The core of Bahasa Basudara’s work is teaching English, Dutch, German, French, Alune and Wemale languages free of charge and online. Our aim is for anybody to be able to learn regardless of their income or location in Maluku.

We formed Bahasa Basudara as we could see that there were only a few students from Maluku who were able to study overseas. Since founding of Bahasa Basudara in 2020, many of our former students and tutors are studying and working  in the US, New Zealand, Germany, the UK, Italy, Russia, Australia, Norway, Japan and of course at many other universities in Indonesia.

We regularly update our “Komunitas Bahasa Basudara” Facebook page with available scholarship opportunities worldwide, so keep an eye on this. In the meantime, we continuously receive enquiries about new online classes and have recently set up our 432^nd class.

More than language learning

However, our work is not limited to online language teaching. We have supported various villages and communities throughout Maluku by:

·    Donating laptops, projectors and mobile phones and renovated school buildings to enable students to participate in various educational activities. We have collected and donated over 3,000 mainly English books to various universities and schools in Maluku.

·     Distributing over 3,500 sporting kits donated by British School Jakarta to many communities and sporting clubs in Maluku. An additional shipment of approximately 1,500 kits is on the way to Ambon now.

·    Collaborating with many universities in Maluku to support their English language and tourism faculties. We have conducted Campus Road Shows to talk directly to students on the importance of English, their career choices and how to manage their personal finance.

·     Spelling Bee annual spelling bee contests, which have become well known by many children and parents in Maluku. In 2020 we started with 18 participants, and by 2023 we had to close the registration early when we reached 80 participants.

·    Supporting many other educational activities in Maluku, such as: a photography competition in Damar Island; Bible reading and Lord’s Prayers competitions in Ambon; Educational Festivals in various villages in Ambon and Seram; the Nama Cultural Festival in Aru; the publishing and launching of “Awan-awan Maluku” poetry book; and support for some local football and athletic clubs. We even had our own “Summer of Poetry” in August-September 2021 highlighting the work of twelve up and coming Moluccan poets.

·    Running education programmes such as the Bacarita Dari Timur webinar series, a sort of Moluccan Ted-talk series. In 2021 we started the Duke of Edinburgh International Award in Maluku, the first and only centre in Eastern Indonesia.. In 2021, we ran a series of Entrepreneurship workshops which led to a series of micro-credit facilities (with money donated by our sponsors) in two different Churches in Ambon. These are mainly home-industry businesses run by women. This ongoing micro-credit programme is a pilot project which we hope can be expanded eventually to other communities in Maluku.

But of course the most exciting thing we have done this year is opening the Bahasa Basudara Café in Lateri area of Ambon. This is the only English language café in Maluku (perhaps even in Indonesia) where you can safely practice your English no matter what level.

Telling our story

So, we have been extremely busy! To reflect the various activities we have updated our website www.bahasabasudara.org. The website now has exciting new images on the front page and click-on buttons to make it easier for those who want to register as a student (that form is in Bahasa Indonesia), or to volunteer as tutor.

We have updated the album gallery page with lots of beautiful photos showing the work we have done over the last few months.

The updated website also has a special page dedicated to our Bahasa Basudara Café and of course there is a page where there are traditional Moluccan stories in English, Bahasa Indonesia and various local Moluccan languages. The website also has updated testimonial page and media coverage page. Finally we updated our partners page with their logos included on our front page.

We are a Community Interest Company so we depend on your support to fund the various activities we run, so our website now has “Support Us” buttons where you can donate in Pound Sterling or Euros.

So, please have a look at and explore our website. Let us know what we can be doing better, and welcome to the Bahasa Basudara community!