rather than the financial and corporate communities that have grown in Hong Kong and Singapore, Frankfurt and New York.  Still, Mr. Hardy says he is convinced that the Green School concept can work elsewhere, too, and he hopes the school will be the blueprint — or “greenprint” — for more. “Not just one,” he said — “50!”  Will Green School be a game-changer in the global fight to combat climate change? Who knows?  But for now, 200 children are visibly enjoying the school. And perhaps the school and its future spinoffs will someday yield another Al Gore to shake up someone’s retirement plans.

A version of this article appeared in print on January 3, 2011, in The International Herald Tribune.

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