White People in Ponti

Last night I spoke English with two Canadians for about 4 hours! It was fun, and made me remember that I am in fact not an aberration – there are other people in this world with blonde hair, blue eyes, and white skin. I met the first Canadian, Michelle, at the grocery store about three weeks ago, just before leaving for the field. She sent me an sms last night an invited me to a birthday party for one of her students (Michelle teaches English to Indonesians in Pontianak). I happily accepted the invitation and arrived at the party where I met the second Canadian who works with villages along the Kapuas river helping them to build sand filtration systems for drinking water, as well as a couple of Dutch women who do physiotherapy work with disabled orphans in Pontianak. Luckily I’ve retained at least some remedial English skills, and we had a blast complaining about the difficulties of being a foreigner in this country.

Tomorrow I fly to Jakarta (again) to pick up my passport and do some shopping.

Back to Civilization!

After three weeks of hard but wonderful work in two small villages in the center of Kalimantan, I'm back in Pontianak. I don't have the time or energy to write much tonight, but more will follow soon.

Last Day in Mensubang

Yesterday was our last day of field work in Mensubang. Yadi and walked the border between grass and rubber land uses across the river, and then took a sampan back home in the middle of an incredible downpour. It has been raining “cats and dogs” for the last five days in Mensubang, which has slightly impeded our field work but mostly means that we are constantly wet during the daytime. One effect of the rain is a rapidly rising river level; over the course of about five days the river level increased by at least 15 feet.

Yesterday morning I had one of my most embarrassing experiences to-date in Indonesia. I got up very early as usual (about 4:45 am, before sunrise) and walked down to the river. As I was walking the plank from the shore to the floating dock, I slipped and fell into the river…oops! The Indonesian woman sitting on the dock washing her clothes was at first appalled but then totally amused. Later that day all the Indonesians I saw giggled and asked me why I wanted to swim so early in the morning.

Today we leave for Ketapang, where I will meet with the oil palm company and ask permission to tour the plantation area. Then back home to Pontianak.

Fruit Craving

Today three team members, the kepala dusun, the village secretary, and I went to the oil palm plantation requesting to interview the plantation manager. Unfortunately, we were quickly told that we could not come to the plantation unless we had a letter from the company office in Ketapang. It was a disappointing day, but we made the best of it and instead of staying on the plantation for the remainder of the day, road-tripped (with three motorbikes and six people) to the nearby villages of Engkadin and Nanga Tayap. After three weeks in the boonies it was shocking to arrive in Nanga Tayap, where there are restaurants, cell phone reception, and even fruit for sale!

The lack of fruit and vegetables in this incredibly lush and productive landscape is very disappointing. In Thailand I was accustomed to an amazing variety of fruits and vegetables for sale in even the smallest towns. Here in Indonesia, because they don’t use fertilizer, there is very little fruit or vegetable available except during certain seasons of the year. Our field food usually consists of rice, dried fish (or sometimes fresh fish, if a trader comes by with fish for sale), a vegetable such as green beans, cabbage, or cassava leaves, and sometimes chili paste. Breakfast is fried rice, and snack is boiled or fried cassava root. Surprisingly, I feel quite healthy with this diet but am craving fruit. Sometimes a trader will come through town with watermelon, fried bananas, and oranges for sale – if we see him, we buy ALL of his fruit for ourselves and teammates. One day there was a man selling ice cream – despite the fact that I am supposed to avoid ice at all costs (they don’t generally boil the water used for ice) I couldn’t resist, and happily chowed down on home-made chocolate ice on a stick.

Oil Palm Plantation

We’ve been in Mensubang for four days, and the biggest story here is the oil palm company. When we arrived we learned that villagers were protesting against the company because it had bulldozed their lands without compensation. The oil palm company’s perspective is that the lands bulldozed were not being used (which is true), but the community’s perspective is that these areas belong to the community because in the past the community has cleared the areas. We are treading carefully with this issue, because we want to develop a working relationship both with the oil palm company and with the villagers.

The oil palm plantation is shocking -- the company is in the clearing and landscaping phase (only about 60 ha of 4,000 ha are currently planted with oil palm trees), and the plantation area looks like a moonscape, with no living things except a bit of grass here and there.

Arrival in Mensubang

Arrived in Mensubang via Bayangan (another village) today, after one of the most heart-stopping experiences of my life. The road from Cali to Mensubang is narrow, slippery, rocky, and hilly; we traversed this road with motorbikes and luggage. I often had to get off the bike and walk up hills, and a few times we skidded off the road. My Indonesian friends are totally fine with this kind of travel – they’ve been riding motorbikes since small – but my heart was in my throat the whole trip! To make a bad situation worse, my motorbike driver races bikes (“grass track”, the Ketapang equivalent of NASCAR) and he kept trying to show off his mad speed skills with the buleh on the back of his bike. In the middle of the trip, it started raining and the roads became muddy as well as slippery.

Despite the stressful trip, everyone arrived in Mensubang safely:

Here, we stay with the Kepala Desa in a beautiful house by the Pawan River. Unlike the river that runs in front of Cali, the Pawan is huge and important not only to village everyday life, but is the main mode of transportation for people that live along it. Canoes (sampan), motorboats, speed boats, and fishing boats can be seen on the river at all hours, and few people travel by motorbike. Mensubang spans both sides of the river, but all the houses are sprawled out along only one side, while community rubber farms are on the other side – there is no bridge to the opposite bank so all commuting to the rubber must be done by boat. The toilet and river are one in the same, and all drinking water is taken from here as well (and boiled before drinking). To my incredible surprise I didn't get sick in Mensubang, and I now have improved respect for the power of boiled water.

The best part of the river is the fact that I can swim in it!!! After the long motorbike ride swimming was a wonderful way to let go of all the stress and mud collected during our travels. The 7-year-old daughter of the kepala desa is a great swimmer, and we played in the water together for about ½ hour until it got dark. Tomorrow we meet with important village members and check out the village area.

No More Cameras, Please!

A hard, and long day in the field. We walked about 12 kilometers through swamp forest and on logging roads to get the GPS points needed to understand this border area. We also picked up another member – Tata – to complete our team (8 people).

Upon returning to Cali, I happily bathed and ate. We are leaving for Mensubang on Monday so tomorrow is our final day in the field. All the villagers came to the school tonight and wanted pictures with me (the buleh). Although tired, I obliged but I fear that the pictures will show a sleepy white girl trying to stay awake, instead of the celebrity they all think I am! Indonesians have an obsession with buleh – they want to touch me (my skin), to talk with me, and above all to take photos with me. Sometimes this is amusing but most often it is intrusive and tiresome.

Gunung Tarak

Friday the 13^th. Because Friday is a holy day in the Muslim religion, we have chosen to make Friday the day off each week. Indonesians are such diligent workers, however, that they decided to use the day off to catch up on data entry – yet another reason I love my teammates! After lunch and praying (Indonesian men must go to the mosque to pray each Friday) Yadi and I packed our bags and hiked to Gunung Tarak, a protected area near Cali. Our purpose was to pick up some compasses at a field station there, and to get some GPS points of the border between Cali and its northern neighbor.

The field station at Gunung Tarak is also run by SIMPUR HUTAN. The area has about 5, 2 kilometer-long transects where they are mist-netting bats, doing transect bird and mammal surveys, video-trapping mammals, and doing vegetation studies. Most of the area is swamp forest, and has been heavily logged (illegal logging) over the past 10 years. We could hear chainsaws during the walk to the field station.

At the field station I (as a white woman) was received with what can only be described as wariness. All of the workers at the field station are male, but I was able to find a private place to bathe and change, thank goodness. I learned a bit about the project at Gunung Tarak, and saw some beautiful video footage of orangutans taken just a few days earlier. The area is connected to a much larger national park (Gunung Palung) and is very biodiverse due to its protected status and proximity to such a large protected area. After dinner (dried fish and rice and chili and cassava leaves, standard fare in the field) I went to bed early, protected by a mosquito net.

A day of hiking

With a team of three men (Rohman, Yadi, Guide Bapak Asni) I hiked to the border of Cali with a neighboring village. This was the most enjoyable day of field work thus far – our objective was to simply collect a couple of GPS points so most of the time was spent walking and talking. The hike took us from the lowlands through forest which had been logged (industrially logged) in 2004, and then burned in 2006, and to the top of a peak overlooking cali and the village of Mensubang. Mensubang has oil palm, and the extent of the plantation was incredible – it filled most of the valley floor.

Bapak Asni is a man from Cali who earns a living by hunting. He knows these hills well, and had lots of stories and information for us as we walked. One of the highlights of the day was drinking water from a log (see picture below) and another was finding a group of orangutan nests. I have yet to see orangutans here, but monkeys are abundant.

Rubber and Leeches

Have you ever wondered where the rubber for your tennis shoes comes from? A tree. Okay, you probably knew that. Have you ever seen a rubber tree? Probably not, except maybe on National Geographic or the Discovery Channel. Today I saw rubber trees for the first time. These trees produce latex, which is harvested every day (except for rainy days, when harvesting will kill the tree). The latex is harvested by cutting the trunk of the tree and letting the latex drain into a small container such as a half of a coconut shell. After collecting the latex, the rubber worker mixes water and another substance with raw latex and lets it dry in a rectangular form. After dry, the rubber is transported to market in Ketapang and around the world. Perhaps the most surprising thing about rubber is its unpleasant smell – I can tell where there is rubber being harvested simply by the stink.

Besides rubber, I learned about Indonesian leeches today. Because it rained last night the forest was filled with leeches – about ½ inch long, black, and skinny, these animals are incorrigible, and quickly move from boot to sock to foot. They aren’t painful, or dangerous, but a leech sucking on my foot is yucky nonetheless, so leech checks will be a regular part of our field work on days after rain.

Cali Field Work Day One

The first day of real field work! The team, plus a guide named Bapak Donco, walked from the village center of Cali to the border between fruit garden and forest, which turned out to be a significant elevation change. I’m happy that everyone is physically capable of doing this work – although tired, even the girls were able to keep up and stay interested throughout the day. On our trip, we met with many illegal loggers. Illegal logging here is not as I imagined it. Instead of an industrial-style logging operation that is common in the US, illegal logging is done by a single person with a chainsaw. The wood is sawed into boards in the forest, and transported to roads or major rivers via small forest roads called “jalan kuda-kuda” – no vehicles involved, the logger must pull the logs himself. Incredibly hard work!

Fun with Mapping

This morning the team learned how to use the GPS units, and got a taste of what field work is like. The team is made up of 6 indonesians: Dessy, Windi, and Neli are female; Rohman, Yadi, and Tono are male. Neli and Windi have never done vigorous field work before, and after the training session (about two hours of walking around an open field and in a fruit garden with GPS units) they were exhausted. In Indonesia no one walks ANYWHERE – all movement is by motorbike or car or bus, so this is more activity than most everyone is accustomed to.

In the evening community members arrived at the school to make a paper map of the Cali area. The kepala desa, as well as about 4 other men gave input, but the kepala desa was the one who drew the map. Cali’s main revenue sources are timber (from illegal logging) and rubber. They also have extensive fruit gardens (durian, mango, and other tropical fruits I’ve never heard of) and ladang (areas that are cleared and planted with rice and other yearly crops). The people here don’t use fertilizer, so they must move rice cultivation to a new area every year – thus the term “shifting agriculture”. The end result is a diverse landscape in many stages of regrowth, from newly cut ladang to areas that look like forest, but which probably hosted ladang about 80 years ago. Despite all the reading I’ve done, I have a hard time understanding this form of cultivation and I suspect it will take me some time to recognize the different land use types.

We encountered some resistance from village members at the start of the map making session; they were wary that I was interested in making Cali into a national park. Apparently this situation recently occurred in a village north of Cali, and the local people are afraid it could happen to Cali as well. After assuring everyone that my purpose was not to kick villagers out of their town, everyone calmed down and at the end of the night we had our work cut out for us: Cali spans a distance of about 22 x 10 kilometers, and we had to map land uses within this area as well as borders with neighboring villages.

Welcome to Cali!

After spending an extra day in Ketapang doing paperwork (a truly endless process in this country) Dessy and I followed the rest of the team to Cali. First we boarded another, much smaller speed boat to take us up the Pawan river to a town near Cali. This boat trip was one of my most unhappy travel experiences to date – I strongly dislike small spaces, and the boat was packed with people to the point that I could barely see outside or move my legs for the entire 4 hour trip. The boat:After the boat ride was over, we hired a couple of motorbikes and drivers to take us overland to Cali. This was to be my first of many harrowing experiences on a motorbike in Ketapang – no helmet, dirt roads, fast driver, and the motorbike loaded with luggage. But I was able to forget all this as I looked around: Ketapang is filled with bright green hills, red soil, huge fruit trees, wonderful-smelling clean air, abundant streams, birds, and very few people. I fell in love with the area during this first motorbike ride to Cali, and I feel so lucky that I will be able to work in the area for the next few years.

Arriving in Cali was like coming home – the whole team warmly welcomed us with enthusiastic greetings and yummy papaya. While in Cali we stayed in the village school (see pic), which was luckily on holiday during our visit. So the first day in the town was filled with setting up house (kitchen, beds, laundry lines, lights) in the school. There is no electricity in Cali except for portable generators. Luckily our neighbors were willing to let us share generator power (for a fee, or course), thus we had lighting and power every evening from about 6-10 pm.

The first night in Cali was full of many firsts – the first time bathing in the river stands out above all other experiences. In Cali, no private bathrooms or bathing areas exist. The small stream that runs through the village is used as a water source (upstream of bathing, etc.), a bathroom, a place to do laundry, and a shower. Every night at about 5 pm most women in Cali go to bathe in the river. Most women wrap a tube sarong around themselves, tie it tightly at the top, and do all bathing activities in this sarong. New to this style of bathing, my sarong kept falling off – probably an unfortunate combination of a small chest and no experience! All the girls had a good laugh at the crazy buleh. Happily, my sarong skills have improved since that first day and I can now bathe without troubles.

After bathing, the entire team went to meet the kepala dusun (literally “head of village”), the man who serves as the leader of Cali. I tried to explain my purpose to him in very broken Indonesian, and then my team members (thank goodness) explained our work in Indonesian. He seemed to support our purpose, and promised to gather a group of villagers to help make a map of the village the following night (“community mapping”).

Swallow Town

Today we traveled from Pontianak to Ketapang by speed boat. As usual in Indonesia, the speed boat packed to the gills with people – luckily we were in “first class” (with air conditioning, movies, lunch, and seats provided). For those in economy class, there were no seats (everyone on the deck of the boat, sitting on the floor in whatever space was available).

We arrived in Ketapang at about 4 pm. Ketapang is a sleepy town at the mouth of the Pawan river, and is a hub of travel for those entering the greater Ketapang District, including Gunung Palung national park. The town is filled with funny-looking houses, with no windows and many stories tall, and at all times of day the sound of swallows can be heard. Apparently the houses (see pic) are actually built for swallows – people in Ketapang harvest the nests and sell them to China for birds nest soup. Strange!

Tomorrow 5 members of our team will go to Cali (the first village study site of 10) while Dessy and I stay in Ketapang to get approval for my research in the district.

To Ketapang!

After a hectic couple of days getting ready for my first field work (so easy when there are six people with motorbikes ready to help with every request!) we are leaving tomorrow morning on the 7 am boat. I'm excited and nervous - hopefully this will be both a fun and productive time.

Talk to you on July 20 or so...gotta run and buy some last-minute supplies!