Selling ice cream to support the family
“Selling ice cream to support the family”
In front of our school an 11 year old girl was selling ice cream every day, to supplement her parents’ income. At a younger age she used to come to our classes. One of our staff members started talking to the girl to find out her story and why she didn’t come to class anymore.
At Volunteer Programs Bali we try to encourage, not only the kids to come to our classes, but also the parents and community to understand the importance of education. As a local organization we do so with the utmost respect for their culture. A lot of parents can’t afford to let their children go to school. When they are old enough to work, they have to step in and help out their parents. For this reason it is very difficult for children to get a good education and it’s a struggle to get the children to come to our afternoon English classes. Volunteer Programs Bali tries to help out wherever we can so the kids are able to come to class.
At Volunteer Programs Bali we try to encourage, not only the kids to come to our classes, but also the parents and community to understand the importance of education. As a local organization we do so with the utmost respect for their culture. A lot of parents can’t afford to let their children go to school. When they are old enough to work, they have to step in and help out their parents. For this reason it is very difficult for children to get a good education and it’s a struggle to get the children to come to our afternoon English classes. Volunteer Programs Bali tries to help out wherever we can so the kids are able to come to class.
When we learned about the girl selling ice cream, Volunteer Programs Bali looked into her story and we decided to help her out.
Dewi, 11 years old, comes from a farmer’s family and has one older sister. Her parents work long days, seven days a week, but don’t earn enough money to pay for her school. As a result, Dewi decided to help and support her family by selling ice cream. She would sell the ice creams 4 days a week and sell 35 ice creams a day. If she got lucky and sold them all she would earn 5.000 IDR a day which is € 0,33. But this doesn’t happen every day and so her income is even less. In the most positive situation she earns 80.000 IDR (€ 5,37) a month to help support her family.
By knowing her story Volunteer Programs Bali decided to help by giving her a 200.000 IDR (€ 13,42) salary for helping out in our school by doing the offerings and prayers, in between she is able to follow our free classes as well. We are glad we could help this girl with a better education, as well as helping her provide for her family by giving her a job at our school. Dewi has been with our local organization for a couple of weeks now and we are very happy to see Dewi develop and enjoy her time in class. She especially likes the creative activities and games we play, because she normally never has time for these things. Arranging opportunities like these are a slow process. As soon as Dewi is settled in we will start the process to encourage her older sister to come to our classes too. Her sister sells flowers after school and we hope with the extra income her family is getting from Dewi, her sister can come and join us in the future as well.
Things like these are very common in Bali, people tend to forget that it’s still a third world country because of all the tourism on the island. But a lot of the people are still very poor. For this reason it is a big struggle for Volunteer Programs Bali to get the kids to come to class because the parents don’t see the importance of education and need their kids to work to support the family. For us stories like these are big a success because this means we can give one more kid the chance of a better future by offering them a good education!
