INDONESIA: Catholic-run learning center helps keep children off the streets

Now here's an example of a fundamental difference between Western society and Islam. Christianity welcomes all, even it's enemies. Islam rejects all, accepting only Sharia.

FROM UCANEWS.COM:

INDONESIA: Catholic-run learning center helps keep children off the streets
February 5, 2009

BALEENDAH, Indonesia (UCAN) -- Sitting on the floor making an ashtray from a piece of bamboo, Cahya, 17, says he is working toward a life a little better than that of his father's.

The Muslim youth also thanks his father, an unskilled laborer, for making this possible by sending him to the Buana Mekar Community Learning Activities Centre, a Catholic-run vocational high school.

Thanks to the center, Cahya and other poor youths are not roaming the streets of Bandung begging, singing or selling whatever they can to make a living. "I can make wooden furniture. Now I am making an ashtray from bamboo," he said on Jan. 19. He has attended the school, which teaches regular school subjects alongside skills training, since 2003.

Dutch missioner Crosier Father Antonius Rutten founded the center in 1989 in predominantly Baleendah, just south of Bandung, and appointed laypeople to run it. In 1998, it came under the country's non-formal education system.
The center now has 23 teachers, five of them Catholics and the rest Muslims. Of its 174 junior-high and 88 senior-high students, only four are Catholics and another four are Protestants. It has six classrooms in addition to various workshops such as for carpentry, computer skills, food production and fashion design.

"Our mission is to equip poor children with skills to sustain their own life. Hopefully, they will in turn create work opportunities for others," said Hubertus Aming Hidayat, the center's manager.
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