The reading group he started that afternoon in Kampung Rawagede, Desa Tugu Utara, grew to sixty children. For years he was paid in rice. He kept teaching. Later he went from household to household in the tea estates and raised roughly Rp 47 million from people who had very little, enough to put up a permanent building — twenty-seven metres by seven. In 1997 a regent's decree turned it into a real school with a real name: SDN Cikoneng.
It sits deep in the Ciliwung tea estate, about seven kilometres from the Puncak–Cianjur road along rocky track cut through steep ravines. Pupils and teachers climb onto the plantation's cargo trucks to reach it. When no truck runs, they walk for close to an hour. In the rainy season the regency education office once recorded attendance falling to around forty percent.
He is sixty-three now, and he has never been made a civil servant: his disability disqualified him from appointment. The colleague beside him, Ani Fatmawati, has taught there on the same honorary status for more than sixteen years and walks the track despite asthma. The headmaster, Endis Suherman, has asked the government for a single vehicle to carry the children.
What the state has given him, it has given late. An education award in 2024. Then, at the regent's pendopo in Cibinong, Regent Rudy Susmanto handed him a sponsored pilgrimage and the prosthetic leg he had needed for years — the leg arriving after four decades of walking that track without it.
Filmmakers from Citeureup have made a short film about him. They called it Manggala Sang Penjaga: Manggala the Guardian.