David John Booth MBE
Helping Alleviate the Burden of People in Abject Poverty
David Booth chose Indonesia in 1989 as the country to spend the rest of his life. However, having observed that there were many people of Bali (as a centre of tourism) that were still living in abject poverty, far away from centres of tourism, he decided he wanted to help, and give something back to his adopted country. This British man had an aspiration to lend a hand to the communities living in the most isolated eastern region of Bali Island. So, in 1998 he established a foundation in Bali named Ekoturin Foundation’s East Bali Poverty Project. "I’d really like to help alleviate the burden of the most disadvantaged and impoverished people," said David, his familiar call. Prior to undertaking his humanitarian mission in Bali, he looked around the island to find out the territory that genuinely needed assistance, before
establishing the foundation. Ultimately, he determined it was the Kubu sub-district of Karangasem, the easternmost regency of Bali Island. "When I first came here and was asked to help by the all the communities, many hamlets like Cegi and Pengalusan were totally isolated. Hundreds of families still lived in bamboo houses with dirt floors and there was no reasonable infrastructure of roads, schools, healthcare posts or electricity. But the biggest problem was lack of any water supply, chiefly during the dry season," said this former civil engineering project manager.
Seeing this misfortune, David was inspired to help all the communities living at the foot of Mounts Abang and Agung. With a team of 100% local people, his foundation has already educated more than 600 children, many of which have graduated elementary school. "The education programmes were requested by the communities as most of their children had no opportunity of getting basic education. Their hardest obstacle was the distance to existing government schools. From their hamlets, the nearest school was up to 6 km on foot as there was no road access at all and nobody even had a motorcycle," he explained.
Other serious problems in this isolated region included health disorder such as thyroid (acute iodine deficiency), malnutrition, skin infections and very high baby mortality rate reaching over 25%. "We had to include relevant education for all of these problems in our school and community awareness programmes and from the start gave regular health check-ups and transported local doctors to give vaccinations and so forth." To ensure full health care access, the program has activated 27 integrated healthcare posts at 19 hamlets in the Kubu sub district.
"Our hard work during this time has born many satisfying results, one of the most important being reduction of infant mortality to almost zero from 25% before 2003" he said proudly.
Other than education, health and nutrition, David’s program has facilitated the first safe water supply for thousands of people. "Together with local people, we do gotong royong (community working together for mutual benefit) to establish large water reservoirs and pipe the water from mountain springs for consumption by local villagers. In addition, we help them develop organic vegetable farming and open many roads to reach their hamlets," he concluded.
According to him, although the foundation has many expert volunteers in health and agriculture, the key success of this program lies on the participation of each individual and teamwork by all their local staff. On that account, this program is run by local Balinese people for local people who care about their social environment. (BTN/rai)
