A Glass of Hope

"According to Junaedi, the children are no longer working in the street and his increased income has enabled the family to eat better." Photo: Bob Newell/Mercy Corps.

Thirteen-year-old Santi is the third of six children. She lives in East Jakarta, Indonesia where one can see hundreds of cramped single room houses that are home to thousands. In a city of poverty, Santi's family is amongst the poorest of the poor. She live with seven relatives in a makeshift house that is made of patched plywood walls. The house is little more than a small room divided into a kitchen, guest room and bathroom.

Her father, Junaedi, is a food vendor. "In the past, my father used to earn $3 a day. With such income it was difficult for us to even have proper meals," says Santi. "We used to eat only rice with tempe, noodles with rice or rice with vegetables. Never meat."

Her mother, Usmiyati, wanted to start a small business herself to support the family, but she was too busy taking care of her children. To help their parents, Santi and two older brothers began working in the street, cleaning car windows after school.

The dusty street was not a safe place for Santi or her brothers but as Indonesia's economic collapse worsened their parents could no longer afford to send them to school so they worked the streets everyday.

While working in the street one day, Santi's brother accompanied his friend to a shelter for street children, in Jakarta run by SEKAM, a local non-governmental organization supported by a Mercy Corps grant program.

SEKAM had just started a microfinance program to provide small loans to the parents of street children. After learning about the program through his children, Junaedi applied for and received an $11 loan.

"Not only I did I get a loan, but I was also given an order to cook 25 lunchboxes for children at SEKAM's street children shelter for six months," says Junaedi, who was able to repay the initial loan within two months and is now in the process of repaying his fourth loan after further expanding his small business.

According to Junaedi, the children are no longer working in the street and his increased income has enabled the family to eat better.

In addition to the loans for their father, Santi and her brother were granted a scholarship by SEKAM to continue their studies. When she received new of the scholarship, Santi says, "I saw a glass of hope in my heart."

Asked what she meant by a glass of hope, she explains, "It is an idiom that express my wishes that are simple and easy to fill…. just like a glass!"

Thanks in part to her scholarship, Santi recently finished primarily school and she says she would like to continue studying and also learn some vocational skills through SEKAM's vocational training programs.

Mercy Corps' Grants Program in Indonesia has been supported outstanding NGOs in Jakarta like SEKAM since 2000.