The Story of My Dad Who Dedicates Himself For Environment

My dad is retired from civil officer, a person who works for government. He has a high position in his working place before but he doesn’t like to do corruption. He is very happy when he can retire so he can relax and do other works. He tried lots of things such as making bio oil from wild plants, and farming. He has a mini silk factory at home before. He takes care of the silk caterpillar until the process of painting the batik on the silk with his friend and my mom. Now he is working and active for rubbish bank.

My dad

That is him, using mattock to dig a pool for fish. He works with only few people, his team. Every morning, he comes to this place located south of our village. He will come early and do some works first before his friends. He wants to motivate his team to work harder.

Pak RT, My dad’s team

paddy field

working

view from my village

The road south of my village

My dad has a dream that he can clean the environment and make the river clean again. He starts it from his own place where he lives and by himself. He joins in a group of Rubbish Bank. It takes care of the rubbish in our village. So, people will send their rubbish in different types. Then the Rubbish bank team will do some works such as selling the rubbish that can be recycled. They also made the household rubbish as fertilizer for organic plants. So, they also sell the fertilizers to farmers or sometimes people will use their own household rubbish. The team made a tool to process the fertilizer and provide them to the families in our village. The people will get the money once in a year or depends on how many times in a year. That’s brilliant idea! My dad is very active in it. He helps and works a lot.

The rubbish bank team and the teenagers in my village make a business. It’s a small warung or angkringan or what we call with HIK [hik] in my hometown. It is a place where we can buy rice with a small fish in a package and other snacks, plus the drink likes ginger tea, hot tea, or ginger milk. They also made fish pond for fishing. People will pay for an hour or two hours to do fishing and if they get the fish, they can bring it home.

HIK

Traditional farmer

My village

They make the business for earning money in order to maintain the rubbish bank. It sounds great. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run well because we lack of diligent or good human resources. They’re always thinking differently, I mean often talking about small things like they thing the business will be only used by my dad. It’s common here, where we want to help or to do some good things. People will think negatively.

The pond

Now the warung is rented to one of our neighbors. It’s better so the renting money can be used by Rubbish bank. During maintaining the rubbish bank, my dad cleans the environment around our village especially for the river. He wants to clean the river as he has a dream to make the river clean and clear like he has seen before when he was a kid. He is also an initiator for water pump by using liquid propane gas. So, the farmer can save the budget about 50% to maintain their farming field. It’s good idea for irrigation.

The river is getting better now than before. It was very disgusting with lots of rubbish there. People always throw his rubbish to the river. But now, it changes. They send the rubbish to the rubbish bank. So, our environment is saved from rubbish.

The warung or HIK

View from my village

That is a view of Mount Merapi and Mount Merbabu or the twin mountain view from my village. I’m happy if my village is clean and healthy. I’m very proud of my dad who works hard to give example for the people around him. He becomes an advisor for some environment activities. I hope our government will help him someday to spread his goals to make Indonesia green and clean from rubbish.