bahasa indonesia

Pojok para guru

As many of you already know, Inside Indonesia relies on volunteers to stay in print. Subscriptions and donations help to cover the cost of production and pay a small wage to some very hard working office staff but editing the magazine is a labour of love. Consequently, it has become increasingly difficult for the IRIP board to find guest editors who are willing and able to edit an edition and we have reached a point now where we have to seriously consider the future of the magazine.

With this edition you will find a reader survey. We urge you to complete this survey and return it to us as soon as possible so that the board can take your views into consideration in seeking a solution to our current difficulties. If you share your copy of Inside Indonesia with others and the survey has already been used, you will find a copy of the survey on our website: www.insideindonesia.org

The artist whose work is featured on page 17 is a Grade 6 student from Bantul. She was able to give creative expression to her trauma because of Kelompok SEPI’s Menggambar Bersama (Drawing Together) project. See www.kelompoksepi.blogspot.com.

The Westralian Indonesian Language Teachers’ Association (WILTA) in collaboration with Kelompok SEPI, is organising an event to promote positive pathways for engagement between our Australian and Indonesian communities. The event will run from 22 September until 26 October 2006, at Green’s Cafe, Oxford Street, Leederville. It will feature an exhibition of Kelompok SEPI artworks and a variety of activities such as free informal Indonesian language activities, open forums and presentations regarding the challenges facing Indonesian communities since the recent earthquake and tsunamis.

If you require further details about this exhibition or about building positive relationships between our communities, email karen.bailey@det.wa.edu.au or visit www.wilta.org.

If you and your students would like to assist by sending donations to the Kelompok Sepi’s project, you can find further information (and more drawings and photos) on their website (www.kelompoksepi.blogspot.com). Pak Ouda’s bank account details are also listed. Pak Ouda Teda Ena can be contacted at: ouda@lycos.com

Dari Jendela Saya: A Glimpse at Life in Indonesia is written from the perspective of a fourteen year old girl from a village on the north coast of Bali. It is written in standard Indonesian with an eye to the sorts of language structures and topics that are the focus of secondary school Indonesian in Australia. Each chapter is followed by well-considered comprehension questions and suggested writing tasks. An easily accessible glossary for difficult words is provided on each page and early chapters deal with simpler topics but overall the text is most suitable for students in the senior years of secondary school. The photography throughout the book is outstanding and is a valuable teaching resource in itself.

The difficulty that authors of ‘readers’ face is that a fine balance must be struck between making a text accessible for the target audience and avoiding oversimplification. Sandra Gago achieves this balance by focusing on a particular part of Indonesia that she evidently knows well. This works best in the early chapters that are written from the perspective of her teenaged narrator, giving the reader a sense of everyday life in a particular place. In later chapters the narrative moves beyond the village to explore Sulawesi and the final chapter discusses the diversity of cultures in Indonesia. While less personal, these chapters are informative and provide balance to the Bali-focus of earlier chapters.