Make time for charity on your next Bali trip

Ragam Foundation serves nutritious lunches to underprivileged children throughout the holiday island. Carolynne Dear finds out how holidaymakers can lend a helping hand

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Make time for charity in Bali - Nick Kimman founded Ragam Foundation

Peeling 500 hard-boiled eggs is a lengthy, back-breaking process. I should know, as that is exactly what I was tasked with during a morning helping out at Bali’s Ragam Foundation.

Once the eggs were done, I was moved to paper food packet creation where my limited origami skills were found to be sorely lacking. However, I powered through and eventually created about 100 pockets ready to hold around a quarter of the lunches that myself and around 20 fellow holidaymakers were preparing.

Volunteering for this worthy nonprofit organisation is a fulfilling, if tiring, venture. The charity was set-up in 2021 by Dutch-national and Indonesian-born Nick Kimman. The aim is simple, to provide underprivileged children on the island with a nourishing and hot midday meal. That equates to 500+ meals prepared daily, which rises dramatically to more than 1,000 during times of crisis such as the charity’s disaster response to flooding on the island last year. My mind boggled (and my back winced) at the thought of another 500 eggs on the peeling board.

Located in Kerobokan, the charity operates community kitchens, gardens and sustainable programmes such as recycling and social water initiatives. As well as welcoming volunteers five days a week, it partners with local businesses, such as Alila Seminyak, the hotel hosting me during my trip. Just the week before, Alila had sent over enough volunteer staff members to complete a day’s worth of lunch preparation.

Kimman admits the reason for forming the charity was purely to help others and was influenced by his experience working in commercial kitchens. ‘Ragam’ means diversity, which Kimman hopes is demonstrated through the programmes he runs, the people he supports and the volunteers and organisations who support him. The vision is straight forward, to improve the welfare of underprivileged communities in Bali and Indonesia. He sees Ragam as the bridge between people wanting to give and those needing support. “It’s about bringing balance to the island,” he says.

Make time for charity in Bali - peeling eggs (right) with other volunteers

Other tasks during the morning I volunteered at the outdoor kitchens included garlic and onion peeling, veggie chopping and then, finally, wok-frying the ingredients. The carb element to the meal came from the massive tureens containing around 40kg of boiled rice. My eggs, the protein part of the meal, were flash-fried in the wok and then added to the vegetables and a tasty-smelling curry sauce.

A group of us spent around an hour carefully folding the cardboard food packets. Finally, everything was ready to be packed. I was allocated rice serving as my next duty, a task which I have to admit was as back breaking as peeling the eggs. As a mum of four, I’m used to serving large-ish meals, but nothing had prepared my shoulders for scooping 500 portions of rice into paper packets. I was entirely and justifiably proud of myself as the pockets were carefully stashed into large boxes and loaded into vans for delivery across Bali. 

The meal we had prepared was fresh, nutritious and ecologically conscious with not a morsel of plastic used in the packing process. The packets may have been destined for underprivileged children in one of the poorer countries of the world, but to be honest, a lot of richer, ‘western’ school kitchens could learn a thing or two from the Ragam set-up. 

Ragam welcomes volunteers every morning, not just those wanting to help in the kitchen, but food and cash donations as well. Our group was dropped to the kitchens by Alila Seminyak concierge at 9am and we were back at the hotel by around 1pm, feeling rather chuffed with what we’d achieved; 500-plus children would be eating a hot lunch thanks to our hard work. Assessing whether your efforts have been worthwhile when volunteering is not always as clear cut.

If you can carve some time out of your holiday, a few hours spent with the Ragam Foundation is a morning you won’t regret.

Ragam Foundation can be contacted via its Facebook page, Ragam Foundation.