The Program

How rude of me, I realize I really have not yet explained why I am even here in Indonesia…and now I feel the need to apologize for such a poorly constructed sentence…is it too early to blame a language barrier?

Here is the program at a glance. The Freeman Indonesia Non-Profit Internship Program, sponsored by the International Institute of Education is a cross-cultural program designed to bring Indonesian and American students together. There are ten American students paired with ten Indonesia students who study at US colleges and universities spread across three cities in Indonesia: Jakarta, Bandung, and Yogyakarta. Besides strengthening the relationship and understanding between our two nations, the program is designed to expose us students to the NGO (non-governmental organizations) sector in Indonesia. As Americans, we are enrolled in an intensive language and cultural course where we attend class Monday through Friday from 8:00am to 10:00am and then have field trips every Saturday. The Indonesians will have two weekend intensives on non-profit management in Indonesia.

We are each paired with an Indonesian counterpart to complete our main task in Indonesia: our NGO internship. Upon acceptance to the program we were placed into different areas: education, public health, the arts, environmental protection and economic development. Every day from 10:00am until 4:30pm I work with Kehati, an NGO working to protect Indonesia’s biodiversity through sustainable development and community empowerment (aka environmental protection). They are a source for grants to a number of NGO’s in Jakarta and they are not only well known in environmental initiative but are also doing some amazing work. So far all I have done is help formulate the early stages of a proposal for a grant for a mangrove education center and give a fifteen minute presentation on sea-level change and coral reefs for what they call “knowledge-sharing Fridays.” My main project will be to work with various mangrove projects over the course of the summer ranging from grants to education to restoration. I am very excited about what I am doing here.

Hopefully this gives you a better idea of what I am doing with my life. I am really trying to learn as much as I can and will hopefully come away with cultural, academic and self knowledge.