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Originally appears in the Spring 2021 issue.

By Marc van Loo

Many students want to change the world. They tend to think, however, that their individual actions won’t have much of an impact. But they are wrong about that, and it’s an enjoyable part of our job as teachers to show them. When students discover the power they possess to affect real change — leveraging some of the unique skills they have as the new generation — they relish it, and they go off creating actions that are packed with value for education and for the world at large. In this article, we share how students aged 11 years and above, from all around the world, have helped — and continue to help — bring lifelong, lifesaving sanitation and clean water to Indonesian families, and in doing so, have been inspiring others to bring about United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) #6: clean water and sanitation for everyone by 2030. We hope that this story will inspire passionate teachers to empower their students to engage and change the world to become a better place.

How local staff and students joined forces to bring real change

Through hits and misses, we learned a couple of things about what makes a successful student-led community project. First, there needs to be a clear human connection: the students need to really know the communities they engage with and feel what they feel. The best way of doing this is to keep it intimate and tie a group of students to a single family, which they can use as an anchor to introduce them to the wider community (should they wish to do so).

Secondly, social and/or eco projects need to be bite-sized with a clear start and finish and a tangible product that shows vividly the positive change that students have created.

With the death of our daughter’s cook as an eye opener, we began to discover that the biggest impact one can make in developing countries is to deliver safe sanitation. In countries like Indonesia, it is sanitation that creates the biggest inequality between urban and rural people: City dwellers have good sanitation, village people don’t. The photos in this article show why: Shower water and kitchen wastewater have nowhere to go, forming permanent puddles in the garden that are so toxic that village people lock up their small children in their houses until they are three years old and know they cannot touch the mud outside. This is not to mention the detrimental effects of the traditional ways in which toilet water is processed. At best, it is deposited in soak pits where flies have access before carrying diseases into the kitchen, leading to chronic diarrhoea. Three-hundred seventy children die every day in Indonesia alone, and over one third of Indonesian children suffer from stunted growth (if you have chronic diarrhea, you can’t properly keep in the scarce nutrients you receive).

We discovered that the basis of a solution was there, inspired by a system that UNICEF, Red Cross, and others had developed in the wake of the 2004 tsunami. The schematics of that solution are shown below.

Together with our guests — mostly students based in Singapore — we started building these systems in village homes and village schools, learning as we went along. The projects could be completed in as little as half a day (if our staff did some of the hard digging) or in a couple of days (if the students did everything by themselves) and the result was a sanitation solution that deeply satisfied the local recipients and our students.

In building these systems, students were also helping to create the biggest sanitation laboratory in the world. This meant that we could get world-class universities and companies to join us to help optimize the UNICEF solution and make it even cheaper and easier to build locally. In 2019, after three years of extensive research, we had our result: the “Safe Water Garden” (SWG), which addresses 11 of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals. It features four main components, as illustrated above, as well as a separate kitchen sink (not pictured).

The Indonesian government quickly recognised the SWG’s potential to address the rural sanitation issue, and declared it fit for use early 2020, making the SWG officially the world’s most cost-efficient sanitation system.

Provided users are informed of the simple maintenance rules, the SWG offers immediate benefits because it…

• prevents diseases — Open-air contact with human waste is eliminated.
• lifts social status — The houses no longer smell and they each feature a beautiful garden.
• improves life quality — The system is maintenance-free and children can safely play in the garden.
• promotes food security — The garden can provide a family with its chilli, thus inspiring more micro-farming.
• enhances spiritual well-being — Having a clean environment and clean public facilities speaks to religious beliefs.
• imparts household-savings of 3–10 % — This comes from garden income and reduced medical/maintenance bills.
• positively impacts the global environment — Around 50 kg of plastic are upcycled, reducing organics/nutrients release.
• promotes local ownership — Buildable in one day, a SWG is an asset for life for a rural family/school.
• is affordable to everyone — A one-off material cost below €300 is within budget for all communities.

A vision: safe sanitation for every villager in the world by 2030

As Richard Branson said, “if your dreams aren’t so big they scare you, they aren’t big enough,” so we started dreaming big, and made a five-year plan in 2018 to ultimately get clean sanitation to all Indonesian villagers (and beyond) by 2030 at the latest.

To our delight, because of the strong human connections and the evocative imagery of student action, the vision for 2018 and 2019 was realized on schedule.

But just as we finished Phase 2 — flush with national recognition and big companies ready to sponsor entire villages — and were about to enter Phase 3, COVID struck and we hit a double snag: Corporate funding dried up; plus, students from outside Indonesia could no longer visit us and help build the system (and thus inspire others to act).
But after being invited by a school to do a Zoom session on what we had achieved, it dawned on us: We could keep going with students, COVID or not!

Why students keep going, COVID or not

The best thing about community service was always the human connection and the satisfaction of having made a real difference, and we realised that students in this new generation make connections over the internet almost as easily as they do in real life. Moreover, letting an ecological project be executed by the local people is far more ecologically-sound — and cost-efficient — than bringing over students from abroad to do it. Additionally, the internet allows our students to keep track of the progress and stay in touch, adding a long-term engagement that was often missing from a real visit. We start by giving local families mobile phones and we open up a WhatsApp group from the get-go so that students can stay in touch and witness the long-term impacts of their actions.

Finally, the interaction over Zoom presents students with a natural opportunity to record all the images and to act as movie directors for the production of a video log (vlog). This vlog simultaneously serves as an educational log of what has been achieved and as a social media product that could inspire others to follow suit. So, from the beginning, the students know that they are responsible for creating a product that supports the grand vision.

In May 2020, three months after COVID had arrived in Singapore, and having been inspired by schools giving us the opportunity to explain over Zoom what we had done, we started to work on developing virtual journeys, and we did this with the help of friends and teachers who had come to cherish the SWG project. Initially, people felt like holding off on virtual travel and waiting until real travel would return, but increasingly, people began to realize that there was no point waiting for things to “go back to normal,” and that we could and should act now.

So, we started receiving our first virtual guests, mostly private families, but then late in 2020, the first schools decided to be pioneers and dive right in. We started with an IB school all the way from Austria, whose lead teacher had been posted in Singapore before and knew about the power of the Safe Water Garden project. Then an old Singapore-based school client of ours, who used to send a year group of around 100 students every year, decided they wanted to give it a shot, and we had our first three-day virtual trip with 120 staff and students.

At the end of this trip, many students declared the trip to be one of the most satisfying experiences of their lives and the school management was pleased with the price tag (as compared to that of real-life travel), so we knew we had something really good here, especially since once again, student action served as an inspiration for others to join. Right after the videos for the two schools were produced and featured on our website (https://loola.net/virtual-testimonials/), an international company (Dole Fruits) was inspired and decided to do the same thing and offer these virtual eco journeys to their top executives as a Corporate Social Responsibility experience. Other companies have taken note as well, and of course, other schools are now looking at the footage and are deciding to join in. So, the students realize that our work isn’t just changing the lives forever of the Indonesian families we visit, but by broadcasting our work, our efforts have the potential to change the lives of those in an entire country.

A celebration of all aspects of education

As an educator who has always believed in education being a holistic enterprise where things work best when we show how everything is interconnected and that all skills are needed, delivering life-saving sanitation through virtual travel is awesome. It involves science (biology and chemistry), humanities (human behaviour, both in Indonesia and in students’ home countries), infrastructure and economics (sanitation that also promotes food independence), languages (the power and importance of storytelling, story sharing, and story production), arts (in the design of gardens and powerful social media postings), and even mathematics (helping villagers to figure out which crops give them the biggest bang for their buck).

When schools expressed the wish to do hands-on work parallel to the virtual work, they inspired us to invent a brand-new way of upcycling plastic that could be practiced at home and abroad simultaneously (see the slide below); plus we realised that Indonesian people love to show off and share their cooking skills online (Indonesia’s food regularly wins the top awards as the world’s best street food). With these program additions, the programs came even more alive.

In the process of interviewing the Indonesian family they adopted, the Austrian students from our first school guest discovered that the family didn’t have running water, and the students decided they wished to do something about that. The solution turned out to be simple and affordable, so the next week, they virtually returned to see the solution they had sponsored.

For all of us, it was such a powerful moment of pure joy to see the faces of the local people when they opened the tap and for the first time in their lives enjoyed running water. We all realized how something many of us take for granted is a very big deal for those who don’t have it.

We shared with the students the fact that about half of the recipients of a SWG had huge success with their crop gardens (mostly by growing Indonesian chilli peppers, the country’s second most important food component, together with rice), while the other half experienced complete failure, as their crops died early on. Our staff figures that the difference between success and failure is simply the difference between spending some loving care on the garden and neglecting it. One of the obstacles to taking care of the garden, as the students discovered through inquisitive questioning, is the fact that it is hard work if you have to water plants by pulling up buckets of water manually from the well.

So, we came to realise that it was really a good idea to have running water. Not only does it bring joy and a boost in living standards, but running water can also be connected to a garden hose, probably significantly increasing the chance of success in crop farming (together with students, we’re busy testing this hypothesis now!).

Then, we came to realize that running water also has great COVID-related hygiene benefits, as it allows people to wash their hands before entering their house and before starting to eat. It soon became clear that we should really aim to make running water provision part of the program. Fortunately, the water provision systems in Indonesia are so simple that everyone can build them; it’s just money holding people back. All you need is an elevated drum to hold water; a small pump and pipes for pumping water from the well to the tower; and then some more pipes to deliver water to the washroom, kitchen, and garden hose via gravity.

Thus, thanks to students’ imaginations, the addition of running water is now rapidly becoming a standard part of our programs — all of our guests are ready to pay a bit more to include it in the package. Finally, questions from students about clean water led us to adding a delightful USD $30, WHO-certified water filter to the mix that delivers the cleanest water you can find in Indonesia.

Unleashing the power of individual student action: it’s a mindset!

The human experiences described above led us to the next step: students being engaged in a real-life business exercise that will crucially contribute to successful micro-farming and food security in Indonesia.
We had observed that the success of the crop garden can be sustained as soon as villagers have enjoyed their first harvest and realized that farming is actually possible. This first harvest typically takes place three months after first planting the crops, so we realized the first three months are key.

This led to the following idea that ties the students and the villagers together for these crucial three months: our staff informs the villagers that they will receive funds for 50 plants (crops or flowers) — the choice is theirs — but they have to report the planting over WhatsApp to the students; plus, they have to report successes and failures in weekly reports. In exchange, the students act as bankers and award micro-credits through WhatsApp for each successful plant and report, locking both parties in until a successful finale, while gaining real-life knowledge about what to plant and how to plant it.

As educators, we marvelled at how naturally such great ideas arose from students getting engaged online. We also realized that it is then only a small step to make students realize that there is so much they can do to help make the world a better place, and that saving the world isn’t just necessary, but a whole lot of fun at the same time.

In conclusion…

This is a generation comprised of young people with natural empathy and tolerance for racial, cultural, and gender differences; they have sustainability caked in their cultural DNA. Connecting to people online is second nature to them, but it delights them to discover that such connections can result in profound, positive impacts. What we as educators can do is to open the doors and let all this positive energy rip.

I hope this article has helped inspire you, fellow educator, to try things out and ignite this awesome student power to make the world a better place!

Dutch by birth, cosmologist by training, educator and international educational author by early profession, Marc van Loo opened LooLa Adventure Resort in 2000; it went on to become the world’s most highly decorated eco-resort. Spurred on by the preventable death of the daughter of LooLa’s cook, LooLa’s team — together with LooLa’s guests — has built 500 life-saving sanitation systems for village families in Bintan over the past four years, the so-called Safe Water Gardens (SWGs). Marc then put together an alliance of research institutes and companies as well as passionate individuals, united in our aim to bring 100 million Safe Water Gardens to villagers around the world within the next five years. The Indonesian government recognised the SWG as part of its national standards early in 2020, officially making the SWG the world’s most cost-efficient stand-alone sanitation system.

Editor’s Note: Marc will be joining us on our podcast, Talking with Green Teachers, later this spring to chat about upcycling plastic for the Safe Water Bricks in the SWGs. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!