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.

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.

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.