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On enrollment day, the education authorities will close SD Muhammadiyah Gantong, a crumbling Muslim village school on Belitung, unless it registers at least ten new pupils. Only nine have come, and teachers Bu Muslimah and Pak Harfan are preparing to give up. Then Harun, an older boy with an intellectual disability, arrives with his mother and becomes the tenth, so the school survives only because it accepts the child other schools would pass over.
Lintang, a fisherman's son, cycles about 40 km each way to school, through swamp roads with crocodiles, and becomes a mathematical prodigy. He leads the poor school to victory over the well-funded tin company school in a regional academic quiz. The book presents this as proof that talent has no protection when a family has no economic buffer.
The state tin company pulls enormous wealth out of Belitung but concentrates it inside a walled compound, the Gedong, with its own well-equipped school, hospital and amenities for company staff. The native miners and fishermen outside live in poverty beside it. The resource enriches the island's ground but not its people, because the institutions built on it serve the extractors and seal off the locals.
Pak Harfan tells his pupils to live to give as much as possible, not to receive as much as possible. He and Bu Muslimah model this by teaching for almost no pay in a leaking building, which makes the school's worth a matter of the teachers' commitment rather than its resources. The book treats a teacher's visible self-sacrifice as the thing that makes poor children believe their education is worth fighting for.