Kuliah Kerja Nyata 1

I'm writing this post while doing program Kuliah Kerja Nyata (KKN).

KKN is a program in my university which let the students spend a full month in a village, while analizing the village's problems, arranging some solving, then giving the ideas to the head of the village. It's up to the village's side whether they want to take them or not. 

KKN this year starts from January 5 until Februari 4. My 20 friends from various faculty and I went to a village named Panyingkiran, which is part of Majalengka district in West Java. We're renting two houses here; for girls and boys, because the society doesn't let both gender to live under same roof.

We had many activities here, like teaching elementary school, doing survey about some aspects of this village, and helping the village to hold a maulid nabi event. For your information, this village is known for their loyality of worshipping God (Moslems).

My friend, teaching elementary students

Panyingkiran village is relatively small, compared to other villages. People here use Sundanese as everyday language, but they also use Indonesian even some of them can't speak Indonesian well. I rarely see teenangers here; most of them are old people and children. The teens are probably living outside the village to have a better job. 

Most of the residents are farmers who plant rice. Some others are entrepreneur; they built small businesses here like school uniforms production, edible mushroom production, stock raising, and convection. 

As an agriculture students, my friend and I went to a rice field and met a farmer there named Mr. Dudung. He is the head of one of the farmer groups here.  We did some interview with him. That was interesting to know real problems in real field; that's a chance for us to make use of the theories at univesity. 

Rice field (left), irigation (right)

The farmers at this village use conventional agriculture technique. They use anorganic pesticides and fertilizers. This is not good for the environment but I assume the farmers want to increase their yeild fastly. But at least they don't burn the straw; they spread it on the land. This simple activity is good for the efficiency and environment. If they burned it, the organic matters would be converted to carbon, which could pollute the air. Moreover, the nutrition the soil need will be reduced; this might caused the increase of fertilizer needs. 

The main problem of the rice land here is the lack of water (especially during drought). Even if there's water in the dam near the village, it still would be hard to water the land, because the contour is flat. To overcome that problem, the farmer use water pump to flow the water from its source onto the land. If there's really small amout of water, they plant red onion because this plant doesn't need much water. 

This is our part as academica to give ideas and solutions for Panyingkiran village. We're from various major so we can observe the problem from different point of view.

The story of this program will be continued..