Markus came to Ampel as a guest in April 2024. He came back in March 2025 as something harder to name — not a tourist anymore, not a local, something in between that the village has had to find language for.
He was a secondary school teacher from Hamburg who had taken an extended leave of absence to travel. He had already been through Thailand, Vietnam, and Lombok when a friend's recommendation brought him to Nusa Penida and, eventually, to an Ampel Experience day. He did the trekking route to Goa Gede, ate lunch with Wayan Surani's cooking in the village pavilion, spent an hour watching Men Sruti work the loom. He was quiet for most of it, the way people are when they're paying attention rather than performing enjoyment.
Before he left, he asked whether the village school needed help. He was a teacher. He had time. He wanted to know if his being there could be useful rather than just pleasant.
Months Markus spent volunteering at Ampel village school, running conversational English sessions twice a week for the upper classes.
The Conversation We Almost Didn't Have
My first instinct was to say no, or at least not yet. Voluntourism has a well-documented history of producing more value for the volunteer than for the community. Unskilled helpers create work for the people who have to manage them. Even skilled ones bring assumptions — about what children need, about how learning should feel — that don't always survive contact with the reality of a specific place and a specific school.
But Markus was a qualified secondary school teacher with twelve years of experience. He spoke Bahasa Indonesia at a functional level. He wasn't proposing to build anything or renovate anything or run a project; he was asking to sit with a class twice a week and practise English conversation. The school principal, when I asked her, said yes immediately. She'd been wanting something like this for two years.
"I didn't come back to feel good about myself. I came back because I had something useful and the village said they wanted it."
What Changed and What Didn't
For three months, Markus rented a room from a family in the village, ate where the village ate, and taught on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons. He was not a hero of this story — he was careful to say so himself. The students were already curious about the world; he just gave them a native speaker to practise their curiosity on. The principal says two students have since enrolled in an English-language correspondence programme they wouldn't have considered before.
What this experience changed, for Helios, is the way we think about what a guest relationship can become. We don't have a formal volunteer programme, and we're not sure we want one — the structure of such programmes tends to flatten the specific, particular connections that make them valuable. But we are keeping the door open to the conversation Markus started. When a guest leaves Ampel and asks how they can give something back, we have a better answer now than we did before.