In a Sumatran hamlet, residents turned their rubbish dump into a garden

In <strong>Kenyayan Bawah 1</strong>, a hamlet at the southern tip of Sumatra, hamlet head <strong>Fauzan</strong> led his neighbours in clearing a site where people had dumped rubbish for years. They made it into a garden and a place to meet. When South Lampung's regent came to see it, the residents said they had done the work with their own hands.

The hamlet lies in Desa Bakauheni, the village that holds the ferry harbour where boats leave Sumatra for Merak on Java. Travellers pass through by the thousands. For a long time, a patch of ground in the hamlet served as an informal dumping point, and people left their rubbish there as a matter of habit.

Fauzan, the kepala dusun, or hamlet head, decided to change that. He did not wait for a contractor or a government budget. He called on gotong-royong, the old Indonesian practice of mutual cooperation, in which neighbours share the work that none of them could manage alone. Together they cleared the site, planted a garden and made a place where people could sit together.

The work fitted into Desa HELAU, a district programme whose name stands for green, beautiful, sustainable, safe and excellent in Indonesian. Elsewhere in South Lampung, villagers taking part have sorted their waste, woven rubbish bins from bamboo and painted markings on their roads. The programme gives the framework. The labour comes from the residents.

That evening was the sixth Malam Kamisan, a Wednesday-night meeting between residents and district leaders. Regent Radityo Egi Pratama, the youngest regent in Lampung Province, walked around the new garden. He called it extraordinary that a former rubbish site had become a comfortable shared space, one made, in his words, "from us, for us."

The residents spoke about it with pride, and they were clear about one thing: this was not a project someone had brought to them. It was the result of their own shared work, done one afternoon after another.

The regent then turned to something practical. A garden that people use in the evenings needs light. He asked the district head to work with PLN, the state electricity company, to install lighting so that the space could be used safely after dark.

He also asked the people gathered there to find their own strengths, what he called their daya ungkit, the point where a small effort can move something larger. In Kenyayan Bawah 1, they had already found one. It had started with a hamlet head, his neighbours and a pile of rubbish nobody else was going to clear.