My time now seriously draws to a close, and I worry how I will possible get everything done in time and how I will be able to say goodbye to this place that has become my home.
Last weekend, Dave, another volunteer, and I went on a “petualangan,” which is Indonesian for adventure. Dave is here teaching English on his way home from a four year stint of living in Japan and had enjoyed his month with ASRI so much that he had decided to stay for another. His visa was about to expire and he had to leave the country to get a new one. Although I could have simply sent mine to Pontianak to have it extended another 30 days, I decided that I too would skip town and go to Kucing.
Kuching literally means “cat” in Indonesian and Malay, but no one seems to know why exactly Kuching is called Kuching, though there are several theories. In any case, it is a lovely little city in Sarawak (part of Malaysian Borneo) on a river near the coast. To get there from Sukadana we took a 5 hour speedboat last thursday afternoon, to Pontianak (capital of West Kalimantan), and after a quick dinner we got on the nine oclock night bus. Although I cannot claim it was the greatest night of sleep I have ever gotten, and getting woken up at 4 to go through a border crossing doesn’t help, I must admit that I was pleasantly suprised by the painlessness of the experience (of course we treated ourselves to the super executive class which has HUGE reclinging seats and provided you with a blanket etc.)
After arriving in Kuching Friday morning drowsy and disoriented we found ourselves a place to stay and then set off to go to the Indonesian consulate. The nice taxi driver that we tried to hire, however, informed us that the consulate would be closed as it was a national holiday. Of course, why didn’t we think of that? Resigning ourselves to the fact that we would have to remain in this lovely city until at least Monday was not hard.
Friday was spent exploring the city, eating Lebanese food (ahh hommus and falafel how I’ve missed thee) and going to the Sarawak Museum which is chock full of interesting displays, including one about the history of oil in Sarawak (funded by Shell Oil), as well as a seashell collection, and a reconstructed Dayek longhouse (complete with human skulls decorating the interior). Saturday we went to an orangutan rehabilitation center which was similar to Tanjung Puting in Kalimantan where I had previously gone on a trip and seen several “feedings.” We were extra lucky that morning however, and I saw my first dominant which is a huge hairy beast with crazy cheek phalanges.
Next up was the Sarawak Cultural Village which is a “living museum” and though very touristy, also very cool. Out on a peninsula there are houses built in the traditional style of the various tribes and people of Sarawak (including not only several different kinds of longhouses, but also a Chinese farmhouse and a Malay style house). Our timing worked out well as the World Harvest Festival was going on that weekend and there were several visiting dance troupes as well as a special “theme play” that evening and the finals of “Miss Fair and Beautiful, Ethnic Beauty Contest.” The play was fantastic, and although we did not stay to see how would be crowned the fairest of them all, we DID try river snails (tasty) as well as some sort of toasted white maggot worm (less tasty).
Sunday was my birthday (thanks for all the well wishes!), and aside from wishing that more of the wonderful people in my life could have been there, I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Dave and I went out to Bako National Park, which is only accessible by boat. There we hiked through the jungle, on the highlands along the coast, and eventually to a river with a small waterfall that was delicious for swimming. It was surreal. The well-marked nature of the park also caused us both to reflect, yet again, on how far Gunung Palung has to go in order to become a more accessible tourist destination.
Birthday dinner was at a restaurant called, aptly enough, Bla Bla Bla and we both ate ourselves sick in the finest American fashion. When the cheesecake that Dave had secretly ordered came out we were both too full to even touch it, almost. The margarita’s were also a nice touch.
It was great to be back out traveling again, seeing new things and having new adventures, but I was also anxious to get back to Sukadana as my time here dwindles at an alarming rate.
Monday, June 7, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Transmigration, actually
An issue that I have been wanting to write about since I first came across it is transmigration. I actually wrote an entire blogpost about this months ago, but for whatever reason wasn’t quite happy with it and never posted it. Today, after what was perhaps my 5th trip to the Penjalaan Trans community, I have determined that I need to put some of my thoughts into words. Forgive the excess length in advance.
First, some background. Transmigration is the Indonesian government’s policy of subsidizing the migration of poor landless peoples from overcrowded “inner” islands such as Java and Bali to the less populated “outer” islands such as Papua, Sulawasi and Kalimantan. This controversial policy was originally started by the Dutch in the 19th century and eventually discontinued, only to be picked up again during the Suharto reign. The transmigrants are each given a small house and plot of land as well as some fertilizer and pesticide to start them off in their new life. The policy has many laudable qualities, namely trying to alleviate crowding and overpopulation and give people a new start, and it is not forced migration, however it has also been highly criticized. From the perspective the indigenous populations on these “lesser populated” islands the government is seen as simply trying to spread the already dominant Javanese influence, while simultaneously diminishing their resources. Indeed, the reason that the “underpopulated” islands were often much less populated stems partly from an inherent difference in the fertility of the land. The rich volcanic soils of Java and Bali are able to support a much denser population than the thin soil of Kalimantan. Thus, when the government clear cuts a swathe of forest and places a whole a group of alien people there has a number of obvious problems. The lack of trees makes the trans communities very hot and dry, yet prone to flooding. The transplanted farmers are often shocked and dismayed to see how much harder it is to get things to grow.
I first visited the Penjalaan trans community when I accompagnied Etty on a Penyuluhan (community environmental education).
Here is what I initially wrote:
The road there is considered very bad, and this is by Indonesian standards, not American. I had heard tales of the trans villages, but was not quite prepared for the bizarre and sad reality. While generally in Indonesia houses appear to be placed higgedly-piggedly, creating a happy sort of disorganization, the trans community has the alarming order of military barracks. We emerged from the dirt path in a huge cleared area (the government razed a large portion of the forest to create the space) with no trees for a few km in each direction. The community is split into several blocks referred to as “trans 1”, “trans 2”, etc. each of which is a road leading off of the main road with a long row of houses on each side. Behind each house is a small plot of land (allotted by the government) on which people can grow their vegetables or rice. The houses are all exactly the same, though some of been modified by adding an extra shack to the back, or made to look prettier with some flowers in the front etc. There is no electricity or running water. People cook over wood fires and collect their rainwater from their roofs. We went first to the house of gentleman from block 5, originally from central Java. Their house was small, two rooms in the front, one to the side with a tikkar sleeping mat on the floor covered in a mosquito net, and one empty but for a bamboo mat on the ground (Indonesian houses often have very little furniture, but the trans houses tend to be extreme examples), behind the front room was the “kitchen” with its smoky fire over which cassava were being deep fried into fritters known as kripik which the Ibu (mother) then spiced and sold at the school. Behind the house was an outhouse, as well as a newly built pen for their newly acquired goats. And of course, a handful of chickens running all around outside.
Thus, I experienced some of the best hospitality I’ve had yet. We sat in the front room and dined on freshly fried cassava chips (keripik) and chatted in a mixture of Indonesian/Javanese/English (the Ibu knew quite a few English words, as she was proud to show). It was remarkably lovely. Soon, a small horde of local kids started showing up and sitting by the door/on the front porch. We tried to buy some of the keripik, but of course were not allowed to, and forced to take a whole bag stuffed full. Next, a woman across the street proudly showed us her vegetable garden and gave us three delicious cucumbers. Her adorable little son hid in her arms and she explained that he thought I was a doctor coming to give him shots since we had shown up in the ambulance. Finally, we visited Pak Maskur, whom I imagine to be one of ASRI’s star pupils. He was so excited to show us his vegetables patches, new cow, and compost pile. Here too they made cassava chips, so we snacked some more out on their front porch as the entire neighborhood seemed to slowly gather around us. Though my Bahasa Indonesia is not yet good enough to understand everything, smiles are universal.
Though everyone seemed generally happy, and they were all so wonderfully gracious, I could not help but wonder about their lives. First, what sort of poverty had driven them to move away from their homes to this inaccessible corner of an island without trees and notoriously difficult soil? Second, what sorts of opportunities were now available to their kids? The elementary school was in the kampung (village outside the trans area), close to the village head’s house we had been at earlier, an easy enough bicycle ride away. The middle school however was much farther, and the high school so far that it seemed almost laughable, an hour and a half at least by bike, maybe more. When it rained, they said, they kids couldn’t go to school. I wondered too about assimilation. If they were all off down this road in their enclosed community how could they ever hope to assimilate?
Today I look back on this first impression and realize while I now have a somewhat deeper understanding of the community, and a much deeper attachment many of my questions are still unanswered. My primary project for the past few months has been to conduct a survey of those who had previously attended ASRI’s organic farm training last summer. Penjalaan was among the the five villages that participated, and about half of the trainees were from the trans community necessitating several trips with iin to survey.
I still marvel at the hospitality of these people. While Indonesians are generally gracious and we are served a drink fairly regularly when interviewing, Last Thursday when Iin and I were there we forgot to eat lunch because we were so full from eating snack and drinking very sweet tea at every house (I actually think this is an occupational hazard and I blame my future obesity and diabetes on being a polite guest).
As I returned more to the community, however, I also began to notice how many of the homes were empty: I would say almost half, though the community is only 3 years old, and it’s no wonder. The community is highly isolated making it extremely difficult to do any work aside from farming, while the farming is very difficult due to the very acidic nature of the soil there. Many people high-tail it back to Java just as soon as they can.
This behavior is what worries me most about the trans communities and frustrates me most about the governments plan to continue building them. In Riam Berasap, another survey site, we recently heard about plans for a new trans community to be built, but why bother when there are so many empty houses already elsewhere? Another case of unintended consequences...the government has good intentions, but moving people is is not as simple as it seems and so much of the forest is getting lost along the way.
First, some background. Transmigration is the Indonesian government’s policy of subsidizing the migration of poor landless peoples from overcrowded “inner” islands such as Java and Bali to the less populated “outer” islands such as Papua, Sulawasi and Kalimantan. This controversial policy was originally started by the Dutch in the 19th century and eventually discontinued, only to be picked up again during the Suharto reign. The transmigrants are each given a small house and plot of land as well as some fertilizer and pesticide to start them off in their new life. The policy has many laudable qualities, namely trying to alleviate crowding and overpopulation and give people a new start, and it is not forced migration, however it has also been highly criticized. From the perspective the indigenous populations on these “lesser populated” islands the government is seen as simply trying to spread the already dominant Javanese influence, while simultaneously diminishing their resources. Indeed, the reason that the “underpopulated” islands were often much less populated stems partly from an inherent difference in the fertility of the land. The rich volcanic soils of Java and Bali are able to support a much denser population than the thin soil of Kalimantan. Thus, when the government clear cuts a swathe of forest and places a whole a group of alien people there has a number of obvious problems. The lack of trees makes the trans communities very hot and dry, yet prone to flooding. The transplanted farmers are often shocked and dismayed to see how much harder it is to get things to grow.
I first visited the Penjalaan trans community when I accompagnied Etty on a Penyuluhan (community environmental education).
Here is what I initially wrote:
The road there is considered very bad, and this is by Indonesian standards, not American. I had heard tales of the trans villages, but was not quite prepared for the bizarre and sad reality. While generally in Indonesia houses appear to be placed higgedly-piggedly, creating a happy sort of disorganization, the trans community has the alarming order of military barracks. We emerged from the dirt path in a huge cleared area (the government razed a large portion of the forest to create the space) with no trees for a few km in each direction. The community is split into several blocks referred to as “trans 1”, “trans 2”, etc. each of which is a road leading off of the main road with a long row of houses on each side. Behind each house is a small plot of land (allotted by the government) on which people can grow their vegetables or rice. The houses are all exactly the same, though some of been modified by adding an extra shack to the back, or made to look prettier with some flowers in the front etc. There is no electricity or running water. People cook over wood fires and collect their rainwater from their roofs. We went first to the house of gentleman from block 5, originally from central Java. Their house was small, two rooms in the front, one to the side with a tikkar sleeping mat on the floor covered in a mosquito net, and one empty but for a bamboo mat on the ground (Indonesian houses often have very little furniture, but the trans houses tend to be extreme examples), behind the front room was the “kitchen” with its smoky fire over which cassava were being deep fried into fritters known as kripik which the Ibu (mother) then spiced and sold at the school. Behind the house was an outhouse, as well as a newly built pen for their newly acquired goats. And of course, a handful of chickens running all around outside.
Thus, I experienced some of the best hospitality I’ve had yet. We sat in the front room and dined on freshly fried cassava chips (keripik) and chatted in a mixture of Indonesian/Javanese/English (the Ibu knew quite a few English words, as she was proud to show). It was remarkably lovely. Soon, a small horde of local kids started showing up and sitting by the door/on the front porch. We tried to buy some of the keripik, but of course were not allowed to, and forced to take a whole bag stuffed full. Next, a woman across the street proudly showed us her vegetable garden and gave us three delicious cucumbers. Her adorable little son hid in her arms and she explained that he thought I was a doctor coming to give him shots since we had shown up in the ambulance. Finally, we visited Pak Maskur, whom I imagine to be one of ASRI’s star pupils. He was so excited to show us his vegetables patches, new cow, and compost pile. Here too they made cassava chips, so we snacked some more out on their front porch as the entire neighborhood seemed to slowly gather around us. Though my Bahasa Indonesia is not yet good enough to understand everything, smiles are universal.
Though everyone seemed generally happy, and they were all so wonderfully gracious, I could not help but wonder about their lives. First, what sort of poverty had driven them to move away from their homes to this inaccessible corner of an island without trees and notoriously difficult soil? Second, what sorts of opportunities were now available to their kids? The elementary school was in the kampung (village outside the trans area), close to the village head’s house we had been at earlier, an easy enough bicycle ride away. The middle school however was much farther, and the high school so far that it seemed almost laughable, an hour and a half at least by bike, maybe more. When it rained, they said, they kids couldn’t go to school. I wondered too about assimilation. If they were all off down this road in their enclosed community how could they ever hope to assimilate?
Today I look back on this first impression and realize while I now have a somewhat deeper understanding of the community, and a much deeper attachment many of my questions are still unanswered. My primary project for the past few months has been to conduct a survey of those who had previously attended ASRI’s organic farm training last summer. Penjalaan was among the the five villages that participated, and about half of the trainees were from the trans community necessitating several trips with iin to survey.
I still marvel at the hospitality of these people. While Indonesians are generally gracious and we are served a drink fairly regularly when interviewing, Last Thursday when Iin and I were there we forgot to eat lunch because we were so full from eating snack and drinking very sweet tea at every house (I actually think this is an occupational hazard and I blame my future obesity and diabetes on being a polite guest).
As I returned more to the community, however, I also began to notice how many of the homes were empty: I would say almost half, though the community is only 3 years old, and it’s no wonder. The community is highly isolated making it extremely difficult to do any work aside from farming, while the farming is very difficult due to the very acidic nature of the soil there. Many people high-tail it back to Java just as soon as they can.
This behavior is what worries me most about the trans communities and frustrates me most about the governments plan to continue building them. In Riam Berasap, another survey site, we recently heard about plans for a new trans community to be built, but why bother when there are so many empty houses already elsewhere? Another case of unintended consequences...the government has good intentions, but moving people is is not as simple as it seems and so much of the forest is getting lost along the way.
Monday, May 3, 2010
Life, in a nutshell
Time flies when you’re having fun!
Some news:
(Life trials)
My computer is broken. Kaput. Oh well, May it rest in peace. Thank goodness for external hard-drives…
After a long and protracted inner debate that lasted about a month, I decided to apply to medical school. I then spent the next month trying to verbalize this decision into a personal statement, as well as take care of other odds and ends necessary in the application process. I’m still doing these things. Overall, I would say it’s been REALLY fun. But seriously, I’m happy I took the time to really think about this decision, to talk it over with a number of people, to consider the alternatives, and I feel good with the decision I have made. Please remind me that a few years from now when I am back in school, drowning in work, and upset over the condition of the world.
(city life)
I recently went on a 10 day “business” trip with Hotlin to Kota Kinabalu, located on the exact opposite side of Borneo in Sabah (Malaysia). It really is opposite of Sukadana in more than just geography. After a full day of traveling (3 plane flights!), we arrived in KK like a couple of heathen jungle women seeing civilization for the first time. It was (and is) hard to believe it’s the same island. KK is a modern city with clean streets, shiny shopping malls and a surplus of Starbucks. It also boasts an enviable location directly on the aquamarine ocean, a twenty-minute boat ride from five different off-shore islands each with its own reef to snorkel. We were there to train with Cynthia from LEAP, but managed to also find time to go snorkel at Pulau Sapi (Cow Island), check out the Kinabalu National Park with the premier expert on the endangered Borneo Rhino, get fancy haircuts and strengthening treatments, do a bit of shopping and eat a lot of delicious food. From fancy Italian dinners, to BBQ fish in the market by the water, from Thai food to Cynthia’s Mom’s delicious home-cooking, as well as the ability to buy yogurt and cheese at the grocery store, we were absolutely in food heaven.
While we were generally heavily scheduled from morning to late evening (and up WAY past “ Sukadana bedtime”) I also managed to have a bit of R and R at the end. I stayed with Suzanne, who works for Cynthia while we were there and has a beautiful apartment downtown with a giant lap-pool. Suzanne also has a side bag-making business (www.thebagbar.com), and as I stayed in the room where all the fabric and completed bags lived, I simply couldn’t help but buy one.
(village life)
Back in Sukadana things are going well. I’m on my fourth cycle of volunteers, though of course they don’t all line up perfectly. It’s hard to have such wonderful people come, and then just as you really get to know them, bid adieu. Jenny and Roberto, a lovely doctor and architect who were here before, were gone by the time I returned; Jenny was replaced with Maggie, a family practice physician from Denver, CO. She’s cool. We went on an attempted adventure yesterday in what turned into a torrential downpour; returning home with our tails between our legs we discovered neither of us had brought a key and we were locked out. Luckily, it’s hard to go too far in Sukadana and we soon located one.
Overall, I’m really enjoying living in the “girls house”; with the 5 Indonesians and 2 other Americans, there’s almost always someone to talk to, and as much of the dinner conversation takes place in Bahasa Indonesia it helps me practice. At first I wasn’t crazy about the 5:30 am alarm clocks and music (in addition to the ever-present roosters), but I have adapted and become an early to bed early to rise individual in the truest sense. Also, a number of the barn-like aspects of the house that I wrote about so lovingly (below) have also been modified since my return from KK. The improvements include puting in a kitchen sink, building a little bicycle garage, tiling the bathroom, and screening in the back-porch with bamboo and chicken-wire; the house has been blissfully chicken free for a week and a half now! Of course there are still some minor hiccups, such as the muddy color of the water now highlighted by the white tile, but we’re all too happy to really give it much thought.
(clinic life)
We are currently having free cataract surgeries for those blinded in one eye at the clinic. We have two visiting doctors and 4 nurses from a missionary hospital about 12 hours north of here as far as I can tell, performing the surgeries. A lot of effort has gone into planning this event: getting permission from about 10 different parts of bureaucracy, as is necessary in Indonesia, putting up signs and sending out text messages advertising the surgery, arranging the transport of the doctors and supplies, setting up three large tents loaned from the government and rearranging the entire clinic to create makeshift screening, pre-op, and operating rooms, just to name a few of the recent activities. Needless to say, it’s great to see it all come together and this morning we had several hundred people show up. Around 200 were potential patients, many blind in both eyes. The doctors are here for four days of operations and can do about 80 eyes. The screening process will probably eliminate about half of these potentials, selecting for those who have cataracts that are not only operable, but also completely obscuring vision in one eye. Preference goes first, of course, to those blind in BOTH eyes (who will get only one eye done this year). The surgeries began today and the first patients will be able to remove their bandages tomorrow and see for the first time in many years. I’m excited to see their reactions as they see their grandchildren for the first time and return to a world of light and color!
(that’s life)
My time here is starting to go by very, very quickly. Upon return from KK I had the rude awakening of only 7.5 weeks remaining. The new total is 6. Every morning running along the beach and hearing the gibbons’ call, every evening spent attempting to communicate in broken Bahasa now seems that much more special. I’m struggling to continue my “ organic farm survey” and am now worried that I won’t be able to finish in time. What started off as seeming like a good hunk of time in January now seems to have withered away into practically nothing. While I have learned a good deal here, I worry if I will be able to accomplish all that I want and that I aught, before heading home. I worry that by the time I am able to return to this special corner of the world, there will be no more rainforest and all the friends I have made will be gone. On the bright side, I AM looking forward to returning home to you all, dear readers! And also to ice cream, yogurt and cheese; they are practically family members, really.
Some news:
(Life trials)
My computer is broken. Kaput. Oh well, May it rest in peace. Thank goodness for external hard-drives…
After a long and protracted inner debate that lasted about a month, I decided to apply to medical school. I then spent the next month trying to verbalize this decision into a personal statement, as well as take care of other odds and ends necessary in the application process. I’m still doing these things. Overall, I would say it’s been REALLY fun. But seriously, I’m happy I took the time to really think about this decision, to talk it over with a number of people, to consider the alternatives, and I feel good with the decision I have made. Please remind me that a few years from now when I am back in school, drowning in work, and upset over the condition of the world.
(city life)
I recently went on a 10 day “business” trip with Hotlin to Kota Kinabalu, located on the exact opposite side of Borneo in Sabah (Malaysia). It really is opposite of Sukadana in more than just geography. After a full day of traveling (3 plane flights!), we arrived in KK like a couple of heathen jungle women seeing civilization for the first time. It was (and is) hard to believe it’s the same island. KK is a modern city with clean streets, shiny shopping malls and a surplus of Starbucks. It also boasts an enviable location directly on the aquamarine ocean, a twenty-minute boat ride from five different off-shore islands each with its own reef to snorkel. We were there to train with Cynthia from LEAP, but managed to also find time to go snorkel at Pulau Sapi (Cow Island), check out the Kinabalu National Park with the premier expert on the endangered Borneo Rhino, get fancy haircuts and strengthening treatments, do a bit of shopping and eat a lot of delicious food. From fancy Italian dinners, to BBQ fish in the market by the water, from Thai food to Cynthia’s Mom’s delicious home-cooking, as well as the ability to buy yogurt and cheese at the grocery store, we were absolutely in food heaven.
While we were generally heavily scheduled from morning to late evening (and up WAY past “ Sukadana bedtime”) I also managed to have a bit of R and R at the end. I stayed with Suzanne, who works for Cynthia while we were there and has a beautiful apartment downtown with a giant lap-pool. Suzanne also has a side bag-making business (www.thebagbar.com), and as I stayed in the room where all the fabric and completed bags lived, I simply couldn’t help but buy one.
(village life)
Back in Sukadana things are going well. I’m on my fourth cycle of volunteers, though of course they don’t all line up perfectly. It’s hard to have such wonderful people come, and then just as you really get to know them, bid adieu. Jenny and Roberto, a lovely doctor and architect who were here before, were gone by the time I returned; Jenny was replaced with Maggie, a family practice physician from Denver, CO. She’s cool. We went on an attempted adventure yesterday in what turned into a torrential downpour; returning home with our tails between our legs we discovered neither of us had brought a key and we were locked out. Luckily, it’s hard to go too far in Sukadana and we soon located one.
Overall, I’m really enjoying living in the “girls house”; with the 5 Indonesians and 2 other Americans, there’s almost always someone to talk to, and as much of the dinner conversation takes place in Bahasa Indonesia it helps me practice. At first I wasn’t crazy about the 5:30 am alarm clocks and music (in addition to the ever-present roosters), but I have adapted and become an early to bed early to rise individual in the truest sense. Also, a number of the barn-like aspects of the house that I wrote about so lovingly (below) have also been modified since my return from KK. The improvements include puting in a kitchen sink, building a little bicycle garage, tiling the bathroom, and screening in the back-porch with bamboo and chicken-wire; the house has been blissfully chicken free for a week and a half now! Of course there are still some minor hiccups, such as the muddy color of the water now highlighted by the white tile, but we’re all too happy to really give it much thought.
(clinic life)
We are currently having free cataract surgeries for those blinded in one eye at the clinic. We have two visiting doctors and 4 nurses from a missionary hospital about 12 hours north of here as far as I can tell, performing the surgeries. A lot of effort has gone into planning this event: getting permission from about 10 different parts of bureaucracy, as is necessary in Indonesia, putting up signs and sending out text messages advertising the surgery, arranging the transport of the doctors and supplies, setting up three large tents loaned from the government and rearranging the entire clinic to create makeshift screening, pre-op, and operating rooms, just to name a few of the recent activities. Needless to say, it’s great to see it all come together and this morning we had several hundred people show up. Around 200 were potential patients, many blind in both eyes. The doctors are here for four days of operations and can do about 80 eyes. The screening process will probably eliminate about half of these potentials, selecting for those who have cataracts that are not only operable, but also completely obscuring vision in one eye. Preference goes first, of course, to those blind in BOTH eyes (who will get only one eye done this year). The surgeries began today and the first patients will be able to remove their bandages tomorrow and see for the first time in many years. I’m excited to see their reactions as they see their grandchildren for the first time and return to a world of light and color!
(that’s life)
My time here is starting to go by very, very quickly. Upon return from KK I had the rude awakening of only 7.5 weeks remaining. The new total is 6. Every morning running along the beach and hearing the gibbons’ call, every evening spent attempting to communicate in broken Bahasa now seems that much more special. I’m struggling to continue my “ organic farm survey” and am now worried that I won’t be able to finish in time. What started off as seeming like a good hunk of time in January now seems to have withered away into practically nothing. While I have learned a good deal here, I worry if I will be able to accomplish all that I want and that I aught, before heading home. I worry that by the time I am able to return to this special corner of the world, there will be no more rainforest and all the friends I have made will be gone. On the bright side, I AM looking forward to returning home to you all, dear readers! And also to ice cream, yogurt and cheese; they are practically family members, really.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Life in a Barn
A preface: I am not meaning in any way to complain, as I am indeed quite happy here and in fact expected the general quality of life to be worse, not better. I’m just trying to be a keen observer of my surroundings and report on those that strike me in order that you may all share in my experiences.
Remember that expression, “Were you raised in a barn?” Well, I may be done being raised, but it is often on my mind as I’m pretty sure I now live in a barn.
The first hint of barn-likeness in Indonesian houses comes from the windows which are commonly wooden shutters, much like the kind you see in a barn. (In fact it is often much better this than the alternative, which is a plastic “window” that does not open creating a delightful greenhouse effect for those dwelling within) More significant than the windows, however, is the background behind that common expression mentioned earlier: generally an admonishment of someone who has left a door open to the cold, implying that if you were to live in a barn, it wouldn’t matter. Here, I may report that this assumption is definitely true as this is a tropical clime and building with insulation is unnecessary, and houses are often little more than shelters from the elements. In fact, the walls do not generally rise to reach the roof, and ceilings are considered unnecessary. Walls and floors are general the home of many holes, both intentional and not. All of these elements combined allow both improved air flow and/or insect and critter access.
This realization of barn-ness came on slowly, but it seems to be truer every day. I was first alerted to the notion when living in my old house, “the pink house,” Kari noted that “we essentially live in a barn.” Though at the time I remarked upon the general truism of this statement, it seems to have only become more pertinent in reference to my present accommodations in “the blue house,” in which the luxurious amenities of a sink with running water, toilet in the house and internet access are all lacking. The blue house is also in happy possession of one of those split doors which I think for some reason to be actually called a “barn door,” though I currently lack the means to verify this statement. In any case, the back door is a large wooden door, the type in which you can open just the top, or both the top and the bottom. Thus, this ingenious device gives the benefit of airflow without necessarily inviting all manner of fauna into ones home. Unfortunately, the arch-nemesis of the blue house, the chickens, have wings. Thus, whenever the coast is clear and they are not busy crowing cock-a-doodle doo (which anyone who has talked to me on skype can attest they are forever doing), they sneak attack into the kitchen to eat the cats food, poop on the floor and flutter around the stove causing general mayhem. In fact, yesterday poor Ika was unfortunate enough to step in some thoughtfully placed excrement.
The final nail in the coffin, as it were, in the determination of this lovely house as actually being a barn populated by people, is the realization that we are not alone. No, in addition to seven girls and one kitten (and of course the occasional chickens and ever present geckos, mosquitoes, ants, spiders and other manner of invertebrate creatures generally expected to cohabit), we recently discovered that there is also in residence a nest of sparrows, or some other sort of smallish bird, way up in the roof over the front room. Poor Jenny came to this realization as, sitting working at her laptop the other day, she was the near victim of a bird-poo bombardment. Now, gecko poo falling from the ceiling is quite normal here (indeed it landed on my head on one of my first days while I was having a meeting with Kinari), but bird poo is an altogether different, larger problem, and not one you commonly expect to deal with inside a house.
Thus, I must conclude, that we live in a barn. Albeit a nice barn, with tiles on the floor of the front room, and spacious rooms, it is nonetheless closer to barn than house in the conventional American perception of the word.
Remember that expression, “Were you raised in a barn?” Well, I may be done being raised, but it is often on my mind as I’m pretty sure I now live in a barn.
The first hint of barn-likeness in Indonesian houses comes from the windows which are commonly wooden shutters, much like the kind you see in a barn. (In fact it is often much better this than the alternative, which is a plastic “window” that does not open creating a delightful greenhouse effect for those dwelling within) More significant than the windows, however, is the background behind that common expression mentioned earlier: generally an admonishment of someone who has left a door open to the cold, implying that if you were to live in a barn, it wouldn’t matter. Here, I may report that this assumption is definitely true as this is a tropical clime and building with insulation is unnecessary, and houses are often little more than shelters from the elements. In fact, the walls do not generally rise to reach the roof, and ceilings are considered unnecessary. Walls and floors are general the home of many holes, both intentional and not. All of these elements combined allow both improved air flow and/or insect and critter access.
This realization of barn-ness came on slowly, but it seems to be truer every day. I was first alerted to the notion when living in my old house, “the pink house,” Kari noted that “we essentially live in a barn.” Though at the time I remarked upon the general truism of this statement, it seems to have only become more pertinent in reference to my present accommodations in “the blue house,” in which the luxurious amenities of a sink with running water, toilet in the house and internet access are all lacking. The blue house is also in happy possession of one of those split doors which I think for some reason to be actually called a “barn door,” though I currently lack the means to verify this statement. In any case, the back door is a large wooden door, the type in which you can open just the top, or both the top and the bottom. Thus, this ingenious device gives the benefit of airflow without necessarily inviting all manner of fauna into ones home. Unfortunately, the arch-nemesis of the blue house, the chickens, have wings. Thus, whenever the coast is clear and they are not busy crowing cock-a-doodle doo (which anyone who has talked to me on skype can attest they are forever doing), they sneak attack into the kitchen to eat the cats food, poop on the floor and flutter around the stove causing general mayhem. In fact, yesterday poor Ika was unfortunate enough to step in some thoughtfully placed excrement.
The final nail in the coffin, as it were, in the determination of this lovely house as actually being a barn populated by people, is the realization that we are not alone. No, in addition to seven girls and one kitten (and of course the occasional chickens and ever present geckos, mosquitoes, ants, spiders and other manner of invertebrate creatures generally expected to cohabit), we recently discovered that there is also in residence a nest of sparrows, or some other sort of smallish bird, way up in the roof over the front room. Poor Jenny came to this realization as, sitting working at her laptop the other day, she was the near victim of a bird-poo bombardment. Now, gecko poo falling from the ceiling is quite normal here (indeed it landed on my head on one of my first days while I was having a meeting with Kinari), but bird poo is an altogether different, larger problem, and not one you commonly expect to deal with inside a house.
Thus, I must conclude, that we live in a barn. Albeit a nice barn, with tiles on the floor of the front room, and spacious rooms, it is nonetheless closer to barn than house in the conventional American perception of the word.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Tanjung Puting and other stories
My intended next post on "transmigrasi" will have to wait as I delayed too long and now have many other events to report on. I have decided that I need to write more frequently, even if it means an even less polished result. Last weekend, I went away for the weekend to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan and while I was gone my life (here) turned upside down.
Let’s start at the beginning. Kari (a conservation volunteer who lived with Ashti and I in the pink house) and I had a trip to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan planned for a few weeks ago that we postponed till last weekend for various reasons (luckily plane tickets turn out to be quite flexible here). We were joined by Kari’s husband Loren, currently a gibbon researcher in Gunung Palung National park (what ASRI is trying to save) and Millie, an accountant for Yayasan Palung (another NGO in the area) and the keeper of the “research house” in Ketapang (where the researchers stay when not in the forest). Thus, we made a neat group of four.
We set off early Thursday for Pangkalan Bun, the closet airport to Tanjung Puting. After registering with the police (ahh the bureaucracy here), spent a pleasant half-day strolling along the riverfront and eating lunch. After exhausting the options in PB (not peanut butter…those options are never exhausted) we negotiated a trip to Kumai, the launching off point for trips into the park. For about a dollar each we shared a creaky old van with some medicine being transported as well.
En route, it turns out that Millie has a cousin in Kumai whom she hasn’t seen in years, and so, after giving her about half an hour warning, we dropped down on her doorstep. What an experience. There was a wedding going on two doors down that was blaring music, and quite a number of people milling through the house when we arrived, none of whom appeared to actually be Millie’s cousin, but who let us in quite cheerfully. The communal open-ness and friendliness of Indonesian households truly astounds me sometimes.
The erstwhile cousin returned and we exchanged pleasantries and drank disgustingly sweet tea that is customarily served here. Finally, her cousin invited us to spend the night if we wanted. After some hemming and hawing we decided to accept and that was how I spent my first night truly Indonesian style, sleeping on a mattress pad on the floor in the middle of a hallway, listening to a wedding until 10 pm.
The rest of the day was essentially spent finding and negotiating a houseboat trip up the river into the park. Friday morning Kari and I went to the market with the guide and chef that we had hired and bought fresh fruit, vegetables, tempe, and fish for the trip. We had a blast and bought a ton of food. It’s really such a shame that we don’t have markets like this in the US.
We spent the next two days and nights on the boat where we ate 3 delicious meals a day cooked for us and slept on the top deck on mattresses they brought out and mosquito nets that got strung up. It was lovely. From our vantage point on the river we could see probiscus monkeys and red-leaf monkeys high in the trees bordering the river, as well as all manner of birds. We stopped at a village and three different “camps” at various points along the river.
The village was actually the home of our guide, as well as many of the rangers and those who worked on the reforestation project. The camps are each the site of former research and rehabilitation of orangutans (there is still some research going on Camp Leaky, the third). Because of the rehabilitation process each of the camps has a feeding platform a few km into the forest where they put fruit out once a day for the orangutans. Thus what started as part of the rehab process became the secret to tourism in Tanjung Puting: guaranteeing that tourists can see orangutans. Finally getting to see my first orangutan (even if they were only semi-wild) was incredible. They are so human-like in some respects. The way the orangutans move is also kind of remarkable. As Loren put it: gibbons swing through the forest by the trees, orangutans swing the trees through the forest.
On Saturday at Camp Leaky we also went on a more extended hike through the forest. Soon after we set out it started to pour. And when it pours here, it really POURS. I discovered I absolutely love the feeling of walking through the rainforest in the rain. You are absolutely soaked, but comfortable and there’s a sort of steamy feeling of life humming all around.
Sunday we made our way back, and thus discovered that while we were gone everything went haywire and all the housing got turned on end as, in order to make room for the new volunteers, the “boys’ house” and the “girls’ house” switched (the former boys’ house was bigger, but there were many more girls) as well as some other maneuvering. I had been living in the “Yale house” or “pink house,” right next to Cam and Kinari, but was moved to become a new resident in the massive new girls’ house (7 bedrooms). Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock to come back from a long weekend and find that all of my belongings had mysteriously walked down the street, but I recovered. The upshot is that I no longer have internet access in my house (before we could steal Cam and Kinari’s) or a sink, but also that I now live with a group of lovely Indonesian women which is helping my Bahasa Indonesia. Life is all about balance I guess.
Let’s start at the beginning. Kari (a conservation volunteer who lived with Ashti and I in the pink house) and I had a trip to Tanjung Puting National Park in Central Kalimantan planned for a few weeks ago that we postponed till last weekend for various reasons (luckily plane tickets turn out to be quite flexible here). We were joined by Kari’s husband Loren, currently a gibbon researcher in Gunung Palung National park (what ASRI is trying to save) and Millie, an accountant for Yayasan Palung (another NGO in the area) and the keeper of the “research house” in Ketapang (where the researchers stay when not in the forest). Thus, we made a neat group of four.
We set off early Thursday for Pangkalan Bun, the closet airport to Tanjung Puting. After registering with the police (ahh the bureaucracy here), spent a pleasant half-day strolling along the riverfront and eating lunch. After exhausting the options in PB (not peanut butter…those options are never exhausted) we negotiated a trip to Kumai, the launching off point for trips into the park. For about a dollar each we shared a creaky old van with some medicine being transported as well.
En route, it turns out that Millie has a cousin in Kumai whom she hasn’t seen in years, and so, after giving her about half an hour warning, we dropped down on her doorstep. What an experience. There was a wedding going on two doors down that was blaring music, and quite a number of people milling through the house when we arrived, none of whom appeared to actually be Millie’s cousin, but who let us in quite cheerfully. The communal open-ness and friendliness of Indonesian households truly astounds me sometimes.
The erstwhile cousin returned and we exchanged pleasantries and drank disgustingly sweet tea that is customarily served here. Finally, her cousin invited us to spend the night if we wanted. After some hemming and hawing we decided to accept and that was how I spent my first night truly Indonesian style, sleeping on a mattress pad on the floor in the middle of a hallway, listening to a wedding until 10 pm.
The rest of the day was essentially spent finding and negotiating a houseboat trip up the river into the park. Friday morning Kari and I went to the market with the guide and chef that we had hired and bought fresh fruit, vegetables, tempe, and fish for the trip. We had a blast and bought a ton of food. It’s really such a shame that we don’t have markets like this in the US.
We spent the next two days and nights on the boat where we ate 3 delicious meals a day cooked for us and slept on the top deck on mattresses they brought out and mosquito nets that got strung up. It was lovely. From our vantage point on the river we could see probiscus monkeys and red-leaf monkeys high in the trees bordering the river, as well as all manner of birds. We stopped at a village and three different “camps” at various points along the river.
The village was actually the home of our guide, as well as many of the rangers and those who worked on the reforestation project. The camps are each the site of former research and rehabilitation of orangutans (there is still some research going on Camp Leaky, the third). Because of the rehabilitation process each of the camps has a feeding platform a few km into the forest where they put fruit out once a day for the orangutans. Thus what started as part of the rehab process became the secret to tourism in Tanjung Puting: guaranteeing that tourists can see orangutans. Finally getting to see my first orangutan (even if they were only semi-wild) was incredible. They are so human-like in some respects. The way the orangutans move is also kind of remarkable. As Loren put it: gibbons swing through the forest by the trees, orangutans swing the trees through the forest.
On Saturday at Camp Leaky we also went on a more extended hike through the forest. Soon after we set out it started to pour. And when it pours here, it really POURS. I discovered I absolutely love the feeling of walking through the rainforest in the rain. You are absolutely soaked, but comfortable and there’s a sort of steamy feeling of life humming all around.
Sunday we made our way back, and thus discovered that while we were gone everything went haywire and all the housing got turned on end as, in order to make room for the new volunteers, the “boys’ house” and the “girls’ house” switched (the former boys’ house was bigger, but there were many more girls) as well as some other maneuvering. I had been living in the “Yale house” or “pink house,” right next to Cam and Kinari, but was moved to become a new resident in the massive new girls’ house (7 bedrooms). Needless to say, it was a bit of a shock to come back from a long weekend and find that all of my belongings had mysteriously walked down the street, but I recovered. The upshot is that I no longer have internet access in my house (before we could steal Cam and Kinari’s) or a sink, but also that I now live with a group of lovely Indonesian women which is helping my Bahasa Indonesia. Life is all about balance I guess.
Thursday, March 11, 2010
An Eco-friendly, 95% Recycled Blogpost
Full disclosure: this is a post that I actually wrote to be an intro for my new role as a "citizen reporter" for the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council)'s OnEarth blog. I know that it is lazy of me to just post this since some of the information is redundant, however I also realize that I haven't posted in over a month. Also, let's be honest, the opportunities for recycling in Kalimantan are rather meager and I've got to get my kicks somehow! I promise that I will manage to take some of the many half written posts that I've been sitting on and publish them soon, that is if I still have anyone left reading this blog. Also, this is a picture of the ASRI clinic.
without further ado...
Deforestation and Its Discontents: An Introduction to Six Months in Borneo
Borneo. The name itself brings up the image of the exotic, maybe some images akin to those from Heart of Darkness: deep tropical jungle, wild natives, heads on sticks, etc. Beyond this however, many Americans know little of Borneo other than that it is far, far away and maybe that it is home to the orangutan. In fact, Borneo is one of the most biologically diverse places in the world thanks to its location at the junction of three tectonic plates and along the biological border of Asia and Australia. It’s not only the biological world that is diverse here however; three nations share the large island of Borneo: Brunei, Malaysia and Indonesia. Brunei is a small, but wealthy, sultanate, known for its oil. Sabah and Sarawak, the Malaysian sections of the island, make up the vast majority of tourist infrastructure, despite being only a fraction of the large island. It’s almost a joke: you open up a Lonely Planet Borneo and there is large map of Borneo with pop-outs for highlighted places. Odd, you think, all of the pop-outs seem to be clustered along the northern coast; did all those natural wonders somehow end up divided by national lines? What about the other two thirds of the island? That, that large part that often gets little more than a footnote, is Kalimantan. Even to Indonesians, Kalimantan is considered a wild place and many eyebrows were raised in Java when I announced my intention to spend 6 months in a small village on the western coast named Sukadana.
The reason for the lack of eco-tourism here, of course, is the lack of infrastructure, but, though the roads are bad, this is not the whole story. The many environmental problems that plague Kalimantan are systematically destroying exactly that which the tourists would come to see. As many “environmentalists” (and readers of this blog) may know, Borneo is currently experiencing some of the highest, or the highest (depending on whom you ask), rates of deforestation in the world. What was once a verdant forested island, is quickly being reduced into a degraded island of palm oil plantations and invasive “along along” grass.
National parks represent some of the last preserves of forest in Kalimantan, where much of the rest of the land has already been logged and/or turned into palm oil plantations. Unfortunately, protection in name and protection in practice are two very different things.
The organization that I’m working with, Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI (www.healthinharmony.org ), is using a unique model to provide both high quality, accessible health-care to the local peoples and to try to save the Gunung Palung National Park. The GPNP is home to an estimated 10% or the worlds remaining orangutans, as well as the incredible biodiversity that is characteristic of Borneo. Entire lives have been devoted to studying this forest, yet so much remains undiscovered and undocumented. Unfortunately, this forest, as with much of the forest on Borneo, is disappearing.
ASRI works by integrating primary health care and conservation to improve the health of both the people and the eco-system. Patients may pay for their care through numerous non-cash eco-friendly methods, including manure, seedlings, or labor in the organic garden. This model organic garden thus not only provides vegetables and a small amount of revenue for the clinic, it also works to teach new skills. The project also incorporates a health-care incentives system, known as the “red green” system, in which for non-logging “green” communities are given a 75% discount on care, as well as free eye-glasses and ambulance rides. Additionally, an experimental reforestation project was started last year in which 4 hectares of completely degraded land within the national park was replanted in 102 different plots to test various methods of reforestation.
While the rapid demolition that was happening over the last 20 years in Kalimantan appears to have slowed, the local appetite for illegal wood is forever growing as the population of the area around the park balloons. In fact, I was recently out in the field working on a survey to determine the effectiveness of an organic farm training session that ASRI conducted last summer. While interviewing two farmers who live on the edge of the forest we heard a chainsaw. When we asked them about it, they assured us that it was just local people, poor people, taking wood to build their houses. They were not selling it. This, they told us, was not really illegal logging.
This is a common problem, not just of understanding, but of supply and demand. Since almost all of the local forest outside of the protected area has already been logged and exported abroad, there is now no unprotected area left for local people to take wood to build a house, or make a kitchen fire. Thus, the constant struggle towards balance between human civilization and the nature that it both depends on and destroys is placed into sharp relief here. In my future posts I hope to explore more deeply a few of the many environmental issues that come up due to this struggle.
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Forest Fest: Reflections on An Environmental Education
Ever since my initial viewing, in first grade, I just could not wait to be a big fifth grader and participate in that culminating experience of Lower School: Forest Fest. Today, here I am, living on the edge of the rainforest, in many ways a dream that I thought would never come true. I’m here to admit it, Forest Fest got me. I took very deeply to heart all the information about the incredibly diverse rainforests with their species, as well as the incredibly rapid rates of logging. I even still remember some of the songs, whether written by students (its too bad there are no pictures or performances up here, only the lyrics), or sung every year like “Yanamamo”, the integral traditional opening based on an Amazonian tribe and complete with accompaniment by xylophone and glockenspiel; “Subsidized Stumps,” the popular stand-by with matching hand-motions (sample lyrics: "I said don’t cut down that tree, its part of a higher plan and if you do you’ll have to deal with meeee, I said don’t cut down that tree…"); and, of course, the deeply moving “Tree of Life”:
I am a very old tree I grow in brazil,
I have stood for a thousand years and I am standing still
Friendly delicate epiphytes find lodging on my bark,
their swinging ways do me now harm and they escape the dark
(chorus)
We are part of the tree of life and we cannot live without it,
We are part of the tree of life and we’ll perish if we doubt it
All of us need someone else, can anyone deny it?
None of us can live alone, its suicide to try it
Etc. (It’s better if you know the tune)
The level of detail I can remember from this seminal event 12 years ago is amazing, considering the fact that I can barely remember what I learned last year in college (just kidding Mom and Dad, well, sort-of). Additionally, I can very distinctly pin-point my cognizance of the environment in peril and the need of my active participation to help “save” it from this 5th grade Spring curriculum. It should perhaps be noted Forest Fest was no small undertaking; it was instead the culminating musical extravaganza of an entire spring semester dedicated to an integrated learning experience focused on the rainforests, both tropical and temperate.
Returning to the larger question, however, how many members of our 5th grade class are out now, actively participating in a campaign to “save the rainforest,” as cliché as that sounds? Perhaps just me. But even if I am alone in this endeavor, 1 out of 90, those are still pretty good odds. What’s more, I’m sure that this type of environmental education did not fall on deaf ears. How many from our class of over-privileged Philadelphia suburbs have an “environmental conscience” (whatever that is) of some sort? A good number, I would venture to say.
Unfortunately, “environmentalism” seems to have long been the strong-hold of the same subset of people that went to my K-12 private day school. Even at Harvard, the EAC or “Environmental Action Committee,” a group of which I was a proud member, was undeniably under-diverse. The lack of diversity in environment-related causes seems to be generally accepted and expected, but I don’t see why. Granted, I can think of a few arguments for why this is: minority groups or those from less-fortunate backgrounds have other, more pressing issues to worry about than the environment, so they want to take care of those first; only once they have eliminated these other problems of social-equality will they be able to fully participate. I also think that a strong sense of environmental responsibility is often highly related to a personal love of being outside and spending time in nature, which makes perfect intuitive sense. For those from the inner-cities, experience with nature is often harder to come-by, especially during formative early years.
Despite all this, however, I think it's time for a serious change. The problems of the environment run deeper than being a “crunchy granola tree hugger,” and the traditional perception of having the luxury to care about the environment. The environment is intimately linked with health and poverty, and an examination of those problems really cannot be taken out of their larger context. Furthermore, given current climate projections, I really have to wonder what issue is more pressing than the environment? Will it matter if we fix all the other problems if we no longer have a habitable world to live in? You may think I’m being an over-reactionary alarmist, but as anyone who has taken a good hard look at the climate data knows, the numbers are scary.
Finally, in the world of climate change models, one of the only things agreed upon is that the world’s poor will share the greatest burden of the changes to come. This is for a number of reasons. Geographically many of these poor countries are simply located in areas that already suffer somewhat more volatile weather events, and as extreme weather events rise those countries will be disproportionally affected. Additionally, for people already living on the edge, a change in weather patterns, creating say, a devastating drought or flood, will cause much more harm than in those countries with healthier populations and more developed infrastructure. Although this disproportionate burden is widely acknowledged, not nearly enough seems to be done, in my opinion, to mobilize social activists outside of the traditional category of “tree hugger.”
I don’t know where this long ramble really brings me. As with most interesting questions, there is no easy answer. A small part of the solution, however, may lie in the lesson of Forest Fest; the implementation of environmental education curriculum in schools across the country to capture the hearts and minds of children from all walks of life, the way mine was captured.
I am a very old tree I grow in brazil,
I have stood for a thousand years and I am standing still
Friendly delicate epiphytes find lodging on my bark,
their swinging ways do me now harm and they escape the dark
(chorus)
We are part of the tree of life and we cannot live without it,
We are part of the tree of life and we’ll perish if we doubt it
All of us need someone else, can anyone deny it?
None of us can live alone, its suicide to try it
Etc. (It’s better if you know the tune)
The level of detail I can remember from this seminal event 12 years ago is amazing, considering the fact that I can barely remember what I learned last year in college (just kidding Mom and Dad, well, sort-of). Additionally, I can very distinctly pin-point my cognizance of the environment in peril and the need of my active participation to help “save” it from this 5th grade Spring curriculum. It should perhaps be noted Forest Fest was no small undertaking; it was instead the culminating musical extravaganza of an entire spring semester dedicated to an integrated learning experience focused on the rainforests, both tropical and temperate.
Returning to the larger question, however, how many members of our 5th grade class are out now, actively participating in a campaign to “save the rainforest,” as cliché as that sounds? Perhaps just me. But even if I am alone in this endeavor, 1 out of 90, those are still pretty good odds. What’s more, I’m sure that this type of environmental education did not fall on deaf ears. How many from our class of over-privileged Philadelphia suburbs have an “environmental conscience” (whatever that is) of some sort? A good number, I would venture to say.
Unfortunately, “environmentalism” seems to have long been the strong-hold of the same subset of people that went to my K-12 private day school. Even at Harvard, the EAC or “Environmental Action Committee,” a group of which I was a proud member, was undeniably under-diverse. The lack of diversity in environment-related causes seems to be generally accepted and expected, but I don’t see why. Granted, I can think of a few arguments for why this is: minority groups or those from less-fortunate backgrounds have other, more pressing issues to worry about than the environment, so they want to take care of those first; only once they have eliminated these other problems of social-equality will they be able to fully participate. I also think that a strong sense of environmental responsibility is often highly related to a personal love of being outside and spending time in nature, which makes perfect intuitive sense. For those from the inner-cities, experience with nature is often harder to come-by, especially during formative early years.
Despite all this, however, I think it's time for a serious change. The problems of the environment run deeper than being a “crunchy granola tree hugger,” and the traditional perception of having the luxury to care about the environment. The environment is intimately linked with health and poverty, and an examination of those problems really cannot be taken out of their larger context. Furthermore, given current climate projections, I really have to wonder what issue is more pressing than the environment? Will it matter if we fix all the other problems if we no longer have a habitable world to live in? You may think I’m being an over-reactionary alarmist, but as anyone who has taken a good hard look at the climate data knows, the numbers are scary.
Finally, in the world of climate change models, one of the only things agreed upon is that the world’s poor will share the greatest burden of the changes to come. This is for a number of reasons. Geographically many of these poor countries are simply located in areas that already suffer somewhat more volatile weather events, and as extreme weather events rise those countries will be disproportionally affected. Additionally, for people already living on the edge, a change in weather patterns, creating say, a devastating drought or flood, will cause much more harm than in those countries with healthier populations and more developed infrastructure. Although this disproportionate burden is widely acknowledged, not nearly enough seems to be done, in my opinion, to mobilize social activists outside of the traditional category of “tree hugger.”
I don’t know where this long ramble really brings me. As with most interesting questions, there is no easy answer. A small part of the solution, however, may lie in the lesson of Forest Fest; the implementation of environmental education curriculum in schools across the country to capture the hearts and minds of children from all walks of life, the way mine was captured.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
This is Indonesia
“This is Indonesia,” the man next to me told me somewhat smugly as I looked up vaguely appalled at the prospect of cramming a fourth person into our already snug row of three. I already had a box jammed next to me, the corner digging into my thigh, my knees crammed against the row in front of me, and my bag on my lap. I was on a short trip (one day there, next day back) to Pontianak, the capital of West Kalimantan in order to renew my visa. Luckily I had Samuel, ASRI's "fixer" to help me out with the process. Exciting business, really. I was just thankful it all went smoothly; when some of the Indonesian doctors from ASRI went to Pontianak last week to get new passports, they had to stay the week. So, this is Indonesia: a land where a 5 seater car fits 10 and where the bureaucracy is enough of a nightmare to require organizations to have a “fixer” whose sole job is to navigate it. This brings back some thoughts from Weber's classic On Bureaucracy, but those are probably best left alone for now.
And again, the man told me, “This is Indonesia,” in response to my renewed look of dismay when our boat broke down and drifted listlessly into some mangroves on the side of the river. As if a 5 hour boat trip isn’t enough? I wish I had a picture of the situation, but alas, we were crammed in so tight there was no way for me to get out my camera, never mind attempt to use it. Instead, I have a lovely sunburn on the left half of my face and body as a souvenir.
Indonesia is also a place where much is cheap; quality NOT guaranteed. Example: As I was leaving at 6 am to go to Pontianak the other morning, our almost-new front door-handle literally self-destructed in my hand. It was the most expensive one available in town. Furthermore, our lovely little house has the unfortunate problem that the cement was laid directly on the ground and thus water is constantly soaking through via capillary action and causing our beautiful, hand-woven bamboo mats to mold.
My biggest pet peeve here, however, is exemplified as I sit here writing this post, worrying that I’m causing my future self lung cancer. My house is currently full of smoke from nearby trash burning. Yes, I wrote an earlier post deriding the way that people still burned trash on the side of the street in Yoyga. Here, there is no waste system to speak of and everyone (including ASRI) burns their trash out of necessity. Including plastic. What makes the plastic problem worse is that everything here seems to be individually wrapped. Granted, what is not individually wrapped often goes stale almost immediately (e.g. Oreos put out on a plate to eat during a meeting are crisp and crunchy at the beginning, and already a bit soggy within half an hour; it’s really quite astounding).
I’m not sure just how bad this burning is for the environment (and our lungs!), but I’m pretty sure it’s not good. The other option is just as appalling to me: to litter. There is trash everywhere: in people’s yards, on the beach, in the rivers, etc. What is to be done with it? Yesterday on the boat, I watched, appalled, as the people all around me casually tossed their wrappers and other plastic bags into the river, as if it were a giant trash can. I guess it is.
This trash problem continues to irk me every time I’m presented with its intractable nature (so, everyday). To me, this trash problem is symptomatic of a much larger problem, namely that of global consumerism. Admittedly, I am very much a part of the problem. But, when I think with longing of the nice, organized US where the trash man comes along once a week to take away those large bags of unwanteds, I’m forced to ask myself: is it so much better to pile mounds and mounds of trash into giant land-fills that create noxious gas than it is to burn it? I think the answer is yes, but it’s still not good. Just because we often don’t see where I trash ultimate ends up, doesn’t mean that it magically disappears. What is good about the system here is that people are generally less wasteful. Anything that can be re-used, will, a natural recycling system of sorts. Unfortunately, plastic wrappers appear to have limited re-use value.
This post started due to my reflections on that statement uttered to me, somewhat laughingly, no less than three times, as I was faced with various frustrations on my journey yesterday. I have meandered a bit from my original thread, but I want to return to it to balance the tally a bit. This is also Indonesia: a beautiful land full of warm, friendly people. A fascinating collection of islands with very different religious and cultural backgrounds; Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) alone is reputed to have over 300 different languages. This is Indonesia: a place where communities come together and work together, and where children are revered and loved by all, but where life is very hard for many. A place of spectacular rainforests (though disappearing at an alarming rate), beautiful coral reefs, magnificent rice paddies (and all the rice you can eat!), and so many things more. Despite all the frustrations, this is clearly special place, and I feel fortunate to be here.
Picture: the public beach in Sukadana at Sunset
Saturday, January 23, 2010
On Roading and other extreme sports
What’s On-Roading, you might ask? Well, similar to its sister sport Off-Roading, On Roading is driving, except ON a road. Driving to a somewhat remote village Laman Satong yesterday for “Hari Hijau” (Green Day, a celebration of HIH’s reforestation efforts) provided a fine example of such sport. The level of dereliction of the roads here beats even the worst post-holes the US has to offer by a long shot. Additionally, it seems the problems can appear suddenly, and where there was once a fine road, suddenly there is the ultimate drivers test. In fact, because of how bad some of the roads are here, it appears that the shoulder is often favored and the roads grow wider and wider as they expand off road. In these cases, it is driving on the road that is infinitely more difficult than off. Thus, we often found ourselves driving a 4WD ambulance with one set of tires off the road while the other set bumped through behemoth potholes and the less fortunate riding in the back bumping their heads on the ceiling with great frequency.
In short, getting anywhere seems to always be a bit of an adventure around here. I found this out right from the start. After traveling from Bali to Jakarta to Pontianak, suffering a few delays and spending the night, I took a “taxi” (on another of the bumpiest roads I have ever seen) to Rasau to catch a boat to Melano, a town about a half hour away from Sukadana, my final destination. While the boat ride was a bit cramped but exciting, the real adventure was still to come. After this 4 hour boat ride, I found myself riding an “ojak” (motorcycle taxi) to the clinic with my suitcase tucked in the front between the drivers knees and my backpack on my back, purse over the shoulder; in short quite the spectacle. So, why did my organization send me a man on a motorbike to pick me up with all of my luggage, you might wonder (as I did wonder during the course of this rather uncomfortable half hour ride)? Answer: they didn’t. In a dangerous combination of knowing enough Bahasa Indonesia to ask very simple questions, but not knowing enough to say a lot, and also knowing how much of Indonesian transportation is based on the motorbike and being comfortable with that, I was deluded into thinking that this random man who asked me, “Sukadana? ASRI klinik?” when I got off the boat had been sent to pick me up. I said yes, as that was where I was going, to which he took my stuff and strode away beckoning me to follow him. When we got to his motor, instead of a car or truck, I was a bit suspicious and I asked if he was from the clinic. The answer was akin to “yes yes, get on” ….so in my pseudo-delirious state, on I went and off we went. The shock on people’s faces when I got to the clinic in this unorthodox fashion was clear. It turned out, of course, that my boat had gotten in early and Agus, the real ASRI driver who had been sent to pick me up, had not gotten there yet. Meanwhile, this random dude must have known that the only “bule” (white people) for miles around were associated with the clinic* and had thus offered to take me there. The good news is that I arrived safe and sound.
*this is not entirely true, there are a few other NGOs that work in the forest as well as some field researchers
In other news, things are going very well here so far. As a reminder, the organization I’m with now is called Health in Harmony (check it out!) and is absolutely wonderful. I’m living in a small house right with two other girls, one of whom is a 4th year Yale Medical School student, and one of whom is a 4th year Indonesian med school student from Jakarta. We have a traditional squat toilet and scoop shower, both of which I was vaguely skeptical of at first but have since adjusted to. While there is no hot water, a cold shower feels absolutely wonderful most of the time since it’s ALWAYS hot here on the equator (people joke the Indonesia has many seasons….mango season, durian season, rambutan season). We are also living right next door to Kinari (the founder of HIH) and Cam, which is absolutely brilliant because it means we can mooch off of their wireless internet and borrow their adorable kittens for cuddles. The town of Sukadana itself is rather ideally situated on the western coast of Borneo at the edge of Gunung Palung National Forest, the forest that HIH is working to protect and home to 10% of the worlds orangutans by some estimates, with two beaches a 5-10 minute walk from my door.
Highlights so far include a trip to an island off the coast last weekend and Green Day. We were purportedly going to go snorkeling, but the visibility was extremely bad that day, so after recovering from small speedboat induced motion-sickness, we ended up swimming around a bit and exploring the island instead. Tip #79: flip flops are not ideal for walking up steep slopes in tropical rain forests. The biodiversity here is phenomenal and apparently it is very common to spend a whole day walking through a forest and not see two trees of the same species (granted, you would have to be able to identify them in the first place).
Green Day, as I mentioned earlier, was a celebration of reforestation efforts and was very cool to see. Various members of the community came out, including the whole middle school and men from the national park. The ASRI team is very musical and performed a number of songs for the event, one of which included almost everyone (for those of you who have heard me sing, don’t worry, I sang quietly). There was a semi-symbolic planting of seedlings in which we all (~200 people) got to grab a seedling rainforest tree and head out into a field and carefully plant our seedlings, adding compost, water and a bit of love. Overall the day was a success and a great reminder of hope for the future with people working together across levels from the local community, the NGOs, and the park service.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Bromo and Bali: a recap
Hello from Sukadana! So, since Christmas, a rather lot has happened I guess, though it doesn’t appear to have included me writing about it. As I try to backtrack this post grows long, so if you don’t have the time/energy to read an epic, I forgive you.
My last few days in Yogya were rather hectic. I decided last minute to go on a two-day adventure to see Mount Bromo, a famous volcano that continuously spews gas and is located in a giant crater with two other volcanoes in East Java, only 12 hours away by bus, a breeze really. Thus, I left Sunday morning at around 9 am, got to the town by the mountain at around 9 pm and crashed until getting up at 1 am to trek to the mountain for sunrise, and then got back on my bus by 9 am and went right back to Yogya. Lunacy, you say? Perhaps. But, it was still pretty cool.
The first part of the trekking was rather thrilling as I set out across the dessert in the crater alone under the stars; however it later lost some of its magic as the road that I was following up the mountain became inundated with Jeeps (the more popular way to get to the top). There is apparently also a walking trail, but no one seemed to know where it was and I wasn’t left with much choice at 1 am by myself than to follow the road. I don’t know what they put in the cars here sometimes, but let me tell you, its not that pleasant to breath in deep gulps of exhaust as you walk up a steep hill. In the end, I ended up taking a motor the last 2 km (it was apparently around 20 total, though that number is dubious) because I could see that the sun was starting to rise at 4:30 and not at 5:15 as they had informed me, and after all the effort I had gone to in order to get there, I was not going to miss it! Clouds had set in while I was walking, but the sunrise was still beautiful and the landscape just extraordinary. Later I was rescued from my long walk down by some Jakartans in a Jeep and just had time for a quick jaunt over to Bromo itself and climbed the 200ish steps to the top in order to peer into the smoking hole where the giant white plume originates. (NB I really am trying to upload my pictures, but now that I finally have my laptop, it seems that my card reader isn’t working or something…)
Back in Yogya my month which had once stretched on into the distant future seemed to have flown by and I found myself hectically running errands and packing, and suddenly it was time to say goodbye to my host-family. Monica and her sisters were so nice and came to the airport to see me off/give me a goodie bag of presents.
Bali was a lot of fun. Between a combination of fun in the sun, the water, some quality chilling time, and some dance performances of dubious quality, it was an all around great trip. That said, I think my two favorite places were not on Bali proper but on two smaller islands. The first, Gili Air is a tiny and picturesque little strip of white sand and palm trees set in turquoise water. The only form of transport is horse-cart, but don’t worry, you can walk around the entire island is about 90 minutes. Gabe and I essentially split our time between kicking it in beach bungalows drinking mango juice and snorkeling. Ubud was nice, though the best part was definitely our sumptuous accommodations. The town itself is very touristy at this point, with lots of shopping. We went to one dance performance, which was plenty. While I find the traditional dance very interesting, I don’t necessarily have the attention span for a full 2 hour show.
My other favorite place was Nusa Lembogan, a small island off the cost of Bali with 7000 inhabitants, 95% of whom are involved in the island’s seaweed farming industry. Not only was the lack of tourism and touts refreshing, but it was also here where I went on some of the most beautiful dives of my life. This, combined with the great group of people meant that I liked it so well that I ended up staying an extra day and would have stayed more if I could have. Post Nusa Lembogan it was time for a bit of culture shock as I went to join Chris and the some of the HMC crew at a resort in Nusa Dua. The place was absurd. It turns out that Nusa Dua is a resort community of about 15 resorts with a collective security gate outside (followed by more security for each one). There were about 10 pools (it had to live up to its name “laguna”) and many Russians. It was funny too the difference between kicking it with low-key backpackers and the fast-paced intellectual conversation of Harvard students. Eventually we left the resort in search of a more authentic Bali, but returning to Ubud was not the answer for such a task. Finally we found ourselves in Munduk, a tiny village on the side of one of Bali’s volcanoes from where the view of rice paddies and forests stretches all the way out to the distant ocean.
Finally, it was time to part ways again and I headed off on my own to Borneo. Traveling in Indonesia requires some serious fortitude and patience. While it is often very quick to get through airport security, nothing else is easy. After a delay caused me to miss my second flight, I had to fight my way to the front of a “goat rodeo” of people all competing for the attention of 4 clerks issuing new boarding passes. Why they couldn’t have a) more people working and b) some sort of organized line system in which each person waits patiently until the next available clerk is available is beyond me, but it sure gave me new appreciation for those lines they have official offices where you have to “wait behind the line.” Later, as I explored the domestic terminal, I think my favorite image was the group of 8 or so guys kickin it together smoking some cigarettes in the walkway to the terminal RIGHT BENEATH two “no smoking” signs. I would have taken a picture, but there was also a sign saying “no cameras”…Honestly, usually I love Indonesia, but sometimes the lack of regard for the rules can get to me. This, of course has larger implications than my mild asmatic response to a smoky terminal: it means that vast swathes of beautiful rainforest that are technically protected are being logged daily, or slash and burned to create new fields for palm oil. And on that note, I think I’ll leave the rest for later.
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