Students hand out food packages in Bali: Nobody expected it to be so shocking

Kees Hermus and Dirk Monsieurs, third-year students Business IT & Management in Breda, are doing an internship on the island of Bali. When the coronavirus broke out in Indonesia, they decided not to return to the Netherlands but to stay on Bali. Over the past few weeks, they have dedicated themselves to families who are having a hard time. Among their family, friends and relatives, they collected money with which they bought food packages that they could distribute.

By Kees Hermus and Dirk Monsieurs

The coronavirus reached Indonesia in March and Bali not much later. Most tourists and students left the island to return to their homeland, we chose to stay. At first we were with fourteen students in a guesthouse, but after the outbreak we were the only guests. This was a special situation that gave us the unique opportunity to build close relationships with the local population. We started to learn the language and can now make ourselves understandable. With the Balinese we talked a lot about their culture, norms and values and about poverty on the island. We wanted to do something to do our bit to reduce the poverty and suffering we saw and to support the local population. Then we decided to raise money from family, friends and relatives. With that money we started our action.

We checked what was needed. With the donated money we bought as many food packages as possible. One food package consisted of: 10 kilos of rice, 40 bags of noodles, 2 liters of oil and 30 eggs.

With an overfull car we left to distribute those packages to those who need it most. We had expected to encounter shocking situations, but that it would be so tremendously shocking no one had expected.

‘We left in an overcrowded car to hand out food packages to those most in need’

Together with two employees of the guesthouse where we are staying we left from the south of Bali to a poor village in the east of the island. We had asked in advance where our help was most needed. The trunk of the car was packed with food and on the back seat we were surrounded with boxes of food. Everybody who was with us had boxes of eggs on their laps. We were full of good courage and also curious about what we would find. And hopefully we could make many families happy with a food package!

After arrival in the first village, we were accompanied by a police officer and some people from the community of the village. We had food packages for fifteen families this day, of which we were going to deliver ten packages ourselves.

Our first stop was perhaps the most shocking experience. A family of which a few members are mentally ill and also not strong enough to walk well. The nearest water tank is about 1 kilometre away. It seems as if that’s no big deal, but if you can hardly walk and also have to go through bushes, up and down the slope, fetching water is a hell of a job.

For the second and third family we had to go deeper into the forest. Slopes up and down. At the first house – if you can call it a house, four simple walls with a roof – we found a man. There is no electricity and therefore no light in the area. This man told us that he normally eats food he finds in the woods and that’s almost nothing. He showed us a small pan with some food in it. We wouldn’t even call it food. One of the employees of our guesthouse became very emotional He said that he didn’t know – as probably many more residents – that there are families in Bali that are having such a hard time. They said: “We sometimes complain because we have nothing, but now that we have seen this we must never complain again”. A ‘moment of awareness’ for each and every one of us!

‘The man normally eats food he finds in the woods and it’s almost nothing’

The next family was a grandmother with her 10-year-old granddaughter. The girl’s mother died and the father is elsewhere on the island to work. Day in and day out, the girl makes mats from leaves of the coconut palm. She earns about fifty cents per mat and that takes her about two to three days to make. She doesn’t know a carefree childhood. She can’t go to school or play with friends of her age because she has to work. The rest of the families we visited had similar stories. It was heartwarming to see how happy they were with our food packages.

It was a day with many ‘realisation moments’, painful and sad to see. A day when you realize that Indonesia still has many steps to take to make sure that people who need to be helped really can be helped. The realization that if someone dies, they’ll probably not be found until a month later. The realization that many people are alone and have no light or running water. The awareness that we are all in a very good way and that we should dedicate ourselves more often to those who are in urgent need of help. That we actually have nothing to complain about! Something we Dutch are quite good at.

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