Holy moly, this deadline came up fast! Here's my third quarterly report for the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, one of the few requirements asked of fellows. If you like, you can revisit my first and second quarterly reports here. Without further ado...
Third Quarterly Report
Date: April 27, 2018 Countries you were in: Indonesia, Malaysia Countries for next quarter: Indonesia, Malaysia, Scotland, England, Canada Current location: Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia
Dear Watson Foundation,
I am sitting at a kitchen table inlaid with green and blue tiles, under a leaky thatch roof in the town of Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Water is billowing in through two windows and pooling in an aluminum pot. The splatter occasionally coats my laptop screen with mist. I know the storm is directly overhead because the thunder is almost simultaneous with blue-white flashes of lightning, and every clap sounds as loud as an old-growth tree crashing into the kitchen. I love these nightly tempests because they keep the rainforest steamy and damp. They also turn my yard into a mud puddle.
A Sukadana scene: concrete swiftlet house (the bird's salivary nests are a Chinese soup ingredient), drying coconuts, rainforested mountain and brewing storm.
Last I wrote, I was beginning my month with Reef Check on Bali. Although I did produce some documents – a fish identification guide, an infographic on Bali’s 2016 coral bleaching event – the work was unsatisfying. Many days, I arrived at the open-air office to find no tasks. I came to expect the phrase, “Why don’t you take the day off?” with disappointment that this organization was not utilizing my potential. On reflection, I realize most of the blame was my own. I should have invented tasks and been vocal about my strengths, respectfully reminding my supervisors that I can be an author, grant-writer and marine ecologist. Instead, I presented myself as disposable, and that led me to feel disposable.
I found this Cerulean kingfisher (Alcedo coerulescens) behind Bali's garbage dump on an unplanned day-off.
I also found this temple with walls of dirt and moss! If I were spiritual, this would be my place.
For my Reef Check capstone I joined a gathering of Pokwasmas, a fishermen’s cooperative in the village of Penuktukan, to present on reef resilience to climate change. I was honored to speak, but because I presented in English with no translation, only a handful of the audience understood. Since then I have learned to advocate for my language needs. Now when I present, I directly ask one bilingual person to translate for me, and I pause between each sentence to make sure my meaning gets across.
Shaumi, a marine science student from Udayana University, mops to prepare for the Pokwasmas meeting. Posters about marine conservation decorate the open-air room.
After the meeting, I spoke with Nyoman Sugiarta, a tourism-operator turned full-time conservationist. He pours concrete hexadomes for coral substrate and canoes the marine preserve to discourage poaching. On his forearm, an inky ecosystem of turtle, coral, fish and sea grass entwine the word “Conservation” in newspaper font.
Photo credit: Nyoman Sugiarta.
“Why do you feel strongly about coral conservation?” I asked Nyoman.
“I used to think corals were rocks,” he explained. “Then Reef Check came here and told us they were animals.” Nyoman became a diver and began paying attention to the strange, gelatinous lifeforms. “Now that I know they’re alive, there’s so much to learn! I can’t let them die.”
I was surprised that Nyoman’s explanation contained no economics. As an environmental biology student, my training often implied that wealthy Westerners can afford to conserve an ecosystem for beauty and curiosity, but subsistence resource-users conserve ecosystems for practical reasons, like increasing the harvest of fish. How quickly Nyoman dispelled that myth. Driven by his urge to learn, he traded his job for unpaid conservation and occasional scuba-dive guiding. Two summers ago, when I was a wilderness educator in Alaska, I tried to cultivate curiosity for slimy things: marine invertebrates, microbes, slime molds. In Nyoman I found an example of how powerful curiosity can be.
Corals and echinoderms I photographed in Indonesia.
In mid-February I moved to the Malaysian metropolis of Kuala Lumpur. My boyfriend Collin and I converged for a marvelous two weeks diving the corals of Perhentian Kecil, celebrating the end of Chinese New Year with 40,000 revelers in Penang, and visiting our friend Marra during her English-teaching Fulbright in Melaka. We tried to understand the threads that weave Malaysia’s tapestry of religions, genders, and races.
My three favorite postcards before I sent them: a street-art girl from Penang, public buses from Kuala Lumpur, and a stone plant from Melaka.
Once Collin left, I enjoyed the resources of a big city by touring One Health labs and giving a lecture at Monash University on “monsters and microbes.” I reunited with a great friend from high school, Nithya, who is loving her life as a solar-energy firmware engineer in Cambodia. Seeing Nithya’s drive and joy about her career got me thinking hard about my own. Compared to Nithya’s startup – young, efficient, impact-driven – my environmental nonprofits seemed ineffective and bureaucratic. I struggled to reconcile the fundamental difference between engineering, a building science, and ecology, a science of observation. Nithya had been trained to solve problems; I’d been trained to study them.
For her last night, Nithya and I tracked down the last cendol cart open in KL and enjoyed a midnight bowl of shaved ice, canned corn and green jelly (hold the durian, please).
With that mixture of inspiration and apprehension, I returned to Bali for Anuar Abdullah’s course in coral propagation. Anuar had an intense face, tan and deeply lined. His black T-shirt bore the skull-and-crossbones of Sea Shepherd, an organization of vegan pirates famous for sinking whalers. Coral gardening and piracy might seem like odd partners, but it makes sense: both groups have a take-no-prisoners attitude toward conservation. The first words out of Anuar’s mouth were, “Big things are happening. Corals are dead. We don’t have time to mess around. This is too urgent.” Anuar taught me details, like how many drops of superglue to use when attaching a fragment of Acropora to aragonite rock, but I was more interested to uncover why Anuar is successful (his fever-pitch drive to save the ecosystem he calls home) and why he is not more so (he works alone). I was daunted by Anuar’s stance that purely-academic careers are unethical in this critical moment of our planet’s health. Is a life of solitude and heartbreak the only way to fight for an ecosystem? I wondered.
We piled rocks to create an underwater nursery for coral fragments.
Before I left Bali, I met up with my ultimate frisbee team, UB7, for the tournament they host every year, the Nusantara Cup. Our team leader Alex invited me to be Spirit Captain, a uniquely-ultimate role that entails holding the team accountable for high integrity and leading a conversation after each game to discuss our opponent’s sportsmanship. I am proud to report that UB7 was the first Indonesian team in history to win the Nusantara Cup!
No mark!
The following morning had an inauspicious beginning. I was exhausted as only frisbee players will understand. My lungs burned, my hips flexors ached, the skin on my lower lip ballooned into painful blisters, and I wheezed with a nasty cold. The next ten hours in planes and cars were miserable. Little did I know, I was en route for the best month of my year.
ASRI staff jump on the beach, and I'm a bit late to the game.
That evening I arrived in Sukadana, a village nestled on the edge of Gunung Palung National Park in Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. This lowland dipterocarp rainforest is home to 3,000 of the last Bornean orangutans. I’m volunteering here with Yayasan Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI), roughly translating to Healthy Balanced Nature, a pathbreaking Planetary Health hospital with a mission to “save the rainforest with a stethoscope.” The model behind ASRI is simple: orangutans are expected to go extinct by 2050 due to habitat loss; most illegal loggers wish to stop but cannot because timber is their only source of cash for healthcare; to save orangutans, we need a human hospital.
A photo I took of a reforested orangutan corridor posted to the ASRI Instagram.
Over the past month, I have worked on education with Amad and Etty, communications with Oka, grant-writing with Monica, and reforestation with Dika. I’ve gotten to share a house and meals with ASRI’s founder, Kinari. All day I feel respected and productive. In the afternoons, the clinic staff becomes a riotously fun group of friends. We watch the sun set over the ocean, sip kelapa coklit susu (fresh coconuts filled with iced chocolate milk), watch horror films and play cards. I’ve taught the staff to bake chocolate-chip cookies and buttercream cupcakes. They've taught me to speak Bahasa Indonesia and slow down my pace. I leave tomorrow, but on no account am I ready to bid this place goodbye.
One day I baked Tollhouse cookies for the ASRI staff. It's a family recipe, the first one I learned as a kid, and Natalia asked me to write it for her. On my last morning, she pulled out a tupper of fresh-baked Tollhouse cookies! They tasted just like home.
Kelapa coklit susu on the beach.
For the past few years, I've been seeking an interdisciplinary lens through which to approach my work, one that embraces complexity. The Anthropocene Epoch demands a reckoning with entanglement; we will not find success by inspecting any one element in isolation. Initially, I titled my Watson project "One Health" because that movement -- the intersection of human, veterinary and environmental medicine -- seemed like a good stab at integration. But here at ASRI, I’ve learned that I identify even more with "Planetary Health," the recognition that solutions for human and ecological health must be integrated. ASRI does not draw a line between trees and bodies. It delivers babies, provides dental checkups, plants rainforest saplings, and buys back chainsaws from loggers to facilitate a regenerative economic spiral. With this lens, I have a new goal for my PhD. I want to identify and implement win-win solutions in which human health problems are addressed by restoring ecosystems.
A logger revs his chainsaw one last time. Today, he will sell it to ASRI's Chainsaw Buyback program in exchange for a micro-loan and training to launch a small business.
Working at ASRI is emotionally exhausting in the best way. Every day, I find myself revising my place in conservation and developing hope that real change is possible. Since 2007, ASRI has recorded an 89% decrease in logging households and a 25,000 hectare increase in forest cover. The end of illegal logging in Gunung Palung National Park is within reach.
An organic farmer, recently trained by ASRI, takes fastidious care of his black-pepper trellises. With tools like homemade compost and crop rotation, farmers can move away from slash-and-burn agriculture.
In Brazil, I learned how humans, pets and wildlife are connected by disease across a rapidly-changing landscape. In Madagascar, I probed that connection to find out whether forest fragmentation directly contributes to zoonotic spillover of viruses. Now, in Indonesia, I am seeing how the upward spiral of integrated human and ecological restoration really works to create health.
My housemate Bella, a medical student from Jakarta, tests out Marmelade (my backpack). She didn't believe all my things would fit inside.
Though I’m still in denial about leaving Sukadana, I will fly tomorrow to Tanjung Puting National Park to witness rehabilitated orangutans in their wild habitat. I then cross to Malaysian Borneo for two weeks of coral propagation and one of hornbill research. At the Planetary Health Alliance Annual Meeting in Scotland, I’ll present on Malagasy sand-flea season and climate change. I have tickets to visit a bird observatory on a northern Scottish isle and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In mid-June, I helicopter in to the most extreme leg of my Watson journey, the Arctic. In lieu of my original plan to visit anthrax-infested caribou carcasses in Russia (which is now on the do-not-travel list), I will volunteer with Dr. Emily Jenkins to test Arctic foxes and mosquitoes for emerging pathogens at Karrak Lake, a remote outpost in Nunavut, Canada.
Amad stole my camera and captured this candid moment. I am lost somewhere deep in thoughts.
I can’t decide if I’ve learned more about myself or the world these past nine months. I suppose it hardly matters. As I prepare to leave Asia for three Western nations, I’m starting to sense the Torschlusspanik (an excellent German term for “the panic one feels as gates are closing or an end is nearing”), but I can hardly imagine August as an ending. Every day, the world feels larger and richer with beginnings than before.
I clutch a butcher knife and a sack of apples as I speed past goats and banana trees on the back of Amad's motorcycle. Today, I will be observing an ASRI Kids program and supplying a vital service: apple chopping.
In the one-room school building, Amad gives a lively PowerPoint about washing hands with soap and water. He explains nutrition and the importance of healthy foods. I steadily slice apple after apple into juicy quarters. Amad expected 24 kids, but apparently word has spread. Today, the classroom bulges with 33 rapt elementary-schoolers. I have to cut the larger apple slices in half to make sure everyone will get one.
Here I am helping rinse soap off a student's hands with her water bottle.
Look at those clean hands! (Human soap dispenser in background.)
The kids line up for lemon-scented hand soap and splashes of water. They scrub their fingers meticulously, embodying the essence of hygiene. I pass out an apple slice and a tart green orange to each student, then sit back to relish my own. Fresh fruit has never tasted so good.
ASRI Kids looking cool with their apples.
"Quiz time!" Amad announces in Bahasa Indonesia. "Who can name three healthy foods?"
The room erupts with eager kids, straining their hands to the sky, halfway off their chairs. Amad selects a serious girl who's sitting in the back corner. She stands to deliver her answer.
"Milk, rice," she begins confidently, then stalls out. The room hollers ideas at her, but I think they only add confusion. She looks to Amad for support. He gives her an encouraging smile. "Vegetables!" she finally gasps, doubling over in relief. She walks to the front of the room to claim her prize. Without looking, she dips her hand into a canvas bag of goodies and pulls out a magnifying glass. Maybe she'll use it to examine bugs in the schoolyard tomorrow.
The school where Amad and I served chopped apples as a healthy snack. The old school-building is on the right.
Education is one of the five prongs of Alam Sehat Lestari, better known as ASRI, the conservation-healthcare initiative in Indonesian Borneo where I'm a volunteer. (Check out my post, Spirit: from Balinese Frisbee to a Bornean Hospital, for background.)
The five prongs of ASRI are:
Monitor
Provide healthcare
Find alternative livelihoods
Educate
Restore
Each of these prongs is supported by multiple projects on the ground. To learn about prong five, restoration, you can read Rainforest's Rebirth, my recent post about the Laman Satong reforestation nursery.
Over the past three weeks, I've been directly involved with prong four, education, through ASRI Kids. This program teaches fifth graders about Planetary Health topics ranging from nutritious eating and hand washing, to wildlife and ecosystems, to sustainable living. It's led by the wonder-woman educator, Etty Rahmawati, and her talented co-worker, "Amad" M. Zulkarnaen.
Etty poses with our resident Selfie Orangutan.
Amad straps a blender to his backpack and motorcycles to school, so he can make recycled paper with ASRI Kids.
Below is a three-minute video about ASRI Kids produced by Jane Huff, an ASRI volunteer and then-student of Northwestern University. It was filmed in 2013, one year after the program was created. ASRI Kids has come a long way since then.
The magic of ASRI lies in its combination of accurate knowledge with hands-on activity. One of the kids' favorite projects is making recycled paper. They learn to be creative with trash, appreciate forest resources, and reduce waste.
Two students carry a tub to the spigot for water.
Amad blends water and shredded scratch-paper into a violet pulp.
The kids watch as Amad strains out a rectangle of paper pulp.
Selvi, an ASRI Teen volunteer, demonstrates how to press the wet paper onto a drying board.
After paper-making, I brought out my frisbee. Tossing here are Oka Nurlaila of marketing and communications, Amad of education, and me. Photo credit: Selvi.
Two of our students got the hang of it right away. This girl soon mastered the backhand. Here she is attempting a forehand. Photo credit: Selvi.
The most important lesson in frisbee: mistakes are free lessons. When you drop the disc, pick it up again! Photo credit: Selvi.
Behind the scenes, I've spent much of my time crafting new curriculum for Etty to use in her ASRI Kids classes. So far, I've made PowerPoints about mangrove swamps, coral reefs, climate change, plastics, microbes, zoonotic disease, and the lemurs of Madagascar. Climate change was a big hit with ASRI Teens. For the first time, the teens understood the connection between deforestation and sea level rise -- and why there is a giant poster of an iceberg in the ASRI clinic! They took a group photo with the iceberg and brainstormed ways to reduce emissions in Sukadana, like putting up signs at warungs (cafes) asking customers to think twice before requesting a plastic bag or straw. (Plastic trash is burned here because there is no landfill system. Plastic is made from carbon, and burning it releases carbon dioxide.) Long story short, teens are awesome.
ASRI Teens pose with the iceberg. Photo credit: Etty Rahmawati.
Madagascar and lemurs might seem far removed from Borneo, but the links are strong. Two thousand years ago, Madagascar was originally colonized by seafaring traders from Sulawesi, an island next to Borneo. Malagasy shows more linguistic connections to Indonesian than to any other language. Borneo and Madagascar, two of the largest islands in the world, are both covered with fast-disappearing tropical rainforest. Both islands are home to endangered endemic primates: Bornean orangutans and proboscis monkeys here, and all species of lemur on Madagascar.
This year, Etty has finished her usual curriculum on Bornean wildlife, but her students keep coming back for more. Time to expand! And why not lemurs? After all, I grew up learning about African giraffes and Amazonian anacondas and Asian elephants. The strange creatures of another part of the world can be a reminder of how spectacular our own native organisms are.
Here are a few of my slides comparing Madagascar's lemurs to the primates of Borneo.
As much as possible, I show my own photos from the field.
I use lemurs as a tool to teach about scientific observation and animal behaviors. A popular new word was "biting."
Slash-and-burn agriculture is one pertinent similarity between Madagascar and Borneo. The term in Malagasy is tavy, while the Bahasa Indonesia word is ladang berpindah, literally meaning "shifting cultivation."
Making PowerPoints is fine, but it's nowhere near as fun as teaching. Last week, Etty gave me the wonderful opportunity to present my lemur slides to the Sungai Mengkuang ASRI Kids, a local group that meets behind the hospital after school. Etty acted as translator, repeating all my sentences in Bahasa Indonesia with the wide smile and clear enunciation of a seasoned educator. I couldn't have asked for a better teaching partner.
We love group photos!
The kids learned incredibly fast. It must be their combination of their young brains, their lack of inhibition about participating, their willingness to make mistakes, and their supportive environment cultivated by Etty. Near the end of class, I taught the kids about "nocturnal" and "diurnal" animals. Then I showed a photo of a tarsier, a tiny prosimian primate related lemurs, climbing a branch at night.
"Is this animal nocturnal or diurnal?" I asked.
Before Etty could translate, the children called out in a chorus, "NOCTURNAL!"
The next photo showed me in my signature broad-brimmed hat. "And what about this animal?" I asked. "Nocturnal or diurnal?"
The kids didn't miss a beat. "DIURNAL!" they shouted.
Etty and I looked at each other and laughed. In half an hour, the kids had outgrown their translator.
Etty hands back last week's ecosystem-drawing assignment.
For the comprehension quiz, I asked the group, "What are three behaviors of lemurs?"
One boy, smartly dressed in a button-up shirt and khaki shorts, stood to answer.
"Eating, moving, and preening," he answered in English. I was amazed. How many English-speaking fifth-graders know the word preening?
An underwater ecosystem drawn by an ASRI Kid, with Etty's encouragement written in red pen.
A forest of interactions among organisms. What could be better?
It's clear why education is one of ASRI's five prongs. As the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said in one of my favorite quotes, "In the end we will conserve only what we love, we will love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught."
Since its inception in 2012, the ASRI Kids program has reached 800 children across 23 schools. Alumni of the program can pass on the learning as ASRI Teens. Etty has watched with pride as several of her kids moved on to college, including one young woman who is now studying forestry in the West Kalimantan city of Pontianak.
As I watched the kids follow Etty down a jungle trail after my lemur class, I thought about how lucky ASRI is to have dedicated educators like Etty and Amad passing on their love and understanding of the world to the next generation.
