Help Wayan Change Her Life

HELP WAYAN CHANGE HER LIFE

“I want to change my life to be better. I want people who underestimate me to see me succeed even though I am a poor person."

Wayan (center) with her parents and younger sisters in front of their home.

Wayan is twenty-one and has five sisters. She lives with her parents in the mountains outside the tiny village of AbangSongan.

I met Wayan and her family when I moved to Bali ten years ago. When she was sixteen I hired her to help me with household chores. Wayan is one of the most extraordinary people I have ever known.

Since she was a young girl, Wayan’s ambition to rise above her circumstances set her apart from many of the youth in the region. She knew education was the key to escaping the poverty cycle.

In Bali, the primary and middle school are subsidized by the government but high school is not.

Wayan moved in with a family that owned a café in a town where the high school offered night classes. She worked at the café to earn money for school fees and went to school at night.

After graduation, Wayan applied at Crystal College to study culinary arts and hospitality. She completed the course while working for me and was offered a job as restaurant wait staff at the Marriott Marquis Queens Park, a five-star hotel in Bangkok. She had been there two months when Covid hit. The hotel shut down and Wayan came home.

Wayan with her sisters at her graduation from Crystal College.

Since then, she has been selling vegetables at the night market in Denpasar and cooking for a local café in Kintamani during the day.

Now, through an international employment agency connected with Crystal College, Wayan has the opportunity to work for the Park Hyatt, a five-star hotel in Tokyo. She passed the interview and has been offered a three-year contract.

To prepare her for the position, the agency requires two months of Japanese language training while they acquire her visa, work permit, health insurance, airline ticket, and make arrangements for her lodging. Unlike agencies in the U.S., the employer does not cover the company’s fee. Wayan must pay for everything herself. The amount far exceeds her or her family’s subsistence earnings.

But Wayan’s dream isn’t just to better herself.

“I have two younger sisters,” she tells me. “I don’t want them to feel the same as me, like they can’t continue to senior high school because my parents cannot pay for it. I want to pay for my sisters’ education. I also want to build a new house and family temple for my parents.”

The job in Japan would enable her to do that.

Please join me to help this amazing, resilient, hard-working woman achieve her dream.