A journey to Tanjung Puting National Park, Central Kalimantan, and home of Orangutans, where we met a dedicated community and solicited their stories.
Conservation is about more than just teaching people what to do or not do, but about reaching their hearts through storytelling.
When I was a child, we Dayak people hunted orangutans to eat. Our lives depended on nature and we didn't see orangutans as particularly important creatures.
Orangutans can’t tell us what's wrong, and they don’t understand that we’re trying to help them, or worse, they think that we’re trying to kill them. This makes the work dangerous...
We mustn’t allow ourselves to be duped or succumb to a cognitive dissonance whereby we just switch off from it. We have to care because ultimately it will all come back to us.
The area sold its land to the palm oil companies and the village was devastated by the river mining nearby… It’s so sad to see that I don’t want to even stay one night there.
Rica is also very sensitive toward my feelings, what I like, and what I don’t. Her child Ricardo would steal my clothes from the washing line and play with them, and even though I never scolded him or taught her to, Rica would always return them back to me.
You should absolutely never stand between an alpha male and his girlfriend.
Princess was probably the smartest of all. When she was around, you couldn’t tie the canoe to the river bank because she would steal it and paddle it away.
We were all afraid of the mythical Kandar, a decrepit orangutan that has decayed into a soulless ghoul, like the walking dead, staggering around looking for people to devour. The elders warned us not to stray too far into the forest.
Orangutans are emotional creatures, you can see it in their eyes, but there is nothing we can do to soothe them. Only time can heal their pain.
It’s important that children feel connected to orangutans and understand their role in the ecosystem before learning why they need to protect them. We use storytelling, puppets, books, or even dress up in orangutan costumes.
It’s remarkable how similar they are to human babies. In the middle of the night, they cry out of hunger and we have to get up and feed them milk until they fall back asleep.
“I do this job because I am passionate about orangutans and their habitat. It would be difficult to do this kind of work without that feeling in your heart.”
We’ve had pythons try to eat our chickens, and water snakes trying to eat our fish. None of it scares us though, we’ve gotten used to them all.
