We offer for 5 students Internship for community building on Samosir.
Samosir is an island in the biggest volcano of the world, the Lake Toba on Sumatra. In the moment the Indonesian Government want to develop the region to a touristic destination. The main focus is on the developing an Eco and Agrotourism.
The problems to create this are:
- the people don´t work really together
- rural depopulation
- gap of organizing
- gap of English knowledge
- less skills to use the Internet for marketing
- abilities to serve the guests
- creating products out of the land the people have
- structuring the daily life
- invent new things
- the young people don´t have an inspiration to start something
We already built a farmstay, the Ecovillage Silimalombu as a blueprint for the region. We are on the way to create a sustainable tourism development center. The main task for an Internship will be to help to work on this kind of community building by bringing the people together in the villages to work together to prepare the region for a sustainable tourism.
We started with one group of people, they where farmers, or owner of small homestays and we meet now each week to empower the people and work on a development of:
- identifying the things, the tourists like
- create offers for the tourists, like guided tours
- start to make out of a house of a family a homestay, that they can have some guests and out of this an additional income, that the children don´t go the towns anymore.
- collect the informations for the tourists and make them accessible on wikitravel
- working on the problems, the participants have with the government or with their family
- create a small web shop to offer the products for the tourists, that they can buy them and to create out of this a sustainable customer relationship
- working on waste and environment projects
- creating ideas for the young people and start to empower them to realize the ideas.
- starting with teaching English in the schools and create activities for the children out of the environment.
- and of course all kind of social work, what happens, when you work together with people:
- alcoholism of the men
- gambling
- how to go around with money
- how the children can get a good education
- family problems
- gender themes
- empowerment of the girls
- create ideas for the children
- old family traditions against the world of internet
- etc.
For a Internship it should be at least 3 month up to 1 or 2 years. We can provide Accommodation in Silimalombu or in other villages around Lake Toba and food. We help with the Visa Application for Indonesia.
The Tutor of the Internship is Thomas Heinle (Dipl. Sozialpädagoge FH), he lives in Silimalombu and studied in Landshut in Germany.