Wonderful news for the Sanur community as they now have a free mini-library accessible to them courtesy of students from Bali Island School. Officially called the ‘People’s Perpustakaan’, the mini-library was built by twelve students from Grade 6 to Grade 10 of the prestigious school as part of their ‘Service to Action’ programme. This was enacted to support the local residents of Sanur in celebration of Indonesian National Education Day.
During the several weeks of working on the project, which was assisted in part by Indonesian carpenters on the school’s maintenance staff, the students of Bali Island School gained new skills in basic woodworking, design, communication, painting and marketing skills, and poured their innovative prowess in creating the small building, while also harnessing their leadership skills by organising a book donation and procurement programme with PERUPLUS bookstore and the vast BIS community.
National Education Day falls on 2 May, which coincided with this year’s Idul Fitri holiday, hence, the officiation day was held earlier on 28 April 2022. Among those who attended the event were representatives from the local Banjar and local schools, along with children from the Sanur neighbourhood.
“We really felt that Bali Island School could do more to connect and share benefits with the local community, our immediate neighbourhoods, and with a limitation of the availability of free books to borrow in the vicinity, we thought this would be a good way to do multiple good things at once,” shared NoahJon Marshall, the Bali Island School Librarian.
The mini library provides a vast collection of new books, both in Bahasa Indonesia and English, for all ages, from non-fiction to fiction genres, with exact directions of how the library works included in each book. To sum it up, the community can borrow the books for free based on the honour system; borrow a book, take it home, read it, bring it back once finished, borrow another book, and repeat the cycle. Available 24 hours a day, the library provides simple instructions on how to borrow the books, which are attached to the library unit located in front of one of the entrances of Bali Island School on Jalan Danau Buyan IV, Sanur.
Grade 7 students, James and Oliver, spearheaded the project for their peers, who deliver a speech on the officiation day. “We are proud to be part of this project and happy to see how it turned out. We hope this library can be an outlet for people in Sanur who do not have access to quality books and in the future nurture good reading habits,” they said.
Their speech summarises the key goal of creating the People’s Perpustakaan: to design, build, stock and promote a lending library that can be accessed by the local community, whilst inspiring and nurturing reading habits on the island so that it can contribute to the improvement of the country’s literacy level going forth.
For more information on Bali Island School, please visit baliislandschool.com
Bali Island School
Jl. Danau Buyan IV no. 15, Sanur
+62 361 288 770
marketing@baliis.net
baliislandschool.com
