The Next Doorway, the Next Village: Answering Need in Lombok Utara

This week in Lombok Utara has been a story woven from many small moments—of hands held, of names remembered, of laughter slipping through the cracks of something heavier. It has been a week of walking into homes where time moves slowly, where mothers speak in quiet, steady voices, where babies blink up at the world, unaware of what the numbers say about them.

Bashri, relentless and sure-footed, won the trust of the head of the community health center. Not only did every single participant show up, but they arrived on time, as if summoned by something greater than obligation. Safarah and her team moved like clockwork, their training more than just instruction—an act of communion. The participants engaged, absorbed, answered, danced. Because why shouldn’t learning be joyful? Why shouldn’t change feel like music?

And then, the home visits. Winding through narrow paths, midwives in their element, cadres providing nutrition counseling to a young pregnant mother nervously in the doctor’s presence. Babies in arms. The gentle weight of responsibility. Cadre’s hesitant but insistent voices: Just one more house. One more child. Up on the hill. And so we go. Because how do you stop? How do you say, this is enough, when need keeps calling from the next doorway, the next village, the next mother’s eyes?

The goodbyes are never simple. A photo, a hug, a request disguised as a question: When will you come back? Will you visit my house next time? How often do you travel? Where will you be next month? As if geography, like care, should have a pattern, a promise.

Later, over dinner, the After Action Review. One of our FPCs speaks of names. Not numbers. Because numbers turn children into targets, into milestones, into policy briefs. They allow us to say, We must bring stunting down from 15% to 10% next year. But names—names make us remember. Names make it unbearable. Because when you remember that each number has a face, a laugh, a future that could be different, even one stunted child is one too many.

And at the end of it all, under a quiet sky, the laughter returns. Durians split open, the night filled with teasing, with stories, with the kind of joy that can only come when people have given everything and still have something left to give to each other.

A durian party. Because sometimes, after everything, joy is an act of resistance.

And this—this is what keeps me going.