Yaysan Hita Ume Na Nanorin

The Imagine Learning Center (ILC) began very organically in response to the needs of a small culturally diverse community who live and work in the Dehla area of Rote Island. This group was made up of local Rotenese as well as young families from all over the globe. As their families and businesses grew, their ties with each other and the local community strengthened. The ILC was developed as they responded to the needs that they saw within their own families and the community they are part of.

The need to educate their own children, to standard, and with an ethos they were happy with became more and more pressing, as did the awareness that things were changing rapidly on Rote Island due to surf tourism. With this came a strong desire to see sustainable, responsible development and to preserve and protect the local ways, traditions, and customs; to preserve the environment, and to empower local people to be able to benefit from the growing tourism industry. The ILC was born through a passion and belief that it could be part of the answer for these needs, and the realization that things needed to be approached in a different way than had be seen in other more traditional models of education in the Indonesian context.

The ILC aims to empower the people of Dehla, Rote for a bright and sustainable future in a landscape of rapidly increasing tourism development, and to create an environment that, through education, play, collaboration and exchange of knowledge, will:

● enable children to learn, grow and play together

● provide activities to integrate local and international children

● be a place where environmental and community projects flourish

● provide access to capacity building education and training

● preserve and place value upon local culture and language

In 2018 ‘Imagine Learning Centre’ began with one qualified, Reggio Emilia trained Indonesian pre-school teacher and one local helper who worked with around eight young children in the mornings and then offered free community English and environmental classes two afternoons per week as well as the occasional beach clean-up.

Since then, the ILC has:

• Set up the official Yayasan

• Continued with another six years of morning activities for pre-schoolers.
• Employed the original Reggio Emilia trained volunteer full time. Hired and trained another two local helpers.
• Begun morning sessions for the elementary age group with two full-time qualified and experienced primary teachers, a part time student teacher and a helper.
• Employed a project manager

• Renovated a small open-air building to use for the ILC in the interim. The space was offered free of charge for as long as needed by a local business owner.

• Offered three free community afternoon sessions per week. These include English, environmental classes and hospitality (kitchen hygiene, food safety and customer service).

• Trained a local person to run the hospitality classes.

• Been given land for the future ILC site to build a purpose-built permanent learning centre
• Leased a second space for a learning centre for the elementary age group and play area with playground which was donated to us

• Opened the playground after school hours for supervised play

• Partnered with Swim-in-Aid, supported by Swimdo, a group from Bali who run a water safety course, and helped facilitate and run the Swimdo program for hundreds of local elementary children in Rote

• Begun cultural exchange classes in the afternoons, where local Indonesian people come together with local foreign community members and teach the traditional skills unique to the area. For example, ikat weaving and sassando playing.

The center is currently funded solely by the international families who pay for their kids to attend the center in the mornings. So far this model has allowed us to continue to provide all of the achievements to date. However, we have dreams of being able to offer much more:

Our biggest goal is to raise the funds required to build a purpose-designed center on the land which was gifted to us. With a proper, secure, fit-for-purpose building we can move forward with many of our goals for the future. These include:

• Creating a digital learning center which would be open in the afternoons for local Indonesian children to use. Many of the local children here only have access to phones to help with their studies, so having access to computers and printers would be hugely beneficial.

• Creating a library with both Indonesian and English books

• Purchasing a Multi-Lit Phonics program which would then be taught to all children who use the center, both Indonesian and foreign. This would hugely boost the local Indonesian children's literacy and would improve their English, giving them greater opportunities for the future and helping to achieve a core objective of the center which is to bring the local and foreign children together as one community.

• Building basic accommodation on the land so we can house staff and volunteers who will help us to offer an even broader range of activities

• Running a children's life savers course, similar to "Little Nippers" in Australia.

The land that we will build on was very generously donated by Elias, a local man who was born and raised here on Rote and who is also a founding member of the yaysan. When asked why he was donating the land, this was his response:

-“First of all, I care a lot about the local children. Even I can’t speak the languages of the people coming here. I feel that when there is more tourism then the children will not be able to be a part of it all because they don’t understand English or Spanish and as a result they will start to think that they don’t have a place/meaning. I don’t want to profit from all this, I just want the local children to be useful and have a better future. I also want families from other countries to unite with the local children here because I don’t want there to be a difference with our children, ‘oh he is from Australia, oh she is from Uruguay, oh he is from Spain, oh she is from Rote’. This only causes conflict with our children. So with us training them from a young age at ‘Ume Nanori’ they will definitely feel happy and they will also feel that there are no longer differences among them…. And the Rote culture can stay alive.”-