Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Preparing for NGO work

I just found this really interesting article that illustrates one of the troubling issues facing women's health in Indonesia that I will be working on this year: http://sexgenderbody.com/content/indonesia-safe-abortion-could-put-brake-womens-mortality-rates. The statistics describe a disturbing reality for Indonesian women and really lay out the work that NGOs such as PKBI have ahead of them.

Now that my regular language classes have finished here we are moving on to learning language skills that will be useful to my work in the ngo, such as grant and report writing and translation. It is definitely challenging to try reading articles on Indonesian social issues but much more useful to the work I will be doing. This last week we unearthed the actually challenging part of Bahasa Indonesian: prefixes and suffixes. A simple noun can be changed many times by changing the affix so that you can create whole sentences out of one root word: pekebun itu berkebun di kebun. The basics of it aren't too difficult but this is where the nuances of sophisticated speech seem to come in...

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