Community school gives hope to stateless youth
Published on: Thursday, March 28, 2024
By:
FMT, Rex Tan
Buku Jalanan Chow Kit co-founder Siti Rahayu Baharin says the community school currently has 89 students ranging from Primary 1 to Form 4.
PETALING JAYA: The daily routine of brushing teeth, eating breakfast, and saying good morning to parents before a five-minute walk to school might be the norm for many youngsters.
But for Qistina, getting up for school at 8am five days a week is a privilege that she will never take for granted.
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Born to a permanent resident father and an Indonesian mother, Qistina was not registered as a citizen because her parents couldn’t produce their marriage certificate when she was born.
She has been stateless ever since and is not eligible for the national school system.
Her parents did enrol her in a private religious school, but this was not enough for Qistina, who dreamed of receiving a proper education.
In 2018, her desire was finally fulfilled when a mobile library invited her to join its community school.
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“When Buku Jalanan Chow Kit (BJCK) started (as a mobile library), I found out there was a group of people bringing mats and books here.
“They invited me to read with them, and they do the mobile library every week so I joined them more often and became close to them.
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“Later, they invited the students who are most active in the tuition classes to join the school… me and my six other friends.
The community school provides education for stateless children such as Qistina.
“We became the very first batch of students,” she said.
Since then, Qistina has felt less marginalised as BJCK has proven to be an inclusive school for children who are denied equal access to education.
Qistina’s joy was evident as she recounted her favourite memories: leading the Green House in the school’s first ever sports day, going to Cherating Beach for school camp, and receiving a donated laptop for her studies.
“It was the first sports day for me since kindergarten, because there wasn’t any sports day at my religious school.
“It was like something I hadn’t experienced for a long time,” the 15-year-old said.
Goals and challenges
Siti Rahayu Baharin, co-founder of BJCK, said the idea of creating a community school came to the group as a “calling” while they were operating a mobile library in Chow Kit, Kuala Lumpur.
There, they found that many children were denied access to education.
“BJCK caters to all children because… one of (our students) thought that she had reached the age to go to school, so she went to register and the school turned her away because of a documentation issue.
“We don’t want that. We want to provide education to every child because that’s the basic right of any child,” Siti Rahayu, known as Cikgu Rahayu at the school, told FMT.
Although BJCK has transformed from a truck to a brick-and-mortar school with 11 employees, Cikgu Rahayu said they are still expanding under the mission of providing quality education for their students.
They recently opened a cafeteria where they hire students’ mothers, in the hope of increasing their families’ income. This way, students from lower income families do not have to work to support the family.
The cafeteria will also serve as a venue to provide potential jobs for BJCK’s future graduates.
“What will happen to our children next? This year, three of our students are sitting for SPM and they only have birth certificates, which say they are not citizens,” Cikgu Rahayu said.
“Would any university or tertiary education institution want to accept them?
“Through our business, we can provide a platform for them to work, so they will not be cheated.”
Cikgu Rahayu said BJCK’s biggest challenge is to convince the public of its mission, as a large section of society remains hostile or sceptical towards the plight of undocumented migrants.
Asking Malaysians to be sympathetic, she said the father of one of their students was cheated by his employers while doing a poorly paid construction job.
Due to his undocumented status, he could not report the problem to the authorities and suffered the injustice in silence.
“BJCK wants to cut that vicious cycle,” Cikgu Rahayu said, adding that she wanted her students to develop the skills needed to define success and happiness on their own terms, and “live with dignity”.
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