Indonesians in Focus: Elan Wukak Victor

By Barrie | June 28th, 2007 | 2 Comments »

When Elan Wukak Victor, 63, was named as one of the winners of the 2007 Kalpataru Award earlier this month, many were left wondering why he received the country’s highest environmental prize. After all, the father of two is a teacher, and as such an education award would seem more fitting for him.

But, Victor is a different breed of teacher. As well as teach English, he also teaches his students practical skills on how to revegetate vast barren areas in West Sumba.

The result? Every school where Victor has previously taught at (and the one where he currently teaches) have turned into lush green areas in the otherwise barren West Sumba regency.

“I’ve been cultivating plants from an inner motivation to change the environment where I live,” said Victor, the principal of Kasimo Catholic Junior High School in West Sumba, East Nusa Tenggara (NTT), days after receiving the Kalpataru Award in Jakarta.

Students, Victor believes, constitute an important agent of change. While performing his job as an English teacher, he also endeavors to carry out an environmental preservation mission. In his school, Victor has boosted agro-based practical activities of crop culture and has — together with students — planted a plot of three hectares. Some seedlings are distributed to local people and students as part of his environmental campaigning.

While his students have always been eager to participate in his environmental campaigns, parents often mocked him. “Why join that school? (where Victor is teaching) It’s a manairo (gardening) school,” the parents would say, choosing to send their children to other schools, even ones further away.

Victor, however, has his own reason for providing manairo training for his students. Most of his students, he said, come from farming families and are likely to return to farming one day. The students gain skills from the training, which will help turn them into model farmers.

His perseverance seems to have paid off. After seeing for themselves the skills their children have acquired in maintaining home gardens, parents now have a more positive outlook toward his environmental drive. And the number of SMP Kasimo students has also increased.

“Previously we had between 90 and 100 students. Now we have 247 students,” said Victor proudly. Many graduates of the school have become priests, nuns, physicians, lecturers and have pursued other professions.

His 40-year environmental drive has also earned recognition from local administrations. He received an environmental honor from the West Sumba regency in 2003 and another from the NTT province administration in 2005.

How has he fared during this long environmental journey? “It has been a tough struggle,” said Victor, adding that he had to borrow money from friends to pay for his trip to collect the award.
Luckily, the Kalpataru national committee reimbursed his travel costs and granted him a Rp 6 million grant, a small sum by national standards.

Victor started his environmental journey as a child, when he first learnt to grow various crops in his home village of Lembata, East Flores. The practice made him feel that something was missing in his life unless he planted trees wherever he resided. So, when he first reached Sumba in 1965 and discovered its dry, barren landscape, he felt the impulse to cultivate plants.

Different trees were planted in the complex of SMP Padadita, a secondary school in Waingapu, East Sumba which he set up together with Pastor G. Legeland CSsR. After an arduous endeavor, the previously barren school was turned into a green, lush compound.

Similar initiatives were introduced when he taught at SMP St. Aloysius in Waitabula, West Sumba, where he helped construct a new building on a critical plot that was overgrown with weeds.

In this new eight-hectare school, Victor declared his environmental orientation and involved teachers and students in his greening activities, while at the same time instilling the importance of growing plants in their own homes and gardens. He utilized school enrollment, class promotion and student graduations as peaks of his green environment movement.

Like the Padadita school in Waingapu, the Aloysius complex in Waitabula was also turned into a well-balanced and shady environment. The local community enjoyed the benefit of a significantly higher rate of water flowing from the Waiyarak spring at the foot of the hill. This spring has since been providing water for Langgalero and Weelonda villagers.

In 1986, Victor quit his job as principal of SMP St. Aloysius and one year later founded SMP Kasimo (after the late Catholic politician I.J. Kasimo). He applied his experience from previous environment-based schools to Kasimo, where he grew various fruit crops and trees including cashew, mango and mahogany.
He hoped the development of a productive environment would bring a positive impact to the school by yielding extra income, while at the same time creating a living laboratory for students’ research and a comfortable place to study.

Victor enlisted students and staff in his greening program, which has now been incorporated as one of the school’s subjects. In critical areas, he learned to be creative by asking his students to bring to school manure and soil with humus from their homes and applied a simple hydroponic system in the dry season by using water-loaded pieces of bamboo.

Victor has faced a lot of challenges in his journey. The habit of local communities to burn their weed-infested land and release their cattle uncontrolled often harms well tended crops. His struggle in such a remote region is like covering a `deserted road’, where the media rarely monitors his activities and his greening ideas are not easy to disseminate.

“I feel a calling to do all this, so I don’t care about recognition. The point is to achieve my ambition: if a barren plot can be turned into a green environment, it makes me so happy. I enjoy it and feel younger in spite of all the challenges,” said Victor with great zeal.

He is now determined to work even harder to prove that his endeavors will benefit society through the generations.

With the help of his students, Victor has (since 2003) distributed seedlings to 53 groups of villagers.

“From 2003 to 2007 we gave away about 400,000 seedlings.”

Emanuel Dapa Loka