Teacher Henrikus Suroto vowed his students wouldn’t be cheated out of their education when the global pandemic forced schools to be closed in Indonesia’s remote Kenalan village.
So he braves windy mountain roads and sheer cliff drops to visit the poor farming community in Central Java, where online classes are out of the question due to a lack of Internet service – a luxury few parents could afford anyway.
Not only is Suroto risking death or serious illness from COVID-19, he is violating government orders not to hold in-person classes to prevent the spread of the disease.
“No one’s forcing me to do this – it’s something inside telling me to do it,” the 57-year-old told AFP.
“I feel a bit guilty about breaking (orders) to hold online classes, but the reality is that it isn’t easy here. The only solution is to be close to students with door-to-door teaching,” he added.
Suroto is one of a small number of teachers taking on dangerous terrain, bad weather and the chance of contracting the novel coronavirus, to reach home-bound students across the world’s fourth-most populous nation, home to a quarter of billion people.
Nearly 70 million children and young people have been affected by school shutdowns which started in mid-March.
While the pandemic has sparked a boom in online learning, especially in wealthy nations, about one-third of Indonesia’s nearly 270 million people don’t have access to the Internet or even, in some cases, electricity.
Suroto and other Indonesian teachers say they wear face masks, but the threats of becoming sick or infecting students are ever-present.
Avan Fathurrahman, an elementary school instructor on East Java’s Madura island, visits up to 11 students a day, an experience he wrote about in now-viral Facebook posts.
He admits to being scared of getting ill.
“But my fears were overcome by the call to teach,” Fathurrahman said.
“I would not be comfortable staying at home knowing that my students couldn’t study properly.”