Impact

Jembatan International addresses critical global issues by providing meaningful and sustainable volunteer service to communities abroad, and by investing in the local economies and people. As a Jembatan participant, you'll work side-by-side with local people on dynamic and inspiring community-led initiatives.

In addition to providing the infrastructure and a rich experience for participants, Jembatan always gives back to the countries and communities that host our students in the form of educational scholarships and grants to the local host schools, NGO’s, and other organizations with whom our students work. Additional compensation emerges from lasting friendships and involvement with these local people and organizations. Our goal is that students leave a favorable impression on the places and people that they visit.

Finally and maybe most important is the impact made on the Jembatan participant. Generally 4 weeks into the program, many, if not most of the participants, are trying to reconcile their Western concepts of efficiency and “usefulness” with the experiences they are having. We suspect that most will have a hard time doing so.  It is really difficult to let go of the ideology (not idea) that participants somehow have something to offer.  Think for a moment of the counter to this ideology.  Anthropologists and social linguists have definitively shown that societies with highly equal social structures – i.e., where everyone is a close social equal – generally have no words or concepts for “Thank you.”  Thank you implies inequality.  Someone has something that you do not have, and more importantly, it is within their prevue to share it with you or not.  They hold a superior social status over you. They give it to you; you acknowledge your subordinate position by thanking them. 

“Jembatan” means bridge in Indonesian and reflects our mission: to build bridges of understanding and friendship between different cultures through community-led initiatives. In order to do so, participants must disabuse themselves of the ideology that they are better. They aren’t. They are not visiting another culture because they are in anyway superior.  The way you justify time is not superior.  The way you feel useful (or not) is not superior.  The fact that you speak English as a native tongue is also, not superior.  These things are just DIFFERENT – not better, not worse. Different things and approaches tend to work best in the contexts that give them rise.  Attempting to import foreign approaches (and we ALL do this to one degree or another) into a different local context ignores perhaps millennia of give-and-take across social actors in its mildest forms, and reeks of superiority complex in a less mild form. 

Irrigation engineers are notorious for removing rock-dams (a physical tool) in developing countries and replacing them with concrete ones. They are often perplexed and always judgmental when someone takes a stick of dynamite to their dam.  What they failed to understand is that the particular physical tool in question – the rock – may in fact have 2000 years of social rules regarding who gets to move the rock, when, for how long, etc.  When the rock is replaced, so too is 2000 years of human negotiations. 

Please do not visit other countries and see the rock and immediately assume that concrete is “better.”  It might not be.  You can assume it is different. That is not judgmental.  That is an observation.  Spend enough time trying to understand their world, their systems, their approaches, before passing judgment that different is better or worse. The one thing we want all participants to get from this program is this – different is simply different. It is not necessarily better or worse – it is just different.  And one cannot fully appreciate the nuances of different unless one lays aside their preconceived biases as best they can and allow themselves to learn WHY things are different in other cultures.  None of us do that well, but some of us are not even cognizant that we are being bias.  The first step is to realize that there are differences, and once you get there, to realize that things can indeed be done differently. 

These are not academic debates to be gleaned in principle from the pages of books; these are things that must be experienced, and often that experience means we go down to a new view of reality kicking and screaming!  In essence, that is what happens for most students during month two of this program.  There is a lot of kicking and screaming, there is every year.  The cool and tough thing about processes is that they are in fact processes – not finished products.  We must always remind ourselves that we designed this program to make something – more broadly-minded students – not rehearse for ourselves how broadly-minded we already are.  We are all a process, not a finished product.