Working with Local Partners

Funding for the series of Indonesian films comes from the Irish aid organisation Trocaire. No Strings has made the films by working in conjunction with experts in their Jakarta office, and also with local partner organisations IDEP and JRS, the Jesuit Refugee Service, who will distribute the films around Indonesia.

In Indonesia, Els Coolen of JRS and Petra Schneider of IDEP provided Kathy Mullen and Michael Frith in New York with photographs of villagers, their clothes, the tools they use to work their fields, their homes, their crops, the kind of things they dress their babies in.

The village, then, originally called Popolapoo, became Desa Wanabolo on IDEP's recommendation. Here's a few of Petra's pointers:

Suggested Name of Village: Wanabolo "Wana" (a) means forest and "Bolo" is short form "bolong" which means empty or hole. (b) Rhymes with main character suggested name (Tolo) + good subliminal message about de-forestation. (c) It is not the name of any existing Indonesian village.

Typical Indonesian Food Stalls

Indonesian Flood scenes

Garbage blocks waterways scenes

Umbrellas can be replaced with Banana Leaf

"Stuff" that main character would likely buy with his new money: TV, TV antenna, satellite dish, refrigerator, rice cooker, boom box, DVD player, motorbike, some furniture

Standard Indonesian Motorbike (more common than cars in rural areas)

Alarm used should be "Kentongan" see IDEP CBDM comic books for samples. Note: Gong not common here.

IDEP's Community Based Disaster Management Manual and comic book series, each focusing on individual natural disasters, provided much of the background for the content of the films in terms of educational messages.

Putting together a script for the Peace Advocacy film was a tall order; Els from JRS provided a list of starting points:

Key messages : (should be emphasised by story or narrator)

All the children in the world are good, no one is better than others and no one is bad.

The only thing that make you become "good" or "not so good" is that you choose to be.

Fights never solve the problem. The corn or paddy doesn't grow while you fight because no one is cultivating the field and everyone is busy  fighting. The well never produces clean water while you are fighting because no one takes care of it or cleans it up. Then everybody gets into trouble because of lack of clean water to drink or for cooking. The stones never move from the road while you are fighting because they need hands to put them at right and left brink of the road. So when people want to take their harvest to town, they can't get past because the roads are blocked by stones.

You can avoid the fight by: Improving your knowledge. You will know more by listening to each other, you can listen to each other when you trust others and get rid of the prejudice or thought that someone is your enemy.

Working together is the way to get the work done easier and faster. Two hands work faster than one hand, ten hands even more.

No Strings founder Johnie McGlade, who brought together the aid and creative sides in both Indonesia and New York, was present at the film shoot. "It was extraordinary how they were able to translate the pictures, etc, sent from the field into props and sets and clothing, even the little things they put on the shop shelves in the interior shots.

Everything was so detailed, right down to the tools they would use for farming the land, to the type of crops grown, the row of carrots in a garden plot and the paddy fields."