Departments
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Week of 16 October 1998 |
Vol. II, No. 10 |
Feature
Article
Devoted to Indonesia
Common passion to teach links BU grad student to scholarship's namesake
By J. Nicole Long
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Evi Herawati is the first
recipient of the Kelly Stephens Memorial
Scholarship. Photo by
Fred Sway
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Robert and Dorothy Stephens say the Kelly Elizabeth Stephens Memorial Scholarship Fund, for Indonesian graduate students studying education, is a tribute to their daughter and her commitment to education and to Indonesia.
Although Kelly was an alumna of Tufts University, her parents established the scholarship at Boston University because of its commitment to international students and the high quality of the School of Education. "Dean Delattre and others gave us a warm reception and their enthusiastic support," Dorothy says.
The Stephenses began the endowed scholarship with their own funds and with gifts the family received at the time of Kelly's death. "People offered donations," Robert says, "and a small foundation in Vermont has given a grant. All of these gifts have helped, but it has taken considerable work to gather enough money to fully support a student."
The Stephenses are pleased to have raised enough to offer the full scholarship, established in 1995, to Evi Herawati, who is receiving funding to cover her BU tuition and living expenses.
Kelly Stephens' love of skiing, mountain climbing, scuba diving, and sailing were some of the reasons she initially chose to go to Indonesia. It was her vision of helping to improve education there that convinced her to stay. For nine years, Stephens trained teachers, taught English at universities and government ministries, and planned, established, and supervised English-language centers throughout Indonesia, spending the most time working at the Institute of Technology (ITB) in Bandung.
Stephens is remembered at ITB as the person most responsible for developing and implementing curricula -- and ultimately for establishing its credibility. "Because ITB is considered a model language center for other state and private universities, it is a tangible and lasting tribute to the quality of Kelly Stephens as a professional and an individual," says Neil Kemp, director of the British Council S. Widjojo Centre in Indonesia.
Herawati is now studying educational planning, and like Stephens, possesses the vision to improve education in Indonesia. But it is a goal that requires her to challenge her parents' expectations. "Being a teacher is not a favorable career -- it's not prestigious," she says. "Teachers receive small salaries and are unappreciated by the society in general."
After years of resisting what she says is a calling to teach, Herawati decided it would be selfish if she did not pursue the profession. After college, she took a full-time job at Indonesia's Universitas Pelita Harapan as an assistant lecturer in the industrial engineering department, where she taught operations research and statistics and business math to students of economics.
Herawati says that she hopes the country will improve the quality of education, and consequently that the Indonesian population will be better equipped to emerge from its current economic and social crisis.
Indonesians are responding to the economic collapse with violence, Herawati says. The rising prices of staple foods, such as rice, are creating upheaval. "In Jakarta, because industries are shutting down, there are a lot more people who are homeless and hungry," she says. "In most cases they don't ask for food or money anymore, they resort to robbery."
The country's problems are not simply financial. There is a long-standing race conflict between native Indonesians and Chinese Indonesians, based on the latter's holding a high percentage of the nation's wealth.
Herawati hopes that educating Indonesians about the factors that contribute to economic crises will help ease tensions in general. "With better education," she says, "people can be more critical of the factors that influence their lives-personally, economically, and socially."
After finishing her master's degree at BU, Herawati's long-term plan is to be a regional educational planner in Indonesia: to establish communities and alliances within Indonesia that will aid education more broadly than teaching in a classroom alone.