Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Deep in the Indonesian rain forest, our reporter braves tribal war to discover why orangutans may be driven to extinction by America's love for pool cues.
Mar 6, 2002 | The soggy orangutan tries opening his eyes. He's clutched to his mother's breast, and I can barely see him as he focuses for the first time on the world around him. His first impression will be of grey bars. Just beyond is Borneo's rain forest, echoing with insects and chain saws.
His mother, Pijam, protective and serene, lounges on her back in the dim light of early morning, cupping him like a delicate flower. She seems sleepy, at peace. But I know things she can't and wonder what's in store for her and this still-damp newborn.
Pijam is a motherless mother. Like most of the animals at this clinic, she was orphaned by an illegal pet trade that grows as Indonesia's forests crumble. Adults are killed in the wild, infants shoved into sacks and sold for quick cash. Pijam is among the lucky few confiscated and brought to a clinic run by the Orangutan Foundation International where I volunteer. Our goal is to prepare them for life back in the wild.
Most of the volunteers here are vet students. I'm the exception. I came here because orangutans could be extinct within 10 years and I wanted to discover why. I brought a camera and journal to document the experience. As a freelance writer and filmmaker, I've spent the last few years covering anything and everything in a bid to find my niche. It's the orangutans who reveal my calling. Their astonishing beauty, their terrible plight, fills me with awe and outrage. Watching Pijam through the bars of her cage, I decide there is nothing I'd rather do than tell the story of those who are fighting for survival but cannot speak for themselves.
The clinic is in a rural village deep in Borneo's south. In addition to grappling with the usual patchy infrastructure, I had to dodge an unusual ethnic war to get here. The fighting is a backlash against the Indonesian government's habit of relocating people from crowded, urban islands to relatively "empty" outer islands. Indigenous people aren't consulted and conflicts almost always arise. Borneo's recent violence is a case in point. Thousands of Madurans from their jampacked island off the coast of Java were moved to Borneo at the expense of the government. As migrants poured in, local Dayaks felt they were losing their traditional lands, their way of life. They resurrected their ancient tradition of headhunting in a bid to reclaim what they say is theirs.
When I was packing for my trip to Borneo, the news hit the fan. Front page articles all over the country told tales of headless corpses of Madurans littering remote jungle roads. It was a tad unnerving, and the shaky support I had from family and friends about traveling to such a remote area immediately dried up. I defended my plans, pointing out that the orangutan clinic is in Pasir Panjahn, a Dayak village -- I'd be living with the hunters, not the hunted. I emphasized that Sampit, the hub of the fighting, was 100 miles north. Besides, no one was targeting foreigners. I packed my bags and hoped for the best. Four airplanes and two bus rides later, I arrived unscathed in Pair Panjahn, a few newly burned houses the only lingering signs of conflict.
When I first got to the clinic, I wanted to know how in the world peoplecould prepare orangutans for life back in the forest. The process is simpler than I expected. The idea is to let animals roam the "nursery" forest adjacent to the clinic each day, learning from each other and tapping into their instincts about which branches hold their weight, which insects taste good. "They say you can take the girl out of the country, but you can't take the country out of the girl. It's kind of like that with orangutans," explains the founder, Dr. Birute Galdikas. "You cannot take the orangutan out of the orangutan. They are still forest animals no matter what happens to them."
When Galdikas first came to Borneo 30 years ago, she hadn't planned on getting into the orangutan rescue business. Her goal was to launch the first long-term study of orangutans in the wild. Her mentor was the late Louis Leakey, the lifeline behind Jane Goodall's work with chimpanzees and Dian Fossey's passion for mountain gorillas. Like her peers, Galdikas eventually shifted her focus from science to conservation. "My studies do continue, but this," Galdikas explains, waving her hand toward the clinic, "is more and more the focus of what I do on a day-to-day basis because the need is so great, the need is so overwhelming."
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