AFTER almost 20 years of school promotion in Sabah, the Danish-founded Borneo Child Aid Society (BCAS) is responsible for the primary education of more than 8,400 students, mostly children of the immigrant workers from Indonesia and the Philippines on the many palm oil plantations nearby.
Source: ScandAsia
- Subsequently, there has been an increasing amount of logistics to be taken care of from the headquarters of BCAS in Lahad Datu on Sabah's east coast.
- The success of the school project has been quite a challenge for the small volunteer-based organisation.
- "The rapid growth rate has been a pretty overwhelming, but we have had wide support from a various range of sponsors, ranging from Danish enterprises to the Finnish embassy, and good mutual understanding with numerous plantations," says BCAS manager Torben Venning from Denmark.
- Venning is a former schoolteacher from Copenhagen and has been the day-to-day head of BCAS for the past six years, the last two years full time as his Philippine-born wife Rosalin and their four sons Mark, Michael, Martin and Mathias have joined him in Sabah, making Venning's Borneo stay a more permanent one.
- "When we started out back in 1991, we ran one tiny school with room for 73 students. Now we have grown into being quite influential. This year we have registered almost 8,450 pupils.
- "And after such a long time in the area we have earned a great amount of trust and respect for our work from the local authorities, so it has been a very rewarding venture," he adds.
- Even though Venning loves his job, he is aware of the difficulties connected with being a foreign-run organisation. "It is not sustainable if all the expertise and decision making lies in the hands of the Danes, so right now we are in the in the process of training the local staff and teachers to take on the responsibility and management of BCAS," he explains.
- One discomforting experience last year has underlined the importance of this goal. "Rosalin and I were both badly injured in a car accident, and while recovering in the hospital we couldn't help realising how problematic and precarious it is, that we are making all the decisions.
- "Nobody should be indispensable in BCAS, we are all in this together."
- For the vast majority of the young students, the BCAS-run schools are their only option to escape illiteracy, as they are prohibited to attend the public schools of Sabah.
- "Most children enrolled in the schools are of Indonesian of Philippine origins. This means that they do not share the same privileges, such as access to the public school systems, as Malaysian children," he explains. This lack of national recognition has severe consequences for his students and their future opportunities.
- "Many of our students are not to be found in any official register. Because they weren't born in the home-country of their parents, they are not regarded as Philippine or Indonesian citizens either.
- "This is a big problem considering that an estimated number of around one million immigrant-descendants are in a legal sense without a native country.
- "They literally do not exist in the eyes of the system and this makes it even more important that these children are educated so they are better equipped for the struggles they most likely will face later on," Venning explains.
- According to the devoted school-supervisor, the children achieve more than just the standard exam requirements by attending school.
- "In the bigger cities of Sabah the immigrant children are commonly known as the 'garbage-kids' of no value. In BCAS we believe that the school can teach them not to accept these terrible prejudges and that they can achieve the same as the Malaysian children. A big part of our work is to change this devastating mindset of being inferior," he says, adding that creating a common sense of equality among the youngsters is a fundamental goal for BCAS.
- "This is also why BCAS puts so much emphasis in having school uniforms and graduation ceremonies. It is an important part of giving the kids an identity as being students, just like the other children in Malaysia, instead of considering themselves as outcasts," Venning adds.
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