Immersed in a Mentawai Community
Posted on June 30, 2008 @ 1:12 PM
Words: Kirk Willcox
Photos: Kirk Willcox/SAI
You’ve never seen a person savour a piece of bread and butter so much, enjoying the taste of every morsel and just fully appreciating being able to eat something so simple.
Quiksilver SurfAid Community Health Training Centre.
“Ah, this tastes so good. You forget the little things you miss,” says Matt King, who has just come out of the jungle, literally. Here we are sitting in an old-style Balinese hotel eating a late breakfast buffet – all you could eat – fruit, French baguettes, eggs … spread out on tables. Matt ploughed through it all, slowly and deliberately, except for the sausages, as he’s a vego.
The 30-year-old quietly mannered Kiwi has just finished a seven-month stint living in the village at Katiet, in the Mentawai Islands, way across to the other side of Indonesia, as far west as you can go but still be in the country.
A graduate in sociology, with a post-graduate degree in community development, Matt has been designing and constructing the Quiksilver SurfAid Community Health Training Centre. He’d just finished the main buildings and planted out the experimental vitamin gardens before heading across to the “city” island of Bali for some R&R and to meet up with a local group called IDEP, who are experts in permaculture based in Ubud, the art centre in the Balinese mountains.
“I spent three months living in the local Katiet losmen with travelling surfers and then at the Centre, about two kilometres up the path, pretty much by myself for four months,” Matt says. “My role was to design and construct the Katiet Centre which involved a combination office space, community meeting space, demonstration vitamin gardens, toilet system and water management.”
Matt King and staff digging foundation holes.
Despite all his prior studies, the whole experience of living in the village with the locals has had a profound affect on Matt and he is still coming to terms with the “outside” world.
“The process of taking on this job was only about eight days from being offered the role and actually landing on the ground with no Indonesian or Mentawai language and little idea of what was involved,” he says. “I’d had past experience with this type of work living for three months in the autonomous of region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, but this experience was much more immersed in the community, whereas before I was kind of separated.”
In seven months in Katiet, Matt never heard anyone raise their voice. “People were always very friendly. And the enthusiasm for what we were doing was very high simply because a lot of the ideas would be generated by the people themselves.”
SurfAid’s philosophy is a hand up, not a handout – working with the locals, teaching them about better nutrition, hygiene and health care – and empowering them to take on the further development of their health and wellbeing. The Katiet Centre’s overriding philosophy is healthy soil, healthy food, healthy people.
SurfAid’s research shows the people of the Mentawai have high levels of malnutrition and anaemia, which makes them more susceptible to illness. Nearly one in 10 of their children don’t make it to five years of age.
Matt King checks a papaya tree at the Katiet Centre.
The Katiet region is known by the village name of Bosua, and there are about 1,300 residents in five dusun (hamlets) including the Katiet dusun.
Matt worked with seven staff from the various dusun, some on rotation so that every village shared in the project. All villages contributed to making the traditional thatch roofing for example.
“I was more a facilitator/enabler than anything,” Matt says. “I worked with the locals leading by example and showing the way.”
I witnessed this one very hot, steamy day with sweat dripping off Matt as he dug holes for the foundations for the community centre – and being an integral part of the team doing the hard yards, as opposed to a “foreman”. Matt and two locals dug 15 holes in six hours, which is incredibly hard work in the tropics.
“I think I drank eight litres of water that day, that’s a lot of water,” Matt says. “There’s constant dialogue while we work, talking about what we’re doing and why we’re doing it, and getting feedback from them. After all, they are the people who live there, they know the conditions and they know what works.
“As an outsider we have ideas while the people in the village have local experience and so together we can come up with new ideas and solutions.”
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