My name is Sartini. I live in Sureng village with my husband and son.
We go to the field everyday from morning until mid-afternoon.
We look for grass for the goats. During the rainy season we grow rice and corn.
The dry season, if it’s a long spell, will last for half a year.
Before, to anticipate the water shortage, we would only take a bath every two days.
As farmers we kept goats and often we would have to sell our goats to buy water.
If I recall the situation, how it was, it really breaks my heart.
The tide started turning for Sureng almost a decade ago when Dr. Ahmad Agus was studying for his PhD
at Curtain University in Perth under an Australia Awards Scholarship.
His lecturer encouraged him to tackle the problem of how to provide power to remote communities
scattered across Indonesia’s 17,000 islands.
The technology that I worked with for my PHD was about hybrid power system and then adapted
to this special location where water is the highest priority. So we bring the technology to provide the water
The system he developed, together with fellow students, won an international engineering award.
And, the prize money gave him the chance to finally ease a burden that he had carried with him since working
as an intern for the Indonesian Government in 1998.
I was deployed for nine months in a region like this one.
In fact I learned how hard life is, how hard life was in this kind of remote rural area,
I learned how the nature changes, from wet season to dry season, and how water just disappear.
Now, working as an engineering lecturer, Dr. Agus devised a practical course for final year students where they help
communities, like Sureng, with building and maintaining solar-powered water pumping systems based on
the award-winning design.
They come from different backgrounds, engineering, social science, medicine, agriculture and others.
They live together with the local community and they start to mingle with the local community thinking about how
to solve the problem with the local community.
Back in Sureng water is available closer to peoples’ homes, and it’s more reliable year-round.
This saves people time in fetching water and money in paying for expensive water tankers,
We knew that water is a basic needs.
Once we can provide the basic needs, then people can start to think about other things.
They can start to think about how to generate income, additional income from activities like entrepreneurship and others.
Now that I have more time, I produce the banana chips I sell the chips at the food store,
but some people buy them directly from my house.
My son’s education is important to me because he needs to move with the times.
I will need to sell about 10 packets of banana chips to pay for his transport to college every day.
With water now being less of an issue, people here are also thinking about how to attract tourists to this beautiful spot.
If tourists come in I hope they will be interested in m banana chips and that they would sell well.
If we can provide more of this kind of activities, business and others,
hopefully develop and flourish, hopefully our youngsters can start to think
about a choice to stay here, to work here, to develop here.
To also participate in the development of the location.
The Ministry of Public Works were so impressed that they adopted Dr. Agus’ system. And, are now
coordinating a network of 10 universities to replicate it.
What started as a PHD project in Australia has now grown into a huge potential for people across Indonesia.