BUTET MANURUNG

The Person

Saur Marlina Manurung was born on February 21, 1972 in Jakarta the capital city of Indonesia. Her nickname “Butet” is a name that given by her family since she is the first daughter of “Batak” tribe family. She has been obsessed with indigenous peoples ever since she was a child. National Geographic was her favorite magazine, and she dreamed about becoming an explorer. She is a huge fan of Harrison Ford’s Indiana Jones. The movie inspired her to use the teaching technique of learning through playing.
Butet was an excellent student, excelling in mathematics and an accomplished pianist—though she pursued these achievements out of a sense of obligation. Then her life took a sudden turn as she entered university and her father passed away. In college, she studied anthropology and education, and she finally had a chance to explore the world. An avid member of the Nature Lover’s Club, and eventually acting as its head, she became an expert hiker, rafter, and cave explorer. And on her expeditions she finally had the chance to meet firsthand the peoples she had previously encountered only in print of National Geographic magazines or on television.
She wrote her thesis on the relationship between traditional village leaders and government-installed functionaries in West Timor. As she developed her own interests, she supported herself by teaching piano, and today credits her father with imparting to her the discipline and perseverance that would shortly become crucial to her success.
Upon completing her degrees, she could actualy have had a well-paid, prestigious job in Jakarta instead, but this is simply not an option for her. Butet took what seemed to her a dream job: going to the forest to set up an education program with a remote tribe of hunter-gatherers, part of a conservation organization’s strategy to work with local communities.

The Problem
Indigenous peoples tend to evoke two strong opposing viewpoints. Because they live in fragile ecosystems, they are alternately viewed as its best defenders and worst enemies; as rightful inhabitants and dangerous encroachers; as a vigilant monitor and powerless victim of environmental catastrophe; as barometers of ecological diversity and as mere footnotes to major economic and political conflicts. In Indonesia, the paradox extends into a moral realm. To some, including much of the citizen sector, indigenous peoples are symbols of pristine nature, cultural
diversity, and gentle, simple living. While to others, including at times the state, they represent poverty, backwardness, and an embarrassingly primitive obstacle to progress. “Anak Dalam” tribe, is the indigenous peoples that live in Bukit Dua Belas region, National Park in Jambi Province, about 225 km Westside Jambi in Sumatra Island, Indonesia. The tribe that Butet first decided to dedicate her nobel work.
The tribe “Anak Dalam” people like many other indigenous peoples in Indonesia have often been cheated when dealing with outsiders. Apparently, one such outsider once came to them with a piece of paper, claiming it was a letter of appreciation from the local subdistrict head, and asked them to sign it. They did, and were promptly evicted from their land. The letter was actually a land deed, and they had unwittingly sold their land.
Education is a long-term solution to such problems, but there are significant technical obstacles. The state has been slow to setup schools in remote areas, in part because few teachers are willing to go there. Where schools do exist, the curriculum and teaching style hardly fit with local customs. The structure of a school day, rote lessons, and a uniform national curriculum are simply adapted the modern world way of life. At the end most projects to set up remote schools fail.
Indonesia does have a national network for indigenous peoples, but actually this body has very few active members who come from indigenous communities. Most are representatives from citizen organizations working on environmental protection and culture. Butet recounts a story of an organization that spent several years trying to win over forest peoples to its conservation agenda. When that failed, the organization went ahead and made a forest management plan in the name of the local tribe without their input or consent. The zoning plan ignored the way that people actually use the forest, and the strong cultural beliefs that guide their actions. When the community found out, it vowed not to cooperate and a conflict, usually the end will be violence.
Butet knew those problems and there was a best solution for them, but it comes to nothing without implementation. So she dicided to unlearn everything she thought she knew about education. She was unfazed by the fact that none of her predecessors in the role had made any headway, and that the latest died of malaria contracted in the jungle, she just tried to simply focus on living with the community.

Long Way For a Headway
Certainly, her job is noble and demanding, but it just simply because of “Anak Dalam” peoples simple mind and limited access to education they regard reading and writing as something related to black magic, and to master black magic, they must make an offering. The situation that made her way for a headway even harder,
so then she dicided to find another way spent more days with the people of “Anak Dalam”.
However the reality is not that simple. Armed with blackboards, chalk and some pens and paper, and she has to walks long distances every day to teach the various sub-groups of the isolated “Anak Dalam” tribe. This is not easy to travel on foot in a 60,500 hectare tropical forest. Even when she finally finds one group, is not sure that she will be accepted. If a group rejects her, she goes and finds another group, which may mean another long journey. If a group welcomes her, she encounters another set of difficulties: how to persuade them to learn to read, write and count? And what is the most suitable teaching method?.
Furthermore she must also adjust herself to a different sense of time. For example, when they are hungry, they go hunting. If she wants to spend time with them, she has to go along. She also has to trained herself emotionally and psychologically strong enough to immerse themselves in a totally alien culture. She ever inadvertently break a local taboo and suddenly be asked to leave the community for a time. She realized that she has to be perceptive enough to read the situation, sensitive enough to abide by the community’s wishes, yet strong enough to return and ask to be accepted back in.
It was a long struggle for Butet until one day, “Anak Dalam” children happened to hear Butet recite some of their verses from memory and were surprised that an outsider could quickly learn their traditional verses by heart. The children told her that their tribe had thousands of ancestral verses, but after several generations, many of these verses had been lost as they had not been written down. Then they ask she to record the verses and then teach them how to transcribe them. They started to show their interest in reading and writing. Something that made Butet realized then that children, with their natural curiosity, were most receptive to her presence. So then she shelved the curriculum and spent her days playing with the children, letting them teach her about their community and life in the forest. As the children took a greater interest, Butet looked for opportunities to teach them to read, write and count. After 6 years of intensive work with forest communities and the organizations that want to serve them, Butet crystallized her own vision for connecting with indigenous youth and make another long run to solve the problems of many Indigenous people in Indonesia.

Butet Manurung “A Woman of Letters”
After spending years of teaching in “Anak Dalam” tribe, in 2001 she became the recipient of the Man and Biosphere Award from the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) and UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. Beside that she also awarded as the 1st Women of the year in Education by one of Indonesia Television Station.
Although she has made great achievements, she still hopes for more. She wants to prepare young indigenous people to help their communities make informed and
dignified choices about how they will cope with change. The first step is to provide basic education—literacy and comprehension of the wider world. Since the school system does not extend into remote areas, Butet is creating a national volunteer service named “Sokola” to place teachers in remote communities. Based on her own experience teaching in the forests of Sumatra, today Butet has developed a completely new method that allows people from pre-literate societies to quickly learn to read and write Indonesian. While Butet believes in the power of education in general, she is also scouting for young people who can begin building bridges between their communities and the many outside interests they now face. Her organization runs a program that brings youth from indigenous communities into national forums discussing natural resource use, forests, and forest communities.
So far, her organization Sokola working with a number of groups around Indonesia, who are facing a variety of challenges. The challenges that have convinced the members of Sokola that education for indigenous groups needs to be aimed at what those groups need. It also needs to be delivered in a much more flexible manner than the government system can provide. Rather than seeing nomadic or isolated indigenous groups as naked primitives who need modern schooling and a modern religion, they see them as needing appropriate forms of education, support, and protection as they face the challenges of adapting to a world which is encroaching on them from all sides. The challenges made them realize that for most modern society Butet with her Sokola just a committed group of volunteers. But for many Indigenous peoples out there the need for the kind of education they provide is very great

Sources
Anonimous 2006. Butet Manurung The Profile.http://www.ashoka.org [May 15, 2010]
Rokhdian Dodi 2008.Jungle Schools: Valunteers bring alternative education to marginalized communities. http://www.insideindonesia.org/edition-92/jungle-schools [May 15, 2010]
M. Bambang 2003. Butet manurung, Champion of Literacy. The Jakarta Post: Thursday, 11/20/2003.http://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2003/11/20/butet-manurung-champion-literacy.html [May 21, 2010]
Tedjasukmana Jason 2004. Butet Manurung A Woman of Letters. http://www.time.com/time/asia/2004/heroes/hbutet_manurung.html [May 21, 2010]
Tuti & Liska 2009. Saur Marlina Manurung. http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=SAUR_MARLINA_MANURUNG_Indonesia