“Because they are teachers, it’s impossible they commit corruption, they are the ones who educate us.”
That was what a group of high school seniors in Solo, Central Java naively thought about their teachers before they uncovered the systematic embezzlement of funds committed by their school’s administrators.
Their story is captured in the 2008 mini documentary ‘Our School, Our Lives’, in which members of that year’s student association at SMA Negeri 3 Surakarta led a school corruption investigation team named SOS (Save Our School).
The team found discrepancies in their school budget, collected hard evidence, and then tried to hold the school staff accountable for corruption.
It certainly gives us hope that in Indonesia – where corruption remains rampant – there are still many people, particularly amongst members of the younger generations, who are willing to stand up for what’s right, no matter the consequences (students from previous years also attempted to shed the light on corruption in their school, but were threatened with expulsion).
Our favorite moment in the entire documentary has to be seeing the priceless looks on the members of the school administration as they tried to feign innocence when SOS calls them out with evidence of their corruption at a assembly in front of the entire school.
While the video doesn’t reveal if SOS was successful in their efforts to cleanse their school of corruption, Indonesia Corruption Watch reported in 2011 that the story blew up city wide, which prompted then Mayor Joko Widodo (who, as you probably know, went on to become the president of Indonesia) to order an investigation into the school’s finances. Investigators found that Rp 750 million had been embezzled from the school – much more than even SOS initially thought – and both the headmaster and vice headmaster were fired and ordered to return the money.
‘Our School, Our Lives’ was filmed by documentary filmmaker Steve Pillar Setiabudi and was initially released in 2008. It recently went viral after being re-released online by Asian short films curator Viddsee. The video, which was uploaded on August 16, has had more than 100,000 hits on Viddsee’s Youtube channel at the time of writing.
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