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Beiby Sumanti is regal in a pink batik dress as she looks out over Sanggar Bapontar, the traditional music center on Central Jakarta’s Jalan Karet Sawah that she founded eight years ago.  

Beiby — a member of the Minahasa ethnic minority of North Sulawesi — started Bapontar as a means of safeguarding Minahasa culture and music, but since opening its doors in 2002 the center’s mission has grown far beyond the preservation of ethnic music. 

At the end of 2009, Beiby built two shelters on Bapontar’s small grounds to house “street boys,” as she calls them. After Beiby began offering shelter to the homeless youth, many of whom work as buskers in Jakarta, word spread among the itinerant community like wildfire. 

Now, Beiby says, around 20 to 22 of the “street boys” regularly spend time at Bapontar and at most the center attracts 50 youth at a time.

Bapontar’s mission might be broadening to serve the needs of the community, but this greater effort is still tied to the center’s original objective: creating, teaching and preserving traditional music. All one needs to do to see this is walk in the front door.  

Bapontar’s main building is an airy space with green columns and walls the color of ripe guava flesh. In one corner traditional feathered headdresses from Manado — worn during the cakalele, or war dance — stand lined up on the shelves. 

The building opens out onto a dusty courtyard, where a few rangy young men sit at wooden tables, quietly strumming guitars. Stray dogs lounge at their feet. 

Although Bapontar is nestled among Central Jakarta’s skyscrapers, the relaxed atmosphere makes it easy to forget that it is located in the heart of the busy capital. “I want to preserve Minahasa culture,” Beiby says. “In my town, they forgot about traditional music. At parties, they use keyboards [instead of traditional instruments].” 

Beiby, 50, has worn many hats throughout her life — real estate agent, guesthouse proprietor, furniture saleswoman and restaurant manager — but her passion has always been music.  

This love of music can be traced back to Beiby’s childhood near Lake Tondano in Sulawesi, where she grew up in a musical household — her father was a talented steel guitar player. 

It’s a skill she says she tried to learn, but is quick to add with a sly smile that she was “not a success.” Beiby’s appreciation and love of music is a passion she is driven to share with others.  

Over curut, cinnamon cookies from North Sulawesi, Beiby shows off Bapontar’s sizeable collection of kolintang, xylophone-like wooden instruments that originated with the Minahasa.  

Untug, a kolintang maker with a face as deeply creased as a walnut, builds the instruments on the premises. 

Beiby buys the tools and materials to construct the kolintang from donated funds and the profit she makes from selling the instruments to churches and embassies.  

Bapontar has a kolintang ensemble and offers free lessons to anyone who wishes to learn how to play the instrument.  

Fatli Rombis, 27, who is a kolintang instructor at the center, moved to Jakarta from Manado in 1999 and met Beiby while working in a restaurant she managed at the time. 

He learned to play kolintang at the center not long after.  Fatli has recently returned from Shanghai, where he played in a kolintang ensemble for an audience that included prominent Chinese music professors. 

Beiby proudly states that five of Bapontar’s kolintang players have been sent abroad since 2003 to play in the United States, Australia, China and South Korea. 

She adds that Bapontar’s kolintang players have also performed in Jakarta at four-star hotels, malls, Merdeka Palace and even the Cipinang Prison.  

And in what was perhaps their most high-profile engagement, Bapontar players participated in a 2009 event near Tondano, in which almost 2,000 musicians came together to form the biggest kolintang ensemble ever. 

That performance is still listed in the Guinness Book of World Records. 

However, for all its many musical accomplishments, perhaps Bapontar’s greatest achievement is the service it provides to a segment of Jakarta’s population that is most in need, its legions of homeless street kids. 

By opening Bapontar to these young people, Beiby hopes to provide them with a safe space where they can escape the city’s streets and overpasses. Many of them struggle with drugs and alcohol. 

A handful of “street girls” have come to the center, too, some pregnant after being raped. Bapontar’s motto is “si tou timou tumou tou,” or “man lives to educate others.” 

The phrase, attributed to Sam Ratulangi, a celebrated Minahasa politician and journalist, reflects Beiby’s vision for the center. Since 2009, she has tried to provide Bapontar’s street children with reading and writing lessons. 

She teaches them when she can, and recruits a small corps of volunteers to help in the effort. She also gives them a place to channel their musical talents, especially through collaboration with Bapontar’s kolintang players.  

Sitting cross-legged on the floor of a garage-like room in the compound, four “street boys” talk about their experiences.  

Bolang, an 18-year-old from Medan, has a pierced tongue and an intricate tattoo of a batik motif on his left forearm. He heard about Bapontar through a friend he met on a bus and came here to seek shelter.  

Asep, 32, has long hair that falls into his eyes even though he ties it back. He has been in Jakarta for three months, and traveled straight from his home in Sukabumi, West Java, to Bapontar.  

Ceko, the oldest of the “kids,” is 40. A veteran musician and actor, his arms are riddled with faded tattoos — remnants of his stint in an “underground” rock band. 

Today, Ceko lives at Bapontar and spends much of his time making traditional instruments from across the archipelago.  Wide-eyed Satya, 20, is from Surabaya. He says he came to Jakarta to seek “freedom” from his hometown and his family. 

When he arrived in the city, he lived under a bridge and was drunk “all the time.” He heard about Bapontar from Ceko. Ceko’s creations hang on one wall of the room. 

He takes a few off the wall and plays them. He blows on a songsoy from Baduy. It sounds like a Japanese flute. He draws a bow across a one-stringed ceng kling from Kalimantan.  

Looking at Ceko, it can be easy to imagine that these “boys” have found a permanent home at Bapontar. Indeed, Ceko’s work is nailed to the wall — he has literally made his mark here. 

But in reality, most of the “street boys” lead more transient lives. Just as word-of-mouth brings youth to Bapontar, the street pulls them out again.  

Beiby laments that she has a difficult time tracking the “boys” once they leave Bapontar. This makes it hard to measure how Bapontar’s music outreach and education programs affect them in the long term. 

But even if Bapontar is unable to retain these “street boys,” a colorful mural on one of the compound’s inner walls reveals a vision of what Bapontar longs to be. 

Whimsical fish and octopi dance along the bottom of the mural. Sums like “1+1=” are scrawled in the blackboard. Above it, a cartoon figure cries “Ayoo! Belajar!” (“Let’s study!”), a nod to Beiby’s attempts to educate those who come for shelter. 

Perhaps most poignantly, a dark scene of a bulldozer demolishing houses fades into a painting of a serene boy and girl. The two exist in a kind of haven, even as more destructive forces lurk just outside.