It's titled, "Tur Klinic." Can you guess what it means? Ok I'll tell you: "Clinic Tour." Bahasa Indonesia is a wonderfully phonetic language with many English cognates.
As a volunteer at Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), I've split my time between education and media. For education, I've created Planetary Health curriculum, presented to the complete hospital staff on climate change basics, and taught kids' classes ranging from healthy snacks to lemurs to mangrove ecology. (More on that in the next post.) For media, I've written blog posts, taken photos of ASRI's programs, and contributed to the Instagram account.
A teaser from the video, to get you to watch it :)
Last week I asked Oka, ASRI's only marketing and communication staff, what I should do next. She pushed me out of my comfort zone to make a video tour of the ASRI Clinic! It's not professional, but it sure was fun to make. And Oka was an excellent host.
An outtake!
For my friends who don't speak Bahasa Indonesia, you won't be able to understand the words, but I hope you enjoy the silly editing, music, and a visual journey through one of the world's first Planetary Health hospitals.
It would make Oka very happy if you would like our Facebook page, follow our Instagram, subscribe to our YouTube channel, and follow our Twitter.
Oka and I relax on the Old Dock after a day of media. (And Amad photobombs.)
Big thanks to Oka for making this video happen! Our target audience are potential patients in the Sukadana region who are curious about seeking healthcare at ASRI but unsure what to expect. I hope this video will make a visit to the clinic seem more welcoming and less scary for patients of all ages.
Heat rises from the wet ground and pulses down through black shade cloth. I can feel thermal energy surrounding me in waves. Welcome to the tropics.
Meranti saplings.
I am standing in ASRI’s lokasi reboisasi, the reforestation nursery. Black plastic pouches, known as polybags, stand in rows like toy soldiers. Each is filled with a measure of native loam, scooped from the forest floor, and a single sapling. The soil here is fine-grained, rolling into a ball between my fingers like playdough. It’s not ideal for plants because it holds water like a sponge and, when dry, forms a rock-hard barrier to roots, but it’s what these trees evolved for, so it’s what they grow in. After all, this nursery is not preparing saplings for an easy, domestic life in a garden. These saplings have a destiny: they will become the rainforest.
Native loam rolls into a ball like playdough.
We arrived to the Laman Satong nursery after an hour of swerving around potholes and bumping over stones in the dirt road. I’m here with three capable guides. Ihsan is ASRI’s Reforestation Coordinator. Juliansyah is the Nursery Manager. And Dika is the new Director of Conservation Programs. He’s in the process of defending a PhD in tree population genetics from Copenhagen University, and he arrived at ASRI one day before I did.
Ihsan tends his flock.
Dika scrutinizes the baby trees.
Here at the nursery, we are standing on a plot of ground donated free-of-charge by the Catholic Church. The surrounding land was forested until the year 2000, when private timber companies cut the trees and left grassland. Usually, timber leases are meant to follow a 35-year rotation, in which the first plots to be cut will have regrown with native trees in time for the next round of logging. Unfortunately, Dika explains to me, these rotation requirements are often violated. The company will simply log the entire lease at once, sell the timber, and abandon the land, which is then sold into palm-oil plantations. That’s what happened to most of the private land around the nursery.
ASRI's Laman Satong reforestation nursery.
Yayasan means "Foundation." Alam Sehat Lestari translates to "Sustainable Healthy Nature."
Alam Sehat Lestari is abbreviated as "ASRI," itself an Indonesian word expressing the fresh, green beauty of flourishing nature.
Then, lacking a source of legal timber, loggers were compelled to illegally move their activities inside the boundaries of Gunung Palung National Park. Across the road, I can see the degraded margin of the park. That’s the area ASRI aims to restore.
This widening road is the border of Gunung Palung National Park.
On the private-land side, three men build a house next to a small rubber plantation.
First, Ihsan shows us around the nursery. Some of the saplings were provided by patients as payment for their medical or dental care. This noncash payment system is a cornerstone of ASRI’s commitment to providing affordable healthcare.
This list, posted at the cashier's desk, displays the cash value of each species of rainforest-tree sapling when provided as payment for medical services. Notice the top two, belian (ironwood) and meranti, both pictured below.
The rest of the saplings were collected, with permission, from intact areas of the National Park where a natural seedbank still exists. The collection puts only a minor strain on the forest’s regeneration ability, because the vast majority of saplings never survive to adulthood. Competition for sunlight and attacks by herbivores and disease would weed out most of these baby trees if they were left in the forest, whereas the relative safety of the nursery allows almost all to survive. Someday, the team might switch to gathering seeds instead of saplings to further reduce impact on the forest and stress of transplantation, but coaxing seeds to germinate is not easy. For now, the nursery staff lets the forest give birth to saplings. Learning how to germinate tropical hardwood seeds will be a task for another day.
Ihsan shows off a belian (ironwood) sapling.
From above, the nursery almost looks like a forest floor.
Dika plucks a leaf from one of the robust display trees. “See that line of pores along the central vein?” he asks, pointing tenderly to the leaf’s underside. “That tells us the species, Shorea leprosula. This genus is a big complex and you need to look closely to tell them apart.” What Dika calls Shorea leprosula, everyone here knows as meranti. The nursery is also home to uba, a hardwood timber favorite, and belian, the famous ironwood. Then there are the fruit trees: sweet cempadak, gas-leaky durian, bitter jenkol and patai.
Dika points out pores on the underside of a meranti leaf.
I weigh a heavy belian (ironwood) seed in my hand.
Ihsan tells me the saplings don’t struggle against many diseases, but ants have a habit of making their nests in the polybags and occasionally stripping young leaves. Because they’re transplanted right before the rainy season, the saplings don’t require watering. The hardest part of running the nursery is, Ihsan tells me without hesitation, “Weeding!” A stiff grass erupts from any patch of soil left untended, smothering the slow-growing trees. “When the tree is taller than the weeds, then it is safe,” Ihsan explains. I imagine that day comes as a relief for the nursery manager, like the feeling a nervous parent gets while watching her child walk across the stage at high-school graduation. The journey isn’t over, but at least the aggressive grass has been outgrown.
Moss coats a logged stump in the reforestation plot.
ASRI has reforested 22.5 hectares so far at this site. I ask Ihsan how many hectares he’s aiming for. He looks puzzled. “Our goal?” he asks. “There are many open areas. Our goal is to plant them all.”
Black shade-cloth protects the tender saplings from direct sunlight.
My straw hat bumps against the shade-cloth roof as I stand from the sprout I've been examining. I may be average height in America, but here, I’m just a bit too tall. We walk out to the parking lot, where water vapor is steaming from puddles. A turquoise butterfly slowly folds its pointed wings with black, scalloped edges like a pair of 1950s cat-eye glasses. A small orange butterfly shows off bauble-tipped antennae, like a Martian, and a pale yellow one rests on a sapling. It’s time to explore the new forest.
The purple blossoms of cengkodok (Melastoma sp.) reminded me of Washington's native azaleas.
A tengkawan planted in 2015. This tree can bring $5,000 per cubic meter of timber.
Within five minutes, a cloud of mosquitoes has descended. They seem to ignore Ihsan and Juliansyah, but Dika and I are going crazy. We roll down our sleeves and spray on deet. We're passing through a semi-wild orchard of jackfruit and durian when an enormous stump confronts us. Two chainsaw slices indicate how this rainforest giant, a thousand-year-old ironwood, met its death. “Normally this tree can put out new sprouts from the stump,” Dika explains. “It’s very resilient.” He runs his fingers over the blackened bark. “But not this time. It was burned for charcoal, so it died all the way down.”
A thousand-year-old belian (ironwood) stump.
A chainsaw delivered the first blow; fire finished it off.
A lanky, teenage belian (ironwood) sprouts from a stump that was cut but not burned.
The first saplings were transplanted here in 2009, and more are being added every year. The forest is a teenager now. It still sports those awkward sunny patches of grass and lingering invaders, like guava and acacia, but there’s light at the end of the tunnel.
Dika models Bellucia pentamera, an invasive weed with wide, sun-gobbling leaves.
Jackfruit (Artocarpus heterophyllus) hangs from a transplanted fruit tree.
For an eerie instant, this log makes me feel like I am home in the Hoh Rainforest of Washington State.
Ihsan places his hand on the flaky, reddish bark of an acacia. “You’re probably wondering how this big tree got here,” he tells me, giving me more credit for my observations than I deserve. “It’s not old, just fast growing. An acacia from Australia. Non-native. But we won’t cut it down. We let these trees provide shade for the saplings, and they’ll die within forty years. Fast to grow, fast to die. But the native trees will live for a thousand years or more.” This long-view logic makes sense to me. Why cut a tree when you could let time do the work for you?
Two fast-growing acacias, introduced from Australia.
Back at the nursery, I open my lunch: rice, chicken liver, and eggplant curry folded into a cone of waxy brown paper.
We packed our lunches at a warung (cafe) this morning.
Juliansyah points to a mural of black squares labeled with indecipherable numbers and X’s. It’s a map, he explains. Each square is a reforestation plot, twenty meters on a side. The X’s are controls, left to their own devices with no saplings added. Through careful monitoring, ASRI is finding an answer to the question on my mind: does all this effort – collecting saplings, tending the nursery – make the forest come back faster than it would if mother nature were left to her own devices? Does reforestation make a difference?
Juliansyah explains the number-and-X map.
Before I lose my chance, I ask Ihsan about the boxes labeled X. “The control plots?” he asks. “They’re sunny and grassy. Just ferns.”
Ferns and sunshine dominate a control plot.
Today, at least, I have learned that nine years of dirt under the fingernails makes the difference between a cool, moist canopy of teenage forest and a sunny meadow. For orangutans, hornbills, and all the rainforest organisms of Borneo, that’s a difference worth noticing.
Ihsan walks beneath the canopy of a rainforest reborn.
It was the end of one era, and not quite the beginning of the next. After my coral propagation class on Gili Trawangan, I dove into a strangely familiar netherworld that transcends time and space. I'm talking about ultimate frisbee.
Tuesday Beach Ultimate the week before I left Bali for Malaysia. That's me kissing Ari on the cheek!
After a midnight coincidence in a Balinese bar, in which I overheard the word "frisbee" and procured a ride the next morning on the back of someone's motorbike to a game of pick-up ultimate, I was hooked. I played as often as I could, from windy beach-litter-clean-up/frisbee combos to high-level mini games to mandatory practice each Sunday. Yes, I managed to try out for a competitive team, UB7, within my first week. The captain, Alex, convinced me to come back to Bali after my month in Malaysia to play on UB7 at the international tournament, Nusantara Cup.
Alex (front) and I set in a team circle during a Sunday practice.
Warming up before practice in my Balinese neighborhood, Sanur.
I made new friends, both Indonesians and ex-pats, on the field. Sweating and diving and nursing grass-cuts over dinner is, universally, the fastest way I have found to make friends. But frisbee also brought old friends to me, even as I lived in relative isolation here in an archipelago of Southeast Asia.
Ari Lozano was my high-school Fryz teammate and my got-your-back-no-matter-what co-captain for our college team, the Whitman Sweets. She swung by Bali to visit me after winning gold with the USA Under-24 Worlds Team in Australia (GO ARI!!!) We played plenty of pickup and dabbled in scuba diving, Ari's newest hobby.
For the Nusantara Cup, I convinced two more Fryz to visit! Here's Jessie Thoreson, one of the ladies who inspired me to play frisbee in sixth grade, and has continued to inspire me ever since. She brought her guitar and leftie backhand, and it was like no time had passed.
Unreal! Here I am with Jessie and Henry Phan (and my Balinese teammate Naja photo-bombing), another of my lifelong friends and inspirations. Henry was one of the first men to take me seriously as an athlete, and he was the same intentional, kind baller I knew in middle school. Fryz will be my family always.
The tournament was a huge success. I got back from Gili the night before, and Alex asked if I would be his spirit captain. That's a uniquely-frisbee leadership role involving sportsmanship, integrity, and positivity. It was my job to greet the other team's spirit captain before each game, shake hands, and ask if there was any particular aspect of their spirit on which they were working. After the game, I led our team in a consensus effort to rank our opponents' spirit in five categories: communication, physical contact, positivity, knowledge of the rules, and fair-mindedness. I was honored to be trusted by the team in this leadership role, as well as my informal contributions to team strategy, even though I was a transient through Bali. These people gave me a home in the middle of my Watson year, and for that I am deeply grateful.
I got to cut and handle this weekend, what a treat.
Throwing or faking? We'll never know.
As a bonus, we won the tournament! Our win marked the first time a Balinese team has ever won a tournament on its home island. In the finals, we beat my personal favorite team: Learning To Fly, all the way from Bangalore, India. After, I traded with one of the men for his orange jersey.
Our final photo with our second-place opponents, Learning to Fly.
The day after the tournament, I was physically exhausted, sunburned to the point of peeling, and hacking with an asthmatic cold. By 3:00 in the afternoon, Jessie and I couldn't stay away. We hopped on motorbikes and headed out to one last hurrah of pick-up ultimate in Bali. There, we found a dozen similarly-addicted frisbee players, all in various stages of injury from the preceding days, all smiling ear-to-ear because we were tossing a plastic disc once more. This sport is an addiction, a home around the world, a lasting family. I'll miss you, UB7, but know that we will meet again one of these days.
The frisbee players can't stop! Here's post-tournament pick-up.
And with that, I said goodbye to Bali. A sixteen-hour day of travel took me across several islands and channels to Java, Pontianak, Ketapang, and finally my destination of Sukadana, a rural town on Indonesian Borneo.
I must be here!
Fun fact, the island of Borneo is roughly the same size as Madagascar, but it contains three countries: parts of Indonesia and Malaysia, and the entirety of Brunei. The island is known as Borneo in Malaysian and English, but Kalimantan in Bahasa Indonesia. It's home to most of the world's remaining orangutans and hornbills, and also to some of the fastest rates of deforestation for oil-palm plantations.
Oil palms neatly criss-cross Borneo from my airplane window.
The reason for my trip to Borneo lies with an organization known as Health in Harmony. I was referred to this nonprofit by a friend of my mother's, and fate brought it all together. I'd been emailing with Health in Harmony's Director of International Partnerships, Amy, when she told me she'd be out of touch for a few weeks. Why? A scouting trip to Madagascar. At the time, I myself was living in Madagascar. Who shows up in the bedroom next to mine? None other than Amy! I spent a dinner and then some grilling the patient and knowledgeable woman about her groundbreaking work in One Health conservation. That interaction led me here, to become a monthlong conservation and education volunteer at Health in Harmony's pilot site in Borneo.
The story of Health in Harmony is very compelling. It all started when Dr. Kinari Webb, a young orangutan researcher straight out of Reed College, spent a year doing fieldwork in Borneo. She realized, as many ecologists do, that studying her beloved primates was not going to save them. She was horrified to realize that the apes might go extinct within her lifetime. She saw the illegal logging, spoke with local communities, and actually listened to what they had to say. This process, called "radical listening," taught Dr. Webb that in order to save orangutans, she would need to become a medical doctor and provide healthcare so the people living around the national park wouldn't be forced to log for their lives.
Really, Dr. Webb explains it all much better than I do. I highly recommend watching her TED Talk:
The next morning, I felt like I was dreaming as I walked through the spacious, white, outdoor halls of Alam Sehat Lestari, or ASRI, the hospital Dr. Webb founded. The hospital's rear boundary butts up against Gunung Palung National Park, one of the largest remaining tracts of Bornean orangutan habitat.
This triptych from the hospital's wall depicts an ASRI reforestation project in the degraded, marginal lands of the National Park. I'm interested to see the progress with my own eyes.
The orangutan poster is a popular destination for patients to take selfies.
A planetary health vibe permeates the hospital. This sign translates to, "Let's guard them now. Someday, they will take care of our grandchildren."
I spent my first afternoon acquainting myself with Sukadana, my home for the month of April. I am living in a breezy house once occupied by Dr. Webb herself. The roof is half thatch and half corrugated-metal. Insects, rats, and cats enter at will, but the mosquito net over my bed keeps the worst at bay. My only complaint are the twitchy yellow wasps that live in two nests daubed to our kitchen's rafters. These curious buggers buzz against my net all night, and they often wander right through the seams of the net into my personal space. It's unnerving to hear the buzzing get closer, then stop, and suddenly feel the tickle of a wasp's feet across my arm in the dark. I've killed a dozen between sturdy books so far. Maybe, if I keep at it, I'll get them all!
The central monument of Sukadana is this space-age salute to durian. Could anything be more Indonesian?
I parked my bicycle for a quick tour of the outdoor market, specializing in fish and vegetables.
The long, toothy, saltwater eels caught my eye (and nose.) I asked if I could take a photo with them, remembering how such requests to photograph without purchasing were met with angry glares in Madagascar. Not so here!
Not only did the fish mongers welcome my photography, they all requested selfies with me and their fish.
Here are just two of our fish-selfie album.
The marine-invertebrate-monger was not to be outshone. Here he displays a prawn and a slipper lobster.
In this highly Islamic town, you would be silly to direct anyone in relation to "the mosque," because there seem to be mosques on every block. But if you were to mention the "big mosque," there could be no doubt about the direction you meant to indicate. This glorious white structure looms above the horizon in a powerful silhouette. Its call to prayer can be heard echoing through the streets five times a day -- including right now, as I type. It's lucky I am a sound sleeper, because my poor housemate is awoken every morning at 5:00 am by the sacred Arabic songs coming through the loudspeaker.
The Big Mosque.
Already, Sukadana feels like a home. I don't have the ready-made community of a frisbee team, but the ASRI staff have the same loving camaraderie. I've heard there is an avid Zumba community, a swimming pool for Saturdays, and an early-morning bike crew, so I won't be lacking for exercise. Maybe I'll be able to teach my coworkers to throw a disc, too, and start a frisbee club. I imagine our name would have a nice ring to it: Sukadana Spirit, a team for ecosystem health.
