Helping The Students of SD Petemon 13 To Recycle Non Organic Rubbish & Discussing With Students of SMA 11 About Fund Raising

by James Ogilvie – England

I spent today visiting two schools to run workshops with the students to celebrate Clean Up the World campaign. The first school we visited in the morning, SD Petemon 13 Surabaya, was a really nice little school that has done lots of environmental work in the past. They have recycling bins for different materials, the first I’ve seen here, and lots of other recycled things. The school recently won a national award for its environmental work and you can tell they children are proud of this as they are very enthusiastic about it.

They also had a mango tree in their playground, which in my book makes it a very cool school! They were very excited to have me visit their school; especially the boys who seemed to know more Premiership footballers names than English words! We spent the morning making recycled paper out of old newspaper, which the children very much enjoyed. I helped them shred the newspaper and mix it up, but they all knew exactly what to do! While we waited for the paper to dry we collected leaves from the playground to make compost.

In the afternoon we visited a secondary school, called SMA 11 Surabaya, which was nice for me because the children were older and understood a lot more of what I was saying. I was able to talk to them properly as well. We held a discussion about fundraising, as they want to raise money for various projects in their school, which was very interesting. I suggested the idea of arranging sponsorship to do something; when I was at school we used to do sponsored bike rides and ask our neighbours and family to sponsor us. However, I was surprised to hear that they said people over here wouldn’t believe them so wouldn’t give them any money! It was a very nice school though, and some students and teachers showed me around which was good.

Later in the day, we went to the US Consulate in Surabaya’s Facebook group launch party, which was lots of fun. It was nice to meet the American people who work at the consulate, and we will be working on some projects together during my time here which I’m looking forward to.