Maumere, Flores: A 20-foot statue of the late John Paul II towers over the entrance to Bishop Girulfuls Kherubim Pareira’s office in Maumere, a town of 160,000 people deep in Indonesia’s Catholic heartland of Flores.
It
was under John Paul II that the Vatican made social work a core mission of the Church;
and here in Maumere, that vision remains potent, creating opportunities for
UNICEF and Government to do more for children.
“We know we can’t just talk about spiritual
needs at the Church,” said Msgr.
Girulfis, who heads the Diocese of Maumere. “When
you look at the condition of our people, it is clear we have
to speak to their material needs too."
Maumere Diocese overlaps with Sikka Regency
in Nusa Tenggara Timor (NTT), an arid province
of farmers and fisherfolk who
confront the same health, wellbeing and gender inequities as much of Indonesia’s underdeveloped
eastern frontier.
It is Sikka's paltry birth registration
rate, however, that has church
and government officials coming
together: As recently as last year, the
number of children in Sikka with
a birth certificate stood at 38
per cent -- barely half the 67
per cent national average.
“For a long time it's been gereja jalan sendiri, pemerintah jalan sendiri [the Church goes it alone,
the Government goes it alone].”
said Romo (Father) John,
who heads the diocese’s Puspas, or
pastoral council. The Puspas implements diocese-wide interventions on a range of issues,
including domestic violence and financial literacy, utilizing its 3000 strong neighbourhood prayer
groups (KBG) to raise awareness and push for
behaviour changes.
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| Romo John discusses Puspas programmes at his office in Maumere. © Cory Rogers / UNICEF / 2017 |
"Since the beginning, we've made these actions
a priority," he said. "But
there are many problems, among them birth registration, which neither the
Church nor the Government can solve
alone, and we know children need birth certificates to
progress through school, to get a passport and other rights," he added.
In 2016, with UNICEF funding and technical guidance, the
Diocese and the local Government pledged to
work together in 12 of the regency’s 36 parishes to bring more children out from
the shadows.
With the Puspas
taking charge of community
mobilization and the Sikka Civil
Registration Office (CRO) ramping
up registration drives,
the short-term aim is to reach the national target
of 85 per cent birth registration by 2019. Ultimately,
the target is to achieve universal birth registration by 2030, in line with
global Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16.9.
The challenge of ‘belis’
Obstacles to meeting the 85 per cent target
are multidimensional, but local officials say the first
step is getting more couples married at the church; a marriage letter from the church is required by
the CRO if a child is to be registered
with the name of both the mother and the father. A 2016 reform permitting couples
to apply for an exception to the law has not yet been adopted.
“This obstacle concerns the problem of
patriarchy,” says Romo Yoris,
a Puspas executive. “The father doesn't like the idea that the child is not
seen as his, so we work to encourage couples to formalize their marriage before
having a child so the child can easily take both names.”
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| Romo Yoris smiles on the portico of Heart of Christ Church in Ili Parish, Maumere, Flores. © Cory Rogers / UNICEF / 2017 |
It is a customary marriage ceremony called belis -- where couples are expected to
exchange gifts valued at many times their
monthly incomes – that pushes couples to delay marriage in the
first place, he added.
Under this system, men provide horses,
chickens and millions of rupiah to the family of the bride, while brides gift
pigs, sarong (fabrics) and
food to the family of the groom, said Karolina Klong, 27, a Maumere native
and mother.
"We know it's expensive,
but it [is
a tradition that] has been passed down from generation to
generation, so we still follow it,” she
said, adding that she has
yet to legally marry
her husband, who works as a motorcycle taxi driver in town.
It was the high cost of
belis, Karolina said, that prevented her from
marrying prior to having a child, and it was why her son had not been registered.
Until recently, that is.
Signs of progress
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| Karolina Klong smiles as she finalizes the paperwork needed to register
her son. © Cory Rogers / UNICEF / 2017 |
In recent weeks, UNICEF, the Diocese of Maumere and
the Civil Registration Office have
been working to accelerate progress on birth registration through the
establishment of community-acceleration teams at the village level and a mobile registration campaign in area
churches. The initiatives bring CRO employees together with diocese officials at
churches in the 12 pilot parishes to encourage parents to register their
children. Plans are currently being devised to expand to all 36 parishes in the
regency.
In the week before
a church visit, members of the Puspas liaise with local priests and the Government sends instructions
to village heads to reach out to families with unregistered children. Karolina
says it was a home visit from her village head that reminded her to go to Heart
of Christ Church in Ili Parish where the mobile drive was happening.
"He came knocking on my door,” Karolina said, grinning on the church portico.
One of about a dozen mothers to
come, Karolina said she’d grown tired of paying for
medicine when her son fell ill. With a birth certificate, she should be able to sign up for the Government’s free health care plan and
pay nothing.
Since the mobile drives began earlier this
year, over 200 babies have been registered at Ili, representing over a quarter
of the parish’s
population of unregistered children.
The advances mirror the situation across the
regency, where rates having risen from
38 to 50 per cent in just over a year – “significant progress”, according
to Pak Yoseph Ansar Rera, the local head, or
bupati, of Sikka Regency.
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|
Maria Celsia Maxsensi Troy waits in line at a mobile birth
registration site to get her daughter (right) registered.
© Cory Rogers / UNICEF / 2017
|
“We’ve forged a good partnership [with
the Diocese of Maumere], and we are
always happy when another party wants to work together to help children,” Ansar
said.
He hopes that that by expanding the registration
drive the Government
can meet the 85 per cent birth registration target for 2019. “By the end of
this year, we think we can achieve 70 per cent,” he said.
According to Astrid Dionisio,
a UNICEF Child Protection Specialist based in Jakarta, the progress in Sikka
has been encouraging in terms of its regional implications, too.
“The experience shows how
the Church can use
its community reach
to run targeted initiatives alongside Government,” she said.
“In places like Papua there are districts where
only a single child has been registered, and these are even more remote than in
Maumere,” she said.
“The progress shows what is possible by partnering with
Church institutions, and shows a way forward for continuing to ensure all
children have the right to an identity.”
