Third Quarterly Report: Nine Wild Months of Watson

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.

Love,
Nina

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Spirit: from Balinese Frisbee to a Bornean Hospital

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.

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Second Quarterly Report: Halfway through the Watson

Here we are, six months into the Watson year and six more to go. Below is my second quarterly report, one of the few deliverables required of me by the Watson Foundation. In case you missed it, you can read the first quarterly report here. Thanks for following along!

Draped in a cape of strangler-fig roots.

Second Quarterly Report

Date: January 27, 2018
Countries you were in: Madagascar, Indonesia
Countries for next quarter: Indonesia, Malaysia
Current location: Sanur, Bali, Indonesia

Dear Watson Foundation,

Apa kabar? Hai from Indonesia! Today I’m writing from the raised wooden floor of a gazebo on the roof of my homestay in Sanur, Bali. I’m surrounded by a sea of red tiles and stone shrines, adorned each morning with foods, flowers, and incense offered in folded banana leaves. I hear two roosters locked in a crowing battle. I have no idea where they’re hiding.

A crab-eating macaque and his mossy stone cousin in the Ubud Sacred Monkey Forest.

My flooded street in Sanur after a night of thunderstorms.

Last I wrote, I was finishing my first month in Madagascar. The challenges of that country did not get easier with time, but I did come to value them more. These struggles ranged from flesh-ripping vines to my heavy sense of guilt because the people with whom I lived had so few resources while I have so many. The average daily wage in Madagascar is $0.70, but poverty cannot be captured in a number. A house in a typical village around Ranomafana has a dirt floor and a thatch roof, with an open fire for cooking and black soot for breathing, but poverty cannot be described by architecture. Everyone I met told me stories of sand fleas burrowing into their feet because shoes were not in the budget, but poverty cannot be understood through parasites. I am just beginning to grasp the roots and results of Malagasy poverty after living amidst it for three months, so I cannot presume to convey it in a paragraph, but perhaps this conversation will give a taste of our global economic dissonance.

A mud-walled and thatch-roofed house in the tavy hills outside Ambatovory.

My superheroine guide, Menja, and I were sitting in one of our rainforest camps beneath a leaky blue tarp, biding our time until the afternoon when we would set lemur traps.

Menja: “I hate the rain.”
Me: “I love the rain! At my home in Seattle, it rains all the time.”

Menja: “Well, that makes sense. Because you have a raincoat that doesn’t leak.”
Me: “Oh. Good point.”
Menja: “And you have rain pants that don’t leak either, right?”
Me: “Yeah.”
Menja: “And your house – does it have a roof that doesn’t leak?”
Me: “Yes, it does have that.”
Menja: “And outside – you have sidewalks? So it’s not too muddy to walk in the rain?”
Me: “Ah, yes, we have sidewalks. No mud trails.”
Menja: “And shoes?”
Me: “Yes, shoes too.”
Menja: “And you have a car? So when you need to go, you are not walking?”
Me: “Yes, we do.”
Menja: “And furniture.”
Me: “Huh?”
Menja: “In your house. You have furniture, yes? So you can sit down while it rains?”

I couldn’t think of a response to that. I’d never thought of the connection between a recliner and a rainstorm, but to Menja it was obvious. In her experience, rain means crouching for hours in a smoky, one-room house with no furniture. Not only does my house have chairs, but it also has windows with glass, a furnace to heat it, electricity to keep the lights on, books to read, and a computer with WiFi to occupy me. Rain in Madagascar bears no relation to rain in Seattle. The water may be the same, but our experiences of rain could not be more different.

Following Menja down a slick, clay trail in the rain to conduct sand-flea interviews.

To fill the daylight hours in our field camps, I began bringing colored pencils and offering drawing lessons to the village kids who hung around after lunch, hoping for leftovers. One day, while hosting a gaggle of children to draw bugs and leaves on pages torn from my notebook, I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that these children deserved an education they would never be offered. Most had dropped out after fifth grade because no matter how hard their parents worked, they’d never earn enough to pay school fees. The unfairness tied my stomach in knots. Right then, I decided I would raise money for Madaworks, a small nonprofit that funds high-school education for Malagasy girls. In a blog post titled “The Power of Pencils,” I asked my readers to donate, and within two weeks we had exceeded my $1200 goal. The Madaworks founder, Diane, then challenged me to raise tuition for a full, three-year education for both girls, a total of $3600. As I uploaded more stories and photos, donations flowed in from teammates, family members, and even strangers who’d come across my blog. Now, as I type, we are $20 away from our new goal. I have received praise for this effort, but I ask myself, why do I have the power to run a fundraiser in the first place? My resources––contacts in the United States, writing experience, a camera, internet access––all come to me as unearned gifts. I do not deserve praise compared to the Malagasy girls who will receive these scholarships: they have overcome far greater obstacles to achieve what I have been given for free.

The kids of Bevoahazo, engrossed in my bird book and their scientific drawings.

As a side project, I interviewed 58 households about the sand flea, a translucent white parasite the size of a pinhead that burrows into skin around the toenails for four to six weeks unless someone digs it out with a needle. Sand fleas live in humans, pigs, and dogs, and they are zoonotic, meaning they can switch from animals to humans. I’d never heard of sand fleas, so I was astounded to learn that 100% of villagers had been infected by this parasite, and 12% were actively hosting sand-fleas at the time of my interview. How could I have studied zoonotic disease for years and never heard of this parasite that infects millions or billions of people? I had wonderfully enlightening conversations with mothers about the health of their families, but the interviews weren’t always easy. One angry man told me he wanted nothing to do with my survey if I wasn’t going to give him medicine for his son’s feet, which left me feeling inadequate and sorry. I couldn’t provide medicine, because there is no medicine for sand fleas, but I did learn to offer small bags of salt, sugar and soap as compensation, and I taught each family how to sterilize their needles. Along with my lemur mentor, Dr. Zohdy, and climatologist Dr. Eronen, I submitted an abstract of our sand-flea research to the Planetary Health Alliance. If it’s accepted, I’ll present at the Annual Meeting in Edenborough, Scotland at the end of May. My hope is to incite more research and remedies for sand fleas by getting them added to the World Health Organization’s list of Neglected Tropical Diseases—yet my hope is tempered by the knowledge that all the diseases on this list will remain neglected until we, as a planetary community, devote far more resources to the injustice of poverty.

A female sand-flea, removed from my friend's finger with this needle. Photo credit: Cindy Capurso.

This foot had at least six sand-fleas embedded in it, making it hard for the child to walk and attend school.

On Christmas Day, my flight out of Antananarivo took me through the tiny island nation of Mauritius and the high-tech city-state of Singapore, whose airport includes a pool, movie theater, and butterfly garden. My final flight, to the Indonesian island of Bali, had plenty of room because Bali’s tourism has plummeted by 70% since its volcano, Mount Agung, began spewing ash in November.

Antananarivo from the air: a sprawling city surrounded by endless rice paddies.

Welcome to Mauritius, former home of the dodo. It must be the only country that is most famous for a species it forced into extinction.

Now what? My volunteer stint at Reef Check would not begin until mid-January, and I had no destination until then. After claiming my backpack, Marmelade, I spent a few hours trying in vain to meet other travelers and split a cab to anywhere. That’s when I met Francisca.

“Excuse me, are you looking for a ride?” I asked the petite woman swiping at her phone in frustration.

“Sure, I’m calling a GoJek,” she replied. She was a Portuguese civil engineer working in East Timor, I would soon learn, and she stops by Bali whenever she wants to go shopping or eat great sushi. Francisca took me to Kuta, the rowdy tourist town where backpackers converge to surf and party. The ride cost 13,000 rupiah – under $1.00 – and when we didn’t have exact change, the driver introduced me to Balinese generosity. “12,000 will be fine!” he said with a wide smile before driving away.

My second day in Kuta with two fast friends, Renne and Arlo.

That night, I met back up with Francisca for sushi (what else?) and checked into a capsule-bed hostel (it’s like sleeping in a very comfortable drawer). Once I got an internet SIM card and my new favorite apps, GoJek and MapsMe, I could navigate Bali as if it were my own city.

Can you spot my head? A secret waterfall flowing all the way down a mountain in West Bali.

Tracing Wallace's path to the ficus buttresses of Lombok.

I travelled from town to town, meeting new people and parting ways in a swirl of motion. I avoided eye contact with crab-eating macaques in the Ubud Sacred Monkey Forest, ate free banana pancakes at my favorite hostel, bargained for cheap sundresses in Kuta, and skinny-dipped in the Pacific Ocean to celebrate the first moments of 2018. In honor of Alfred Russel Wallace, I took a ferry from Bali to Lombok and whooped with excitement as we crossed Wallace’s Line. On Lombok, I examined giant millipedes, trekked to waterfalls, and read Wallace’s book, The Malay Archipelago, in the same steamy jungles where he wrote it.

Wallace would have loved to find this cicada...

... just down the trail from this cicada-mimicking moth. What notion about natural selection might it have inspired in his mind?

One afternoon, I hunched in a cramped bird-blind for an hour, sweat dripping off my nose and mosquitoes whining in my ears, as I waited for the green flash of an elegant pitta delivering insects to his chicks. I extended my Indonesian visa––a bureaucratic nightmare involving three visits to the Kantor Imigrasi––and became a certified rescue diver so I’ll be able to keep my fellow humans healthy while we examine the health of corals.

A stunning damselfly with translucent violet wings. (Any ideas, Thomas?)

I wonder if Wallace encountered quite as many giant millipedes as I did.

Late one Friday evening, I was bantering in a bar with a group of Balinese waiters, nursing my ginger tea, when I heard the word frisbee. Huh? “Did someone say frisbee?” I asked. It turned out that one of the waiters, a programmer named Sam, plays pick-up ultimate frisbee on Saturdays. So began my love affair with Bali Ultimate. I now attend three weekly pickup games in different corners of the island, and I’ve joined a team, UB7, for the Nusatara Cup at the end of March. While I can survive without ultimate, I am not thriving unless I can chase a frisbee down across a swampy field, gasp after sprints, and stay out at dinner past dark with teammates because we’re having too much fun to say goodbye.

Sunday pick-up ultimate in Canggu.

Black leggings? White socks? Or just a great day of mudtimate?

A week into January, I finally reported for duty at the Reef Check office. My role is to assist Sila, an earnest conservation biologist one year older than me, with the implementation of Reef Check’s new Climate Change Adaptation Program. For more than a decade, Reef Check has been partnering with local fishermen and divers from Tejakula, a sub-district on the northern coast, to collect data on coral health. Now, I’m working on curriculum to teach these local partners about the theory behind climate change and its impact on coral bleaching. I enjoy wrestling these abstract concepts into accessible terms, but I’m ready for my move away from the computer screen and into the Tejakula communities.

My first Tokay gecko, Gekko gecko, a species with which I've been obsessed since elementary school. You can't tell from the photo, but this lizard was a foot long, and clinging to a vertical mural like it was the ground!

A couple weeks ago, as a facilitator for the International Student Conference on Global Citizenship, I had the chance to take 40 undergraduate and graduate students snorkeling over a coral reef. Most of the participants were studying business or international relations. None were biologists, and many had never used a snorkel before. A few confident swimmers held their breath and dove to get eye-to-eye with massive blocks of Porites coral, finger-like Acropora, mushroom-shaped Fungia and delicate Gorgonian sea-fans. As we treaded in the choppy water, one student surfaced and, still catching his breath, called out to me, “Why are the corals bleaching?” It might have seemed an absurd moment for a scientific lesson, two bobbing heads hollering back and forth across the din of an ocean, but to me it was perfect. How many times had this man heard the sad tale of climate change in a lecture and tuned it out? Only here, as saltwater coated his tongue and the algae-cloaked corpses of dead corals swayed in his vision, did the question really matter. He wasn’t raising his hand to ask me why corals bleached because it was going to be on an exam. He hollered across the ocean because he couldn’t wait, because suddenly the survival of these calcium-and-jelly organisms was personal.

After snorkeling, we explored Taman Tirta Gangga, a Hindu temple known for its fountain of youth.

At the end of February, I’m heading to Malaysia with my boyfriend, Collin, to explore climate activism in Kuala Lumpur, marine life around Perhentian Kecil, and street food in Penang. I can’t wait to show him a little slice of my Watson life. Then, I’ll move to West Kalimantan on Indonesian Borneo to work with Health in Harmony, a ground-breaking nonprofit that protects orangutans’ rainforest habitat by providing healthcare to the surrounding communities. Already, the connections from this year are circling around to find me again. By coincidence, I met the Health in Harmony directors in Madagascar, and a conversation over rice and zebu blossomed into a partnership on Borneo.

Who did I meet at the Conference on Global Citizenship but Aimee Razafimanjary, a Master's student from Fianaratsoa, Madagascar! We couldn't stop laughing and speaking Malagasy amid the organic lettuce-fields of Bali.

My friends ask me if the year feels like it’s going by too fast. I tell them no. I have noticed these six months passing, and I know where the time has gone: to cat vaccines and hamburger nights, to waterfall baths and lemur lice, to colored-pencil art and coral funerals and sobbing confessions to the stars. I don’t feel like the year is going by too fast, but I can’t imagine it being over. Here’s to the next six months!

What is this, a leaf for GIANTS?

Sincerely,
Nina

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