My Time with Love Sumba

Today’s post was written by Jacob Stoltzfus, who is serving in Melolo, Sumba, an island in the eastern part of Indonesia.

During the service portion of my SST, I was assigned to the Love Sumba organization stationed in Melolo, East Sumba. A bit different from the usual set up, the people in Love Sumba were both my host family and my supervisors. Love Sumba is a Mennonite organization whose main mission in Sumba is to help bring access to education to the local communities in Sumba. And so my assignment’s responsibilities were mostly teaching or teaching assistance. Since I am a native English speaker, most of my teaching involvement was with the English subject, actual teaching experience and aptitude notwithstanding. One of the classes I taught was a preschool located in Paud Watupuda where we worked on basics number translations from Indonesian to English and the ABCs.

Teaching these kids is both fun and challenging as they have an incredulous amount of energy with a child’s attention span of a paperclip to match.  They’re a joyous bunch and I enjoy my time with them.

I also taught a group of high schoolers in an English club at a local highschool. Since they were a bit older and better at English there was a bit more I could do with them which made things harder but interesting. The students mostly wanted to learn pronunciation and sentence structure. Teaching pronunciation to a large group is a fairly difficult task. You can’t ask all of them to say a sentence at the same time otherwise the right and wrong pronunciations will be lost in the crowd. But it’s also difficult to do it one-on-one as it’s very time consuming and it also feels like I’m singling people out and telling them their doing it which makes me feel like a jerk. I also came up with a sort of game where I would pick a random English word, tell the class the word, tell one person the Indonesian translation and then that person would try to charade out the word while the class would guess the Indonesian word.

There was also an elementary class of English students that I taught. Their skills were pretty basic so we mostly just learned basic introductions, colors, numbers and body parts. These kids were very enthusiastic and focused on learning English and were great students to work with.

The final class I taught was of a bit different in nature. At the same high school where I taught the English club, there are some IT teachers who wanted to learn programming. And so I ended up teaching them some basic python programming language. This was probably one of my favorite classes as I’m a bit passionate about coding and computers and I love trying to teach the subject.

I did this all with the help of my host family in Love Sumba. Though their organization has a focus on education, there is also a strong focus on religion. Many of the trips we did would be to local churches or leaders to meet and talk to them and pray with them. Every night our family would have a meeting prayer and would read a section of the Bible, talk about it and then talk about how our day was going.