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1981 Ramon Magsaysay Award for Public ServiceBIOGRAPHY of Johanna Nasution
JOHANNA SUNARTI NASUTION remembers a happy childhood. She was fortunate in her youth in the closeness and love of her family, in having a fine education, and in receiving from her parents a strong sense of purpose. When she was born on November 1, 1923, in Surabaya, East Java, Indonesia was under the rule of the Dutch. Throughout her childhood her parents worked actively for both the freedom and the welfare of the Indonesian people. Love for her country and devotion to her countrymen have been bywords for JOHANNA ever since.
Her father, Raden Panji (title of a lesser prince): Soenario Gondokoesoemo, was a member of the Javanese elite. As a young man he had been exiled to the Netherlands along with other suspected nationalists. There he completed his education in economics and married a Dutch girl, Maria Hendrika Rademaker. Impressed with the young aristocrat's qualifications, the Dutch sent him back to his homeland to work as an executive on the railways. Because of his birth and position he received the same privileges and perquisites as a Dutchman.
In 1927 R.P. Soenario Gondakoesoemo left Dutch government service to become director of the National Bank of Indonesia. Soon thereafter he became a founding member and treasurer of the nationalist political party, Partai Indonesia Raya, known as Parindra. Following independence he was awarded two medals for serving the cause of freedom. In his mind patriotism and civic responsibility were inseparable. "If you are to become a good leader," he told his children, "you must take care of the poor people in your country."
JOHANNA's mother, though Dutch, raised her children to be nationalists and dressed in kain (long wrapped skirt) and kebaya (long-sleeved overblouse), the Indonesian national costume. She was a leader of the Indonesian Girl Scouts until 1937 and was very active in social welfare work. She often took her daughter to help the poor in the urban slums. JOHANNA once wrote a high school paper about these visits and remembers the anger and astonishment she felt when her Dutch teacher returned the composition saying, "This is not your work; it looks very communistic. Please change it."
Although JOHANNA and her two brothers—one older and one younger—reached maturity during World War II and the Japanese occupation of Indonesia, she retains no sense of hardship or bitterness from that period. After leaving primary school in Surabaya in 1937 she attended the Dutch Lyceum (high school) in Bandung, West Java, where her family had moved, until 1942. During those years she joined the Red Cross and received a diploma in nursing. When the Japanese invaded Java and set up their headquarters in Bandung, JOHANNA was sent to Yogyakarta to complete high school. Her goal at the time was to attend premedical school, but she was prevented from doing so because Japanese was not among the seven languages—Dutch, Indonesian, French, German, English, Greek and Latin—that she had studied. Toward the end of the war she went to work in a medical laboratory in Bandung.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945 the Indonesians began their four-year war for independence from the Netherlands. JOHANNA was active from 1945 to 1946 as a Red Cross nurse in the hospitals for Indonesian soldiers. One of the soldiers who claimed her attention was a close family friend, Abdul Haris Nasution.
JOHANNA has first met the soft-spoken military cadet from North Sumatra on the tennis courts in Bandung in 1940. Nasution greatly admired her father, and the two men would spend hours deeply engrossed in discussions of politics and the struggle for independence. JOHANNA herself had no interest in the young man other than as a tennis partner. When she and her two brothers left for Yogyakarta during the Japanese occupation, Nasution came to stay with her parents who were alone in Bandung .He was, she says, "a very good son for my parents." Letter after letter from Bandung told about the young man who worked with her father and talked at length with her mother about his own parents back in Sumatra. It was not surprising that when they met again in 1946 in the Red Cross nursing station, JOHANNA and Nasution fell in love.
The time was not right for marriage, however, and JOHANNA returned to Yogyakarta to enter the Faculty of Law of Gajah Mada, the new nationalist university. In the privileged circles in which she moved it was not unusual for women to attend the university; many of the professional women who help her today were her classmates there or in the lyceum. JOHANNA completed only one year of studies before Nasution asked her to return to Bandung to become his wife; they were married on May 30, 1947.
Three months after their wedding guerrilla warfare against the Dutch began in earnest and both NASUTIONs were participants, he as a guerrilla leader, and she tending the sick and the needy in the villages through which they passed. They spent about eight months in the forests outside Bandung, seeing each other only once every two to four weeks. In early 1948 Colonel Nasution was sent to Yogyakarta as head of the crack Siliwangi Division of the army of the Republic of Indonesia, while his wife stayed in Bandung. It was during this period that the young Ibu (Mrs.) NASUTION's strong sense of social responsibility was first coupled with her impressive organizational talent.
In Indonesia all army wives automatically belong to the Army Wives' Association (Persatuan Isteri Tentara, known as Persit); the wife of the division commander is normally chairman of the division association. In June 1947 Ibu NAS (as Mrs. NASUTION is familiarly known), in recognition of her husband's position as well as of her own special talents, was asked to become chairman of Persit, Siliwangi Division. The Renville Agreement had just been signed by the Dutch and the Indonesians, with the Dutch recognizing the fledgling Republic of Indonesia with its capital in Yogyakarta. The problem facing Persit was to move the families of the nationalist (guerrilla) armies to Yogyakarta to join the men. As chairman of Persit, Ibu NAS founded a committee to deal with the situation—the first of an endless stream of committees into which she was to "gather her contacts." Together with the Red Cross and the Dutch army itself, her committee moved the families of the Siliwangi Division to Yogyakarta. She herself left on the last train out of Bandung.
Ibu NAS often speaks of "collecting people" as her hobby. In 1948 she and her friends collected the wives of all the army divisions in Yogyakarta into a unified Persit. Their object was to take care of widows and wounded soldiers and to help wives send messages to their husbands in the surrounding areas where fighting had flared again. Ibu NAS does not think of her work during this period as remarkable. It was, she says, the way of life in time of war.
In September of that year, Col. Nasution put down a communist rebellion in Madiun on behalf of the Republic of Indonesia; on December 19 his wife was captured and nearly murdered by the remnants of that rebellion. Nasution had taken his troops out of Yogyakarta to prepared guerrilla positions in the districts on December 18, the day before the Dutch entered the city. Ibu NAS was in Solo (Surakarta) not far to the north of Yogyakarta. Finding herself without return transportation because of the Dutch occupation, she set out with her younger brother, his wife and two friends for Yogyakarta by foot. About halfway there they were stopped by soldiers of communist leaning who had them interned under the pretext of their being Dutch spies. Fortunately she was recognized by a non-commissioned officer as the wife of Col. Nasution and released.
Unwilling to let go of their prey, however, the communist sympathizers followed them and the next day, when they were out of the commander's sight, provoked local villagers to turn on them by shouting "death to the Dutch spies!" Once again the small party was in luck. They were recognized by another friendly army officer who vouched for their identity and they were allowed to proceed safely to the city.
But Yogyakarta itself was no longer safe. Two days after her return, Dutch soldiers came to her house at one in the morning and arrested her and her brothers. For five days they interrogated her, and for five days she responded in fluent Dutch, reprimanding them for forgetting their own history and their own struggles for freedom. Eventually they released her unharmed to continue her work of caring for the wives and families left behind. They would, perhaps, have been more careful had they known she would soon become involved in establishing underground communications between her husband's guerrilla forces and the Indonesian delegation in Jakarta. The latter, in turn, transmitted the correspondence to the Indonesian leaders, Sukarno and Hatta, who were under guard in Sumatra.
In August 1949 the NASUTIONs moved to Jakarta where General Nasution became Chief of Staff of the Army of the soon-to-be-recognized independent Indonesia. Ibu NASUTION and her colleagues immediately set about organizing a central Persit to coordinate the division associations from all over the Republic-held islands.
In 1952 Nasution fell out of favor with Sukarno, who had been president of the Republic of Indonesia since 1945, and was dropped as army chief of staff. Earlier in the year Ibu NASUTION had given birth to their first child, a daughter, Hendrianti (Yanti) Sahara. She, therefore, had every reason to resign from the chairmanship of the central Persit—or to be asked to resign—but neither she nor her colleagues saw any reason for her not to continue in the post, regardless of her husband's loss of position; she was reelected chairman in 1953. The vote of confidence she received at that time, and in similar situations since, is due, colleagues agree, to her innate sense of diplomacy even more than to her remarkable organizational ability. Ibu NAS is a tall, handsome woman with commanding presence, yet she insists, with winning charm, that she is a very easygoing person. Although she may receive the homage required by etiquette when her husband's position demands it, in her private activities she never stands on ceremony. Her colleagues, far from feeling threatened, are buoyed up by her easy good humor and warmth.
Under Ibu NASUTION's leadership the central Persit by 1954 had begun a number of projects: 27 kindergartens had been opened as well as a school for kindergarten teachers; three elementary schools, a school for domestic science and a dormitory for young girls. A home had been set up for the handicapped and for orphans and a library and two restaurants established for the benefit of Persit members.
Ibu NAS remained as either chairman or advisor to the central Persit from 1950 to 1963. In 1961 she was asked to form a foundation specifically for fundraising. Although not convinced this was a good idea, and in spite of having given birth in 1960 to a second daughter, Irma Surjani, she agreed to become chairman of the new foundation, Ikrar Bhakti (vow of devotion). Here she was faced, as she has been many times since, with having to start a project with no capital. In this case she solved the problem by convincing Pertamina, the national oil monopoly, to lend the foundation one million rupiahs. By 1963 the foundation owned two printing presses, one confectionery and a fish cannery, the loan was repaid in full and it was using the profits from the business ventures to support the work of Persit.
Meanwhile General Nasution's fortunes had risen again and in 1955 he was appointed Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces. Some historians have indicated that tension may have remained between the general and President Sukarno because of "petticoat politics." Sukarno had just taken a second wife, Hartini, without divorcing Fatmawati who was opposed to the marriage. In this he felt himself in compliance with Islamic law which allows a man to have four wives. During the war for independence, however, the women of Indonesia fought—like Fatmawati and Ibu NAS—side by side with the men. In the postwar years they were demanding equal status and, for the most part, getting it. Among other things, they were strongly in favor of monogamy, and in taking a second wife, Sukarno was letting them down. Ibu NASUTION was among the women fighting for a marriage law that would uphold the strict Islamic interpretation of marriage and would prevent a man from taking a second wife unless he had the permission of the first. To register their protest to his action, the NASUTIONs, along with other leading figures of Jakarta, regularly turned down invitations to functions which Hartini was expected to attend. Ibu NAS rejects the notion that she influenced her husband and that the incident caused tension between them and Sukarno. Her husband, she points out, was a strict Muslim from Sumatra, and their opinions on the subject coincided. Furthermore, Sukarno, an old friend of her father's, understood her position, she says, and gave them permission not to attend such affairs.
In 1962 Nasution was relieved from his position as Chief of Staff and appointed Coordinating Minister of Defense and Security—a post that took him further from direct command. His wife retired from Persit. Less than 24 hours later a delegation from the newly formed Coordinating Body for Children's Homes (Badan Kerja Sama Panti Asuhan, BKSPA) came to ask her to become their advisor. Her husband accepted for her. Surprised she asked him, "Do you know what you are saying? You know I can't stop doing the work if it's not really finished." The work has not-been finished yet.
The founding of BKSPA reflected the changing social needs of Indonesia. Social welfare could no longer be handled within the traditional confines of family or village. By 1963 the nation's population was estimated at over 103 million, and the number of people on Java alone had tripled since the; beginning of the century. Furthermore, the political and economic chaos following World War II had caused mass migration to the cities. With the breakup of traditional rural social systems, social welfare was transferred from the villages to professional and religious organizations. There was, consequently, a great proliferation of these associations. "Every ministry," writes Ibu NAS, "all the forces of the army, and every religious group, not counting the special associations for doctors, for engineers, for women graduates and others—in addition to the usual political organizations—all of them have their own social welfare programs, mostly to serve their own members in accordance with their particular interests and inclinations." Her own experience in Persit showed that many of these social organizations gave "no prior thought to the development of infrastructure and funding for the implementation of services."
In 1963 the country was in the throes of a severe economic depression and the fate of many of these little organizations—orphanages in particular—was uncertain. It was at this juncture that the BKSPA was formed. Its aim was to make the 24 associated homes more responsive and reliable, thereby making it easier to obtain the help they so much needed. Ibu NAS took on the task, first as advisor and then as chairman, of organizing and directing BKSPA's activities. This was the first time in Indonesia's history that social welfare activities had been coordinated and handled in such a clear cut manner. The experiment, although successful, was not repeated elsewhere because, Ibu NAS says, "of lack of social awareness, lack of interest and organizational creativity on the part of government and society, and the lack of interest of many provincial governors."
In addition, the political situation was rapidly deteriorating. The communist party, which numbered as many as 2 million members and 11 million self-proclaimed sympathizers throughout the archipelago, was vying for power with the military leadership which supported the constitution. President Sukarno himself leaned more and more heavily toward the communists, thereby making Gen. Nasution's position ever more precarious. The atmosphere in the capital became increasingly tense. Ibu NAS felt this tension with a peculiarly feminine instinct and found herself rehearsing in her mind how she would react if soldiers came for her husband and how she would organize his escape.
Just before dawn on September 30, 1965 the communists made their bid for power. Taking advantage of Sukarno's support, they sent the Palace Guard as an assassination squad to the homes of all key members of the military leadership; by sunrise all but two of the generals were dead. The survivors were Suharto, who was not on the death list and would later succeed Sukarno, and Nasution whose life was saved by his wife's clear thinking.
The NASUTIONS were awakened at 3:30 a.m., Ibu NAS recalls, by a commotion outside. Since their house was heavily guarded, only the door to the bedroom wing of the house was locked; the front door was not. When she opened the bedroom door to investigate she saw a soldier standing not more than one and half meters in front of her. Not stopping to ask questions she slammed the door and locked it, telling her husband to run. He protested that he would speak to the intruders. Still with her back to the door, she opened it for him and a shot rang out. Nasution, with a soldier's instinct, ducked. His wife locked the door as bullets crashed around her, grazing her arms and legs and head.
Within seconds the rest of the family had come from the other bedrooms. Ibu NAS gave her five-year-old daughter, Irma, to Nasution's sister to hold, who, not knowing what had happened, opened the door and was greeted with a volley of shots, one of which pierced the child's lung. Ibu NAS again slammed and locked the door and forced her husband out through the back of the house and over the wall into the safety of the adjoining Iraqi embassy compound. As he was about to spring over the wall, he turned and saw his daughter bleeding in his sister's arms. Furious, he wanted to go back and fight, but his wife pleaded with him: "Please go, save your life and trust me. I will take care of our daughter. They are not looking for your daughter or for me; they are looking for you. Go."
When he was gone she returned to the living room to try to phone the Chief of Staff, but the telephone lines were cut. Standing in the room in her dressing gown, with her wounded daughter in her, she faced five armed soldiers demanding to know where her husband was. "The general is not here," she angrily told them. "He is in Bandung. You came only to murder my daughter!"
The soldiers left, taking with them Nasution's loyal aide and close family friend who was subsequently murdered. Ibu NASUTION took to the army hospital where five days later the child died.
She met the tragedy with stoicism. "I am not the only woman who has lost her child this way," she says. "During the war so many families lost children." Because she is a private person who does not like to expose her feelings, she refused to cry at her daughter's funeral. She carried her child in her arms to the grave, although custom decrees this role to a man. "It was the last time I co time I could carry my own," she says, "so I carried her myself."
People have often asked her whether she immerses herself so energetically in social work in order to forget her personal tragedy. No, she answers, she was already heavily committed to her to her work. Granted, it took time before she was able to plunge into it with the same zeal as before, "but you know," she comments, "the problems are always there. You cannot say, 'Please wait for me.' When you work for the community you have to separate your private problems from the other problems."
Even before the social disorders that wracked the nation after the abortive coup had died down, forces for national renewal emerged. In Jakarta, Governor Ali Sadikin (1971 Ramon Magsaysay Awardee for Government Service "for innovation, foresight and compassion in design management of a modern administration giving residents of Indonesia's capital a sense of increased well-being in a finer community") laid plans for the revitalization of the capital. Faced with the influx of migrants and a very limited budgeted budget, Sadikin turned to the one person in the city with the proven capability of producing concrete results through the voluntary efforts of private citizens. In 1966 he asked Ibu NAS to increase the scope of her volunteers to cover entire range of social activities in Jakarta. The group thus formed called the Coordinating and Supervising Body for Social Activities, Capital City of Jakarta (Badan Pembina Koordinasi den Pengawasan Kegiatan Sosial, Jakarta). Ibu NAS was elected general chairman and, at insistence of the board, has remained so to this day, despite the increase in the scope of her activities.
There are now 80 projects under the Jakarta Coordinating Body, including the BKSPA. It coordinates institutes for mentally and physically handicapped children, a hospital for the destitute, homes for the aged and an innovative program of care for the aged within their families.
The year after the municipal coordinating body was founded the International Council on Social Welfare, in New York, and the Ministry of Social Welfare of the Netherlands with which Indonesia maintained close relations, suggested that the time was ripe for Indonesia to establish a National Council on Social Welfare. Accordingly, five officials from the Ministry of Social Affairs set up the Dewan Nasional Indonesia untuk Kesejahteraan Sosial (DNIKS), as a nongovernmental institution to coordinate social work on a national level. In 1968 they asked Ibu NAS to join them. She joined but was not initially active because she was too busy with the work of the municipal coordinating body. It was not until 1970 that the new council was able to organize a conference of member associations. At that conference Ibu NASUTION was elected general chairman.
The only results of the conference were to set up the formal structure of the organization and to find an office—the latter was supplied by the city of Jakarta, rent free. Funds were, as usual, non-existent but that is not what worried the new chairman. She was more concerned with finding out what exactly a national council on social welfare was expected to do. Fortunately, in 1971, she was able to join her husband on a tour of eight western countries. In each she conferred with its national welfare council. In the end, however, she found they could not help her, for these organizations had been in operation for at least 25 years and Indonesia was starting from the beginning. There was little in the developed industrial nations that applied to the Indonesian situation.
Ibu NAS claims that the structure and function of the National Council grew, not from an a priori example, but from the problems that presented themselves. First among these was the challenge of coordinating all the national organizations involved in social welfare work. Today the council has a relationship with 23 national nongovernmental associations of various religious and social affiliations. These include the Muhammadiyah and Aisyiyah Muslim organizations, the National Council of Churches and the Bishops' Conference of Indonesia, the Council for Hindu Dharma, the national federations for the Deaf, Blind, Mentally Retarded and Physically Handicapped, the Red Cross and the Planned Parenthood Association. In addition 11 schools with social work facilities are affiliated members, as are the nine departments in the national government whose work is related to social welfare.
Anxious that the national organizations should not lose touch with the grass roots, the council has devoted much time to encouraging the development of provincial coordinating bodies similar in function to that of the Jakarta Coordinating Body. The first efforts to establish these groups were uneven. The difficulty lay, according to Ibu NAS, in the fact that instructions to organize coordinating groups were handed down from the government without first establishing grass roots support. In 1975 this was remedied when a standing committee of dedicated volunteers was formed which had a network of ground level support. Initially this committee acted merely as a channel for funds devoted to social projects. Later it distinguished itself as the main advocate for creating provincial coordinating bodies. Thus the latter were able to grow, albeit slowly, from the local communities, on the initiative of social workers, and in accordance with the needs prevailing in each region. Today 20 out of a possible 27 of these provincial groups have been created; they are members of the National Council.
Through this comprehensive structure, the National Council has been able steadily to promote and support a strong independent nongovernmental social welfare movement which cooperates effectively with the appropriate government departments.
The founding of the Santirama School for the Deaf shows effectively the interaction among the municipal coordinating body, the government and the National Council. The Foundation for Disabled Children came to the Coordinating Body in 1970 to request aid in building an elementary school for deaf children. Ibu NASUTION and her colleagues took the request to Sadikin, governor of Jakarta. He told them frankly that there was no money for special education, especially since the city was presently constructing "30 schools for normal children." Iba NAS replied: "Then one of the 30 is for me. Only one for the disabled children, and 29 will still be left for the others." He agreed, but insisted that the building was to be donated to the Coordinating Body, not the foundation, and that the Coordinating Body was to be responsible for equipping it. To do this the Coordinating Body enlisted the help of a Dutch woman who was an expert in the field of education for the deaf.
After the school was established the National Council, as part of its effort to promote innovative demonstration projects, expanded the scope of the school's teaching. It helped the foundation set up an observation session for deaf preschoolers during which hearing aids were provided if suitable and mothers were taught how to speak with deaf children. The children were then entered in the newly established preschool for more observation. When this project proved successful the National Council then undertook to help spread this type of institution to other parts of Indonesia. It brings personnel from other schools for the deaf to Jakarta to study the observation session, convinces school boards that such a school is necessary, helps find the funds to set it up, and provides the initial expertise to run it.
Even more remarkable is the willingness of the National Council, under Ibu NASUTION's aegis, to share its expertise with the government in order to prevent unproductive duplication. When in 1976 the Ministry of Education and Culture decided to embark upon a program of special education, Ibu NAS pointed out to the research and development officer that the volunteer agencies had already attained a certain level of knowledge and proficiency in working with these problems and urged him to build on the base they could provide. He accepted her help and she turned over to the ministry the team of experts that the council had developed to deal with special education.
Ibu NAS laughingly claims that she deals with her abhorrence for overlapping programs by means of her previously mentioned hobby of collecting people; she invites experts to be members of standing committees. Thus the National Council has a standing committee for the disabled, for family and children, for volunteer service, community development, adoption and so on. Each standing committee includes government officials, representatives of private organizations and various experts involved in that particular work.
The special education project exemplifies a number of the National Council's stated aims: consultation and joint activities between government and nongovernment organizations, promotion of nationwide action programs and innovative demonstrative projects, and advice and guidance for individual social institutions. Cooperation between government and nongovernment groups has aided the council in achieving yet another objective, the passage of laws and regulations involving social welfare.
In dealing with intercountry adoptions, for example, the government sought the assistance of the council, which turned for guidance to a supreme court official who sat on the appropriate council subcommittee. This woman, with the help of the organizations represented on the committee, drafted the necessary legislative proposals and gave them to the ministry for presentation to parliament.
Ibu NASUTION realized quite early in the process of delineating the council's objectives that one of the largest stumbling blocks to the effective development of social welfare programs was the lack of awareness on the part of both society and the government. One of the council's functions has been, therefore, to educate the public about the need for, and meaning of, social welfare for development. Once taken out of the context of family or village, social welfare has tended to be considered as charity. The poor and the weak, according to Ibu NAS, were, and often still are, remembered only on special occasions, such as New Year's Day or the anniversary of an organization. "But charity," she says, "is not the true meaning of social welfare. It should be the right of the weak and the poor to have a decent share of the national income."
Moreover the Indonesian Constitution specifically states in Article 27 that "every citizen has the right to work and to a decent human life," and in Article 34 that "needy and destitute children shall be taken care of by the State." On this basis the National Council directs its public information campaign toward influencing the government's basic pattern of development; it advocates laws and regulations that promote social reform and attempts to see that the requirements of social development are incorporated into the national budget alongside the more obvious needs of economic development.
Ibu NASUTION emphasizes, however, that the magnitude of the social problem facing Indonesia's now nearly 150 million people is too great for the government alone to handle. The private sector, both rich and poor, must help their government. The council's aim, and the idea it wishes to inculcate in the Indonesian people, is not just to help the destitute in attaining their basic needs, but to help them become self-reliant. "They should become," writes Ibu NASUTION, "willing and able to stand on their own in the community; to be creative persons with self-respect who can contribute to the building up of society as a whole." In short, the council wishes to "foster an attitude of mutual responsibility among the members of society and their government."
In trying to foster self-reliance, both the Coordinating Body of Jakarta and the National Council have turned their attention to experimental community development projects. Through these they have learned effective principles that can be advocated for use in communities throughout the nation. Chief among these is that development, as Ibu NASUTION says, "is only possible if the community itself can be activated to identify basic needs, can be supported in its efforts to meet those needs and then be willing to accept the responsibility for its own activities."
She gives as an example the poor fishing village of Kalibaru, just north of Jakarta. Since the boats of this village were not mechanized, the fishermen could barely meet their daily needs. Their children, to help make ends meet, fought for fish that fell to the ground at the daily fish auction; these they took home to eat or sold for extra income. They could not afford to go to school and their parents could not afford to send them. Without some form of education, however, they could not hope to better their situation.
Social workers familiar with their plight met with both the formal and informal leaders of the village to help identify their needs as the villagers saw them. As a result of these meetings, the National Council, as requested by the leaders, started a preschool in one of the huts. Bit by bit classes with flexible hours were added to accommodate older children, and finally a modest school building was built with the help of the community. Now there is a primary school, a vocational training school for girls, literacy classes for adults, adult activities, nutrition projects, simple health services, a scholarship program, and income-generating activities for the school, managed by the youth. All these activities are done through the participation of the community. The teacher, who lived outside the neighborhood, has moved to Kalibaru, while the project manager, a social worker who is also a community member, has since been chosen as one of the local leaders.
Ibu NASUTION concludes that "because the program was not imposed from the outside, and the community was able to identify its own needs, it feels responsibility for the program. Since it has gained cooperation of the government, a sense of mutual responsibility conducive to a healthy society results."
The National Council's effectiveness in advocating and supporting these endeavors rests, of course, on its ability to raise funds—and in this the council excels. The national government's Department of Social Affairs is presently able to contribute only 100,000 rupiahs (US$160) a month to the council, over and above contributions for specific projects. In the early years, the National Council used to hold charity functions to raise money, but this is no longer necessary. Today individual coordinating bodies or charity groups raise money for projects advocated by the council. There are also two foundations in Indonesia that collect funds from, for example, large businesses, to be donated to welfare. One is Yayasan Dharmais, set up by Suharto in his personal capacity, and the other is Harapan Kita, set up by Mrs. Suharto. Ibu NAS always suggests that money donated through such foundations be presented by their representatives so they may receive firsthand knowledge of the projects.
The National Council itself directs its fundraising energies elsewhere. The major portion of the council's welfare budget—about US$998,000 a year—is raised abroad. The largest number of contributions come from agencies in the Netherlands, such as the NOVIB (Netherlands Organization for International Assistance), the Queen Juliana Fund, and the Interchurch Coordinating Commission for Development Aid. Other regular international contributors include: Save the Children Fund, Christian Children's Fund, Unitarian Service Committee of Canada, Helen Keller International, Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific and associations in Australia and Germany. In addition to these large organizations, groups with small donations come to the council asking how their money might be usefully employed in the provinces. The council directs them to needy but viable projects.
Foreigners involved in these projects have remarked on the personal trust they put in Ibu NASUTION. A representative of the Helen Keller foundation once described how she was asked by Ibu NAS to visit schools and programs for the blind in the hope that the foundation could give them some support. "What I learned about the work of the Indonesian National Council on Social Welfare," she wrote, "tipped the balance." The resulting program involved foreign consultants, schools, and both the government and National Council. "It is a highly successful project," the representative asserts, "and we believe that Mrs. NASUTION is responsible for pulling together all the resources of the country to make it work so well."
Ibu NAS firmly believes that the council has been able to obtain and retain these extremely productive relationships with international organizations, not through personal diplomacy, but by maintaining ironclad integrity. "People," she says, "like to give their donations when they are convinced that they will reach the projects. So it is based on trust; they know our organization is bona fide." The first thing she teaches her volunteers is that not one single rupiah donated through the National Council is to end up in a private pocket. Thus the fundraiser and the treasurer are separate persons. All money brought in by the former is channeled through the latter, and the whole is coordinated by the chairman of the finance committee.
The expenses of the National Council itself, which includes salaries of 15 staff members, amounts at present to only US$1,500 a month. The building in which it is housed is donated by the municipal government. Overhead is paid for from a separate budget; no project funds are ever channeled into the administrative sector. Administrative costs are covered by donations made specifically for that purpose. For example a businessman friend gave her Rps.100,000 and a Saudi Arabian "friend of a friend" sends her US$1,000 monthly.
Most of the work of the National Council is done, not by the paid staff, but by volunteers. Professionals are usually enlisted on a voluntary basis for specific tasks, not for vague or undefined roles; this, one observer feels, makes it easier for them to agree to help. As often as not, however, volunteers have no qualification other than good will. The kind of people Ibu NAS enlists are those who she is convinced "have social feelings." Some of them are old friends who have worked with her since the days of Persit. Others are members of small charitable organizations who bring donations to projects on special occasions; should they show interest in the work, they are likely to be invited to join.
Regardless of their background, these volunteers do not remain unqualified for long. The National Council's standing committee on volunteer service holds training courses once or twice a year in which volunteers are taught good management and the principles of social work. In addition, the standing committee has produced three booklets on how to become a good volunteer. The committee also takes volunteers to see different projects so they may choose their fields of interest. Through the training program and experience in the projects, volunteers acquire a high degree of professionalism. In this way the council has developed a corps of skilled teams that can be deployed throughout the country to develop projects and train other workers in the public or private sector. It was just such a team that Ibu NAS lent to the Ministry of Education when it began its project on special education.
The council has an excellent record for retaining volunteers for a long period of time. In part this is due to the traditional pattern of volunteerism in Indonesia. One observer has noted that women—and roughly 80 percent of Indonesia's volunteers are women—who choose to devote time to a voluntary organization other than the one affiliated with their husband's profession, tend to stay with that group. Even during periods of reduced activity, due, say, to family concerns, they will remain members of the organization, ready to return to active participation when circumstances permit. The fact that the work of the council has been creative and successful, and that the organization has grown rapidly, has helped keep people interested. Ibu NASUTION's own dedication to developing the talents of those around her has also been a factor: "I think," she says, "that is one of the most important things—to give them the feeling and the opportunity to develop themselves and to develop their creativity. That is my policy in everything.
That's the policy, too, in the organizational structure. All these organizational bodies are not agencies under the council; they are affiliated members of the council. There is a difference."
Ibu NAS still sees much to be done in the work of the council. Educating the government to incorporate the social needs of the people into its national plans, and educating the people to participate actively in the development of their own social welfare systems, is a never-ending process. As these systems mature, new approaches are suggested. In some areas where social awareness is developed and economic circumstances permit institutions, as such, are not advocated. For instance, where payments to individual families in an area can allow neglected children or elderly persons to stay in the home, the building of orphanages or old age homes is not encouraged.
As far as the National Council itself is concerned Ibu NAS feels that at this point in its development it is firmly institutionalized and has enough dedicated personnel to be fully capable of carrying on without her personal input. Her tremendous effort in establishing a viable administrative structure and in promoting the concepts of self-reliance and joint community-government effort has borne fruit. She feels it is now capable of continuing on its own. Her patient cultivation of provincial social workers to encourage them to recognize the need for, and to establish, coordinating bodies in their regions is nearing fruition. In the meantime, however, she remains in her post at the firm insistence of the council's members.
Ibu NAS is not averse to retirement. "I think I will be happy," she says, "because I have so many hobbies." One of these hobbies is the small family foundation, Yayasan Kasih Adik (Love for Little Sister), set up in memory of her daughter Irma. Muslims have a religious obligation to set aside two and a half percent of their income for the poor. The NASUTIONs have funneled this and other family contributions into a foundation in order to formalize the charity which is continually requested of them. She feels that people who ask for aid should allow their requests to be properly registered and administered, rather than regarding the granting of them as personal favors. Including the scholarships and other aid given through their small foundation, the NASUTIONs donate more than half their income to the poor.
JOHANNA NASUTION's work has not gone unrecognized. In 1971 her countrymen presented her with the prestigious Satya Lencana untuk Pekerjaan Sosial (Award for Social Work). She has also received awards for distinguished social welfare work from Italy's Centro Culturale Italiano Adelaide Restori (1976) and the Rotary Club of Jakarta, Kebaioran, Paul Harris Award (1980).
Unofficial admiration has been even more revealing. A foreign social worker wrote of JOHANNA SUNARTI NASUTION's "good humor, persistence, administrative skill and social vision," adding: "She is a quiet, unassuming, completely selfless woman with infinite charm and warmth. She makes miracles happen."
October 1981
Manila
REFERENCES:
Fischer, Louis. The Story of Indonesia. London: Hamish Hamilton. 1959.
Foreign Areas Studies Division. U.S. Army Area Handbook for Indonesia. Washington, D.C.: Special Operations Research Office, American University. 1964, 1970.
Grant, Bruce. Indonesia. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. 1964.
Hughes, John. Indonesian Upheaval. New York: David McKay co. 1967.
Jones, Howard Palfrey. Indonesia: the Possible Dream. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. 1971.
Nasution, Johanna Sunarti. "Institutionalizing Indonesia's Social Work." Presentation to Group Discussion, Ramon Magsaysay Award Foundation, Manila. September 2, 1981. (Typewritten transcript.)
______. Profile of the Indonesian National Council on Social Welfare. Jakarta: National Council on Social Welfare. N.d. (Mimeographed.)
______. The Role of the Indonesian Council on Social Welfare and the Coordinating and Supervising Body for Social Activities, in the Framework of the Development of Social Welfare in Indonesia. Jakarta: Indonesian National Council on Social Welfare. 1978.
Neill, Wilfred T. Twentieth Century Indonesia. New York: Columbia University Press. 1973.
Steinberg, David Joel, et al. In Search of Southeast Asia. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. 1971.
Tas, S. Indonesia: The Underdeveloped Freedom. New York: Praeger. 1967.
Interview with Johanna Sunarti Nasution. Interviews with and letters from persons acquainted with Ibu Nasution and her work.
