Education: the road out of poverty.

from THE JAKARTA POST -- THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11, 2010 -- PAGE 23 I Ketut Alit grew up without access to education.

Like 99 percent of the other 3,000 people from a remote village balancing on the saddle between Mount Agung and Mount Batur in Bali's North East, Alit was illiterate.

Born into Ban, which covers 19 sub-villages, Alit never imagined life outside his rugged mountain home; a home where disease was the common lot, grinding poverty the only way of life known and iodine deficiency induced retardation endemic.

That's if you lived; infant mortality stood at between 30 to 50 percent of children under one year, mothers had never heard of maternal health clinics, nurses never visited, and the national census ignored the existence of these people.

Just over a decade ago, one man decided to spend his life changing these statistics. Englishman David Stone had kicked about much of the world, working as an engineer in Nigeria, the Caribbean, England …