2 weeks ago our KL Sketchnation team was very honoured to be invited along with few other partners namely SC Venture, Mycorps, IMARET, DFTN and the main organizer, Small Changes to spearhead the initiative to help the Indegenious Bateq Community in Kuala Tahan, Pahang, Malaysia.

The Indegenious Bateq community is one of the most underprivilege/ Orang Asli community in Malaysia. They are nomadic hunters who survive on forest resources, living a very basic life with limited access to electricity and health care.

Awareness for the needs of education in the community had just arisen recently and only since earlier this year their childrens have the chance to enroll into a formal learning education when the government allocated a special class for the 58 children ages ranging 6-14 years old in their community.

The biggest problem in providing them proper education is because from a brief analysis states that only 5% of the whole population (about 1000 people from 7 villages) have proper documentation of birth certificate and ID.

Objective.

Facilitate and ease the Bateq school children entering formal education system by providing soft skills training.
Provide consistent access to dental & medical healthcare to the community.
Conduct an Impact Assessment Study to chart the best forward to assist and empower the community.

Bridging the gap : the role of arts.

KL Sketchnation was invited to play the role to create a fun and easy learning condition to capture the attention of the kids as they are not familiar with formal learning environment.

We conducted a fun sketching session with them at Sekolah Kebangsaan Kuala Tahan to bridge the communication gap as a first step to encourage the children to come out of their shell.

We find it very important to gain their trust and interest in order to make sure the effort going to be sustainable.

As they have their own unique language and are not very fluent with our national language, simple words such ‘bunga’ (flower), ‘rama-rama’ (butterfly) and ‘rumah’ (home) were translated by the kids and sketched into our handmade sketchbooks. We let them keep the sketchbook along with art tools such crayons and pens to encourage them to start drawing at home.

Few different strategies were planned in order to maximise our impact towards creating interest in them through few psychological approach from my research;

1- Positive encouragement; make things feels easy. Create simple instructions from the most basic and doable steps that is easy to follow. Dont let them feel helpless with the tasks, following the flow of their understanding.

2- Train their subconscious ; focus on whats fun first instead of challenging them right away. For example, distract their own inferior of making a drawing by letting them think more on the content rather then the technicality so that they will not think much on how to draw but instead on what to draw.

3- Narrowing down scope through limitations ; by taking away some controls from them, they will only focus on what they can control. For example, limiting the choice of colours by only providing 2 colour of paint so that they can learn to make use only with what they have.

4- Joy of rediscovery; make things feels familiar; One of the best way to create interest towards a certain knowledge is to rediscover whats close to their heart. Let them connect the dots from thier own memories, experience and into making sense of what they already knew.

5- Reward their effort ; the painting activity ended with displaying their artworks on an exhibition installation for them to feel appreciated and proud of themself. We also rewarded them with simple pleasures such getting a stamp for finishing it, getting a badge that they can bring home so it can remind them of the experience after the activity.

Representatives from KL Sketchnation

All volunteers had so much fun and bonded very well with the kids. Each of them showed a very good potential in arts and we really believe that such talents can be polished in no time.

The project will be a continuous effort as we will monitor their progress from time to time through revisits and reports by the school.