During a recent visit by PDA staff member, David Barnhart, to a village in Meulaboh district, children in the village were told about Hurricane Katrina, a huge disaster that recently hit the southeastern part of the United States. When asked what they would say to children in the United States who had been affected by a massive disaster like they had been several months before, the Indonesian children offered to write letters to their counterparts.
Here you can read the greetings from two of these children in Indonesia. They have been translated from their native Indonesian language to English, and appear in both languages.
Background on Dila and Neni, authors of the two letters
Dila and Neni are two girls who live in the neighorhood of YTBI's working group relief center in Meulaboh, Aceh Barat. After the tsunami, a few children saw that there was mineral water available at the relief center, so they came and asked for some. That was the beginning of the relationship between the children in Suak Seunebok and YTBI's working group.
One of the volunteers for the YTBI working group is a teacher. Before school opened after the tsunami, he gathered the children and taught them to sing and write. Even after starting school, they still enjoyed coming to the relief center in the afternoon. Sometimes they brought their assignments from school and worked on them in the relief center with guidance from the volunteers.
Icut, a volunteer who joined the YTBI working group in August, likes to dance, so she is teaching some of the girls how to dance, including Dila and Neni. Now the girls always want to perform every time guests come to the relief center.
When they heard about Hurricane Katrina, they were very concerned. So they wrote a letter to be sent to children in the USA. They wrote poems to be sent with the letters because they believe that is the only gift they are able to send.
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