Taking Big-City Skills to Indonesia's Villages Rony Zakaria for the International Herald Tribune Astuti Kusumaningrum, a volunteer with the Indonesia Mengajar teaching program, with first-grade students at the village school where she works in West Java. GOBANG, INDONESIA - Astuti Kusumaningrum was working a desk job for a children's foundation when she received an e-mail about a program sending young teachers to remote Indonesian villages for a year. As a trained psychologist, she had no background in education, but the program piqued her interest. "I like interacting with children, and I like to listen to them and talk to them, and I think I'm good at that," said the 23-year-old Indonesian, who enrolled in the program, Indonesia Mengajar, and has lived in Gobang, West Java, since last June. Started in 2009 by the rector of a private university in Jakarta, with sponsors like Intel, Indika Energy and the consulting firm McKinsey, Indonesia Mengajar recruits and trains young Indonesians to work as teachers in remote, impoverished provinces. Its goal is to fill a shortfall in the number of qualified teachers in the country of 248 million people, a sprawling archipelago populated by people with hundreds of different languages and ethnicities. The program also aims to shape a new generation of leaders who understand the needs of rural communities. "We hope this experience will equip them with empathy, knowledge and understanding about the reality of Indonesia today," said the program's founder, Anies Baswedan. Through this program we will have young Indonesians with the ability to represent us in the global setting but also an understanding about our grass roots. "This is not only about teaching," said Mr. Baswedan, who is also president of Paramadina University. The young teachers live for a year with a family, "and they become like one of their sons or daughters. They become a role model in that village. A similar program in the 1950s focused on building high schools. The program fizzled after 10 years largely because of political tensions in the 1960s, but many credit that program with helping educate the business people and public officials who currently lead the country. At the time of Indonesia's independence from the Dutch in 1945, there were fewer than 100 high schools in a country of 72 million. "The colonial powers left us with nothing," Mr. Baswedan said. Now there are thousands of high schools and more than 300 universities, but finding quality teachers for the most remote areas is a challenge, he said. Since dispatching the first 51 teachers in 2009, the program has received 19,518 applications. Recruiters are currently selecting 72 teachers from more than 8,500 for the fourth deployment. They say applicants must be recent graduates, have strong academic records and proven leadership ability; a teaching degree is not required. "We're going for the crème de la crème," Mr. Baswedan said. Teachers undergo two months of teaching and leadership training, including survival skills to help them adjust to villages with minimal infrastructure. In Gobang, where Ms. Kusumaningrum is based, there is no running water and no Internet. Grades one through 12 each have classrooms - dimly painted concrete shells with missing floor tiles, broken ceiling panels and cracked walls. Assistance more often arrives at schools closer to the roads, say teachers at the school, SD Mayak. This is a remote place. We don't get many teachers from outside the village," said Darsa, who teaches the fourth grade. He and the other instructors have welcomed Indonesia Mengajar in the hope that it can help develop the school's curriculum and its 169 students. The schools Ms. Kusumaningrum attended in Indonesia had good resources and were devoted to meeting national testing benchmarks. She would later attend one of the country's top-ranked universities, Gadjah Mada, and graduate with honors. She now rotates between classrooms at the modest school in Gobang, teaching English, math and Indonesian to grades one through six.