Review

Tent support for the Anakdalam tribe in Indonesia

WECA, the World Educational Cultural Aid, begins a small sharing effort for children who are not guaranteed minimum safety and are living in poor conditions. There are children running through the jungle and sleeping anywhere. We provide tents to provide children with a safe place to stay.

The Anakdalam people live in the jungles inside the island of Sumatra, Indonesia. The Anakdalam people are the indigenous people of Sumatra Island, who live in the Neolithic Age and are the most distant from civilized society among the approximately 360 ethnic groups in Indonesia.

They live by hunting and gathering in the tropical rainforest jungle and cultivating slash-and-burn farming. The government still does not provide accurate population statistics. Even if you walk for more than a week, they still live scattered in small groups in the endless jungle.

Those who coexist with nature in the tropical rainforest, the second largest in South America after the Amazon jungle, are nature's guardians who protect the umbilical cord of humanity without destroying the ecosystem.

Currently, environmental protection NGOs are paying attention to them with renewed interest, but logging companies in collusion with the Indonesian government are destroying virgin forests on a large scale. They lived in primeval forests for generations, but now the primeval forests have disappeared and only barren scrub forests remain.

Their staple foods - wild boars, snakes, and freshwater turtles - are disappearing, leaving many suffering from hunger and tropical diseases. Their ancestral lands are being passed into the hands of other people, but they are helpless because they do not know the Indonesian language.

Few people know their age. Many people die of malaria or fever before they reach the age of 40.

Watching the lives of the Anakdalam people living together even as hunger and disease threaten their lives, I feel infinitely ashamed of those of us in today's civilized society who ignore their neighbors and friends in order to live well for themselves. Who can call them primitive?

They pitch tents in the jungle, hunt animals, and eat wild fruits. We live by hunting and gathering activities that we only learned about in textbooks.

On days when hunting is successful, we eat to our fill. Even on days when I pick a lot of fruit, I eat to my fill. But on days when I can't do that, I just starve. When it rains, we drink rainwater. If it doesn't rain, we just drink dirty river water. I endure it when I get hurt. Even if I get sick, I endure it. When the pain is too much to bear, people resort to witchcraft, which has questionable effectiveness. 

For adults in this village, this is a normal life. Adults may be satisfied with this life. And we naturally pass this natural life on to our children.

Some people develop deformities in their bodies, possibly due to poor environments. There is so much I want to do for these children who take our prehistoric lifestyle for granted. I want to teach them that there are other things to humans than just running around in the woods.

As the beginning of a support project for these children, WECA, the World Educational Cultural Aid, provides tents to protect children from outrageous pests in the jungle. It's a very small start. There is a lot more work to be done in the future.

We ask for your love and interest in the careful first steps of WECA, the World Educational Cultural Aid for children in the jungle.

[Inquiries about tent support in Indonesia: World Educational Cultural Aid WECA (WECA) 02-2689-3959]