So… I have been asked to contribute a piece for the new blog on our Sekolah Nusa Alam website. It is a sunny Saturday morning, and I’m enjoying a little music when the message from Pak Yusaf, our principal, pops up on my phone.

‘I think it would be fitting for you, as a founder of the school, to kick off this new upgrade, Mark. Perhaps you could play with this year’s yearbook theme: Little Moments, Big Memories.’

‘Sure, why not?’

‘No pressure, but can we have it by tomorrow?’

‘Aha.’ I smile.

Where to start? At the beginning, of course. So, let me tell you about the founding of our school. It is an interesting story, an interesting history. The genesis of Sekolah Nusa Alam.

…

It was 1999. In the years of living dangerously. My wife, Ibu Sopantini, and I were newly married, a baby on the way. President Suharto had just been deposed. Jakarta was in turmoil: daily protests, a monetary crisis, tanks on the streets. I had given up my job as principal of the Australian International School and had my head down writing up my doctoral thesis (a study of intercultural literacy in Indonesia). It was then that I received an invitation from long-term Lombok resident Peter Cranfield. Would I be interested in helping to establish an international school on the island?

Peter and his wife, Ibu Ace, were frustrated with the standard of local schools for their children. PT Newmont had established an international school. At the time, the mining families were housed in Lombok and the school, Buin Batu, temporarily operated out of a house in Mataram. Frustratingly, enrolment was restricted to the children of families associated with the big copper mine being established in Sumbawa.

Ibu Sopan and I visited Lombok, where we met with Peter, Ace, and a group of interested community members. It didn’t take long. Rather than just advising, why not move to Lombok and help establish and run the school? It was a no-brainer. Which education specialist would not welcome the opportunity to create a school from scratch; a school which would embody all the principles and values and lessons of a lifetime in education? Which young family would not take the chance to move from Jakarta to Lombok?

During that year, while Jakarta struggled with the ‘reformasi’ movement, Ibu Sopan continued to teach at Jakarta International School and I wrote up my doctorate. And, in between, we wandered about the Botanical Gardens in Bogor and dreamed up Sekolah Nusa Alam. Peter suggested the name. I created the logo. Sopan and I wrote the school song and designed the school uniform in a batik factory in Yogyakarta. Together, the four of us drafted the school vision and mission, developed a business plan, created a curriculum, researched standard dimensions for school furniture, met with the local education office, and established a legal entity, Yayasan Sekolah Nusa Alam.

In December, we moved to Lombok. It was the end of the millennium.

Everything was prepared for a January school opening. Ibu Ace had acquired a property in Montong: originally designed as a private clinic, the buildings were perfect for a small school. Peter and Ace had arranged for the construction of furniture. Sopan and I had bought books and basic supplies in Jakarta. Together, we had recruited a small team of teachers and support staff, Indonesian and international.

But if Jakarta was a frying pan, Lombok turned out to be a fire. The peaceful community we had discovered in 1999, a tropical idyll in which Sasak Muslims and Balinese Hindus happily coexisted, was ripped apart by politically orchestrated riots.

On 20 January 2000, we opened the school with just six students: a little gang of bright-eyed kids and keen teachers. By the end of the day, all but two of the children were gone, their families having fled the island. Our plans were in disarray.

An unlikely alliance of Suharto loyalists, Islamist hotheads and conservative military forces had stirred up the fight between the majority Muslim community and the tiny Christian minority, hoping to justify a military crackdown and create an excuse for the conservatives to seize power. Unfortunately, the day we had chosen to open our new school was also the day they had chosen for their riots.

That night, a couple of guys with military haircuts turned up on a motorbike, apparently planning to torch the school buildings. We were presumably on the list as a suspect foreign enterprise. Fortunately, we had held an Islamic selamatan after Friday prayers the previous week, and the local Sasak community turned them away. The would-be arsonists crossed us off their list and, after a day off, we resumed classes in Peter and Ace’s family home with their two children, the only remaining students.

The attempt to stir up trouble and seize power was a failure. The Christian community went to ground and efforts to provoke the Balinese Hindus failed. But the cost to Lombok was high. The commotion was all over in three days, but it left the place in shock. The overwhelming reaction amongst locals of all persuasions was along the lines of ‘What the hell was that all about?’ and ‘We must never, ever, let anything like that happen again!’

The following day, we discovered one of the school’s original six students still in Lombok. The girl’s mother was the general manager of the Holiday Inn, a resort hotel up the coast at Mangsit.

‘I’m not willing to take the risk of sending my daughter to school down at your place,’ she said, ‘but why don’t you run the school here for a couple of weeks? It’s not as if we have a lot of guests.’

So, for the next fortnight, we conducted daily classes at the Holiday Inn. It was wonderful! Learn to swim in the big resort pool, lunch in the empty restaurant, science lessons on the beach, and classes in a small meeting room. After a week, a local lad with big, worried eyes joined our little group. We now had four teachers and four kids. Eventually, as Lombok crept back to some semblance of normality and the numbers grew, we moved back into the school buildings in Montong about ten kilometres down the coast.

Ibu Sopan and I moved in too. With only four students, there was plenty of room, so we took over a couple of classrooms at the rear of the building – and there we set up house with our six-month-old son.

…

So, there you have it. It is over 25 years ago, but the memories are sharp. It was a pivotal moment – for Lombok and for me personally. And it is with enormous pride that I look at what has been achieved since then. Now housed in a purpose-built campus in Mataram city, Sekolah Nusa Alam is Lombok’s first international school, and it is still the only fully licensed international school (Satuan Pendidikan Kerjasama, or SPK), and the only Cambridge International Curriculum testing centre on the island.

Indonesia and Lombok have settled down, democracy has taken root, and the little moment when Ibu Sopan and I decided to move to Lombok and help set up a school, to realise a dream, that moment is a big memory.

Part of this story is adapted from Mark’s book, The Glass Islands.