Hello again, and welcome to AS IT IS from VOA Learning English.
I’m June Simms in Washington.
Today, we celebrate the first graduating class of Liquidnet Family High School in Rwanda.
And we travel to Indonesia. The country is home to millions of unregistered children. Today we hear how not having a birth certificate can have long lasting effects.
Getting a birth certificate in Indonesia can be an administrative nightmare. It takes a lot of paperwork and is quite costly. This is especially true for millions of people in the country’s poor and lower income communities. Without a birth certificate, the children are not able to get an education, or even basic healthcare. Jim Tedder reports.
After collecting plastic bottles and sorting through trash, 26-year-old Santi returns home to her small wooden shack. Her son plays banjo on local buses for money. Together they make just enough to get by. Opportunities are few for people who live in this Jakarta slum. That is especially true for the children, many of whom do not officially exist.
Santi says she cannot afford to pay for birth certificates. But without them her children cannot go to school.
Santi’s children are among as many as 35 million children who activists estimate are unregistered.
Amrullah Sofyan is a project manager at Plan Indonesia, a child rights group that is working toward universal birth registration.
“Birth registration is part of the first identity for the children to become citizens because it is linked with their other rights, like identity, nationality, a right to education, a right to health.”
Marriage registration, a passport and the right to vote are also out of reach without a birth certificate.
“It is a matter of citizenship. They are citizens of this country. If we are only concerned with population administration, we will reject them and send them back to their village. We ask the government when they make a policy not to be blind to the people because it is a reality. Street children, marginalized children [are] a reality. The policy should be open.”
1.unregistered adj. [法] 未注册的；未登记的
eg. Commissioners are discussing how to solve the problem of unregistered land effectively.
2.paperwork n. 文书工作
eg. She is getting bogged down in all this paperwork.
3.shack n. 棚屋；小室
eg. Up the road, in his shack, the old man was sleeping again.
4.out of reach 够不着
eg. The box was just out of reach.
5.be blind to 不了解，对…是盲目的；对…视而不见；看不懂
eg. We cannot be blind to her selfishness.
6.marginalize vt. 排斥；忽视；使处于社会边缘；使脱离社会发展进程
eg. My view is students marginalize classes like that.