On Fri, 31 Dec 2004 17:03:41 UTC, "Steve" wrote:


but opted for an international school
(another story).

Do tell...
Chris


Chris, if your referring to my last comment in this thread, here goes::

We enrolled 2 of our 3 sons in one of the international schools. The name
was Magellan's (unsure of spelling) International School. This would have
been in 1979, during Marshal Law, under Marcos..

The school bus picked up our children in the BF Homes sub-div. outside of
Makita. The first thing I noticed was an armed guard on the bus and was
somewhat surprised but not impressed.

Who would be?

I teach in Jakarta, as you may be aware there have been some bombings
here over the last few years, including a grenade thrown in to the
Australian International School compound. Folowing this several of the
larger schools set up full security fences and paid the armed forces
to provide protection. Several of the parents moved their children
from those schools to ours because they didn't want their kids
educated surrounded by machine guns (and I mean machine guns, in
sand-bagged nests, not just automatic rifles). That aside, all schools
here have security guards to protect the kids from the perceived
threat of abduction - which does happen, but not as often as people
think. Any kid at a private school, not just international schools, is
a target as the parents are udoubtedly much richer than the general
populace. To give you an idea the 'minimum wage' in Jakarta is about
US$ 75 per month or US$900 per year (and many people earn way less
than that), this is supposed to support a husband wife and several
kids. Kids in our secondary school cost around 10 x that per year in
school fees (and that would be a pretty typical fee for the other
better 'internationally-foccused' private schools too, while the big
international schools are about US$ 13-15,000 per year), so the
kidnappers deduce that kids at these schools come from wealthy
families and they are an attractive target - one ransom could be 10 or
more years work....

My experience and opinion, FWIW.

Thanks, it was interesting and I'm glad your kids turned out well, and
hopefully happy!

Steve
s/v Good Intentions


Chris




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