Kang GURU Travels Sampit - August 2008

Why not check out some of the travel and magazine reports that Kang Guru Indonesia has had on this website over the past three years about AIBEP schools?

The trip to Sampit was a pleasure as it was well organized and quite interesting Flights were on time and quite okay except the Merpati plane to Sampit to Surabaya was quite an old aircraft. Luckily I had Pak Abdul Syahid with me, one of the organizing committee from Sampit, as he kept me calm on the flight.

'Don’t worry’, he kept saying.

Pak Hadriansyah from SMAN 2 and driver, Pak Maathuda, met Syahid and I at the airport and before we knew it we were on our way to SMAN 2, 6 km from the airport.

I visited two schools in Sampit. The first was SMAN 2 Sampit on Tuesday morning. I met the Principal, Pak Hadriansyah, who welcomed me to the school in meeting I had with around 40 students.

These students were from different schools in the area and after being a little bit shy they really started talking and asking questions. Not many of them knew much about KGI but they do now. Their English was good and several of the students asked excellent questions even though they were shy to begin with.

I met two of the presenters at SMANDA FM and looked at their terrific studio too.

Ade and Subekti are both SMAN 2 students and both of them are keen Kang Guru readers and listeners in Sampit.

SMAN 2 has their own radio station. This school-based station plays Kang Guru every Sunday afternoon at 6.30 and has a broadcast area of about 10 km from the school. Many of the school's students listen regualrly and enjoy the English language info on the program.

Ade presents the Kang Guru program and Pak Sunario, a teacher at the school, is the general presenter of programs. Radio broadcasting is actually a hobby of his and of course he works quite hard at the station every day. He has helpers though such as Ade.

In the afternoon we drove 20km out of town (on a terrible road – very rough) to a school built through the Australia Indonesia Basic Education Program (AIBEP). The school was SMP 10 Sampit in Desa Bapaeng.

The students there were fantastic and I spent 40 minutes ‘teaching’ an SMP 1 class of students. They were very bright and keen to learn. Their school is new (built in 2006 and opened in 2007) and it looks great. The students are very proud of their school. The school library has some library books but of course not nearly enough. Phone connections are extremely difficult in this area, as with many other AIBEP school sites, so no telephone or internet as yet. It is planned however.

KGI has already sent the school some materials for their English teacher to use however without a cassette or CD player, it will be difficult to use the audio teaching materials that we have sent. Nevertheless, teachers can alway sread the texts to their students. Hopefully the school can buy a CD player or cassette player for use in their English language classrooms. KGI has sent motivational items for teachers to use with their students such as KGI buku tulis, pencils, stickers and copies of the brand new Joeys SMP posters.

It was terrific to see their English teacher, Pak Aris Karnang, at the KGI teacher workshop in Sampit the following day. Thanks also to school principal, Pak Gusti. You are all doing a great job.

In Sampit I conducted a KGI Teacher Workshop with 75 teachers from the district. The workshop was well- supported by DIKNAS so thank you to them. They didn’t believe that KGI did these workshops for free and they had money ready to pay me for the workshop. I said no of course and told them that the Australian Government pays for all of the expense. So we decided to spend that money from DIKNAS to buy teacher packages for every school represented at the workshop. That meant DIKNAS purchased 27 packages @ Rp.150,000 each for each school. Fantastic and thank you! I am sure those schools will really appreciated the materials.

Many thanks to the committee for all of their hard work and for the success of the event. KGI was happy to visit Sampit and will possibly return in 2009 for a follow-up workshop.

I had another wonderful surprise was after the workshop.

Members of the Organizing Committee took me to a restaurant on a floating restaurant moored on the river in Sampit for dinner. Unfortunately it was night time so I couldn't see the river but there were large ships anchored there. It is obviously a very busy port.

After dinner we called into a Hari Merdeka celebration in the Kantor Camat Baamang at the invitation of Pak Camat - Pak Sugianor, a keen supporter of SMAN2's radio station and of the value of learning the English language.

I met him on the first day when I visited SMAN2 so it was good to see him again. The celebration was huge with a live band, singers, a comedy/drama and lots and lots of people enjoying the independence activities. We left at 10pm and people were still listening to the music and dancing a little bit of dangdut.

Pak Hadriansyah from SMAN 2 and driver, Pak Maathuda, with Pak Syahid wrapping the KGI's oleh oleh before leaving for the airport for my return to Bali.