Updates from Like in Indonesia
Like has been in Indonesia for over a month now and lots of things have happened. Her goals while there on a Fulbright award in the next six months are:
- To adapt ScrippsOMA and ScrippsAVID to benefit Indonesian older adults living with dementia and students;
- To identify partners and structures that will support the OMA programs’ sustainability beyond my Fulbright period;
- To assist with impact evaluation research on OMA participants in Indonesia.
Like has met multiple times with her partners there: The host university, Universitas Katolik Atma Jaya, Psychology Department and School of Medicine and the local non-profit Alzheimer’s Indonesia (ALZI). ALZI also uses purple as their theme color there too, just like the Alzheimer’s Society in the USA. The fold-out brochure they are holding shows the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease.
The photo below shows Like with the host university partners all holding OMA art cards that Like had brought for them as gifts at her first formal presentation about OMA.
They will do two sets of OMA programs in Indonesia. In May they will start a series of OMA sessions at an adult day center and in July they will begin another series of OMA sessions at a nursing home. In between the two sets of OMA sessions, they will have two fully in-person OMA facilitator training sessions, the first one in English and the second in Indonesian. After finalizing the Indonesian translation and adaptation, they will work with Atma Jaya Press to produce booklets of the Indonesian facilitator training materials for future use. In August we will have ALZI’s 10th anniversary OMA art exhibition.
Like and partners recently visited the nursing home where they will be doing OMA programming in July and met a few older adults. This is a nursing home run by 4 Catholic nuns with 70 residents and 21 staff members. A single room there costs about $150/month and a double costs $100/month. Fancier retirement communities run about ten times this cost. Here are some of the residents at Santa Ana:
In Jakarta, Like lives in an apartment tower of 45 floors. She can walk from her apartment to the psychology department, where she has an office, and shop at a local market. The school of medicine is at another campus, about 45 minutes away when there is no traffic, or 90-120 minutes with traffic. She gets around using “Grab,” which is an Indonesian version of Uber. Occasionally, she rides the bus or the subway around town, or carpools with students and colleagues. Everything is quite convenient where she is, when not caught in traffic!
