Telok Bayur

After a three-day rest in Ketapang, Dessy, Pita, and myself traveled up the Pawan River (again) to a village named Telok Bayur. The other team members have returned to Pontianak to take a test to become an Indonesian Civil Servant. More on that later…

Bayur is our second-to-last study site (9/10), and possibly the most interesting study village I’ve yet encountered. Why? In Telok Bayur, an oil palm company has been operating for about 15 years. The village contains a factory, as well as barracks and houses to support the processing of fresh palm fruit into palm oil. Perhaps more impressively, the majority of the village area (more than 50%) is covered by oil palm plantation. Here, 20 meter oil palm plants create a dark, cool, and shady forest.

Instead of tramping around the forest every day, cutting our way through thorns and getting soaking wet in rivers, we drove around the plantation on motorbikes to complete the mapping exercise. Each morning from about 7am to 4pm I sat on the back of a motorbike with a village guide and drove around the plantation area, and asking endless questions about the villager perspectives on oil palm.

The most interesting thing I discovered is that villagers are so rich they are having rich peoples’ diseases! Instead of malnutrition and TB, present at most of our other study sites, this village suffers from health problems such as hypertension and diabetes. Villagers no longer have to do hard physical labor to earn a living, and they have more money to buy high-calorie, high-fat foods such as cakes, butter, chips, beef, and chicken. In this part of Indonesia, being fat is a symbol of being rich, and is a status symbol. Along with fat, people here (and in all of Indonesia) like to be white (a signal that they don’t have to work outside in the sun) and men often let one nail grow very long (a sign that they don’t do hard manual labor with their hands).