Planetary Health Education: ASRI Kids Learn How to Keep Their Whole Earth Healthy

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:

1. Monitor
2. Provide healthcare
3. Find alternative livelihoods
4. Educate
5. 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.

Share:

Read More

Tur Klinic: My Debut as a Filmmaker

I made a video!

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.

Share:

Read More

Rainforest's Rebirth

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.

Share:

Read More