Photographer Jason Houston and writer William deBuys visit several villages in Central Kalimantan, Indonesian Borneo to learn more about the lives, motivations, and struggles of the people who live with and within the threatened forests.

*RP 100,000 is about US$10 – it’s the largest bill used in Indonesia.

Our second journey to inland Central Kalimantan on the island of Borneo led us to several small Dayak villages along the northern edge of the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. Having spent time in the reserve and surrounding forests to see the landscape and meet the local orangutans, we wanted to learn about the socio-economics and personal experiences of the people who depend most directly on the forest every day.

Travel began as it has many mornings: in a small speedboat departing from the crowded waterfront of Pangkalan Bun. And I say speedboat literally, and not “pretty fast” boat or “motor” boat. In our experience these boats are always driven at full throttle, whether on open water or snaking through the narrow, winding, log-jammed channels they call “short cuts.” I’ve not been to Italy, but Bill, who has, likened it to a “Roman taxi ride.”By late morning we’d landed at a filthy little wharf in the frontier-feeling town of Kotarwaringin. Former home of a sultan and home to one of the more impressive and older mosques in the area, this port town has become a major hub for shipping logs and palm oil downstream. Kotarwaringin has traded-in any sense of royal or religious pride that it once might have had in exchange for the fast cash of extractive industries. After a quick transfer from the boats to a truck (all while deflecting insistent motorbike taxi drivers and other locals hawking their services), we were on our way to the villages of Tempayung and Babual-Babuti.

The hour’s drive to Tampayung became a two-hour drive after we got stuck in knee deep mud while on a “short cut.”

Tempayung, where we’ll be based for the next few days, is a small village of about 800 people, mostly Dayak, living on the edges of the protected area of the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve and surrounding forest—or, more accurately, remaining forest. Much of the forest has been converted to oil palm plantations. We came to see how people live; talk with them about their lives and relationships with the forest, and to see some of Yayorin’s various community projects already at work here. We met with craftsmen and village leaders, activists and farmers, oil palm workers, rubber tree tappers and others harvesting from the forest. Here’s a brief rundown of a few elements that make up the complex puzzle defining the lives of those who depend on these forests. All of this is at a time when populations and economic expectations are growing and the amount of viable, healthy forest is shrinking.

Oil Palm Plantations
In the majority of Borneo’s forests, the dominant economic force—and the most environmentally destructive one—is the oil palm industry. Small plantations can cover hundreds of hectares, while larger ones may spread over tens of thousands of hectares, or more. On the surface, oil palm plantations bring a significant increase in daily wages for the local populations, which at first glance appear to be a good thing; the average worker can go from subsistence farming to a daily wage of about US$3. But with that wage comes an increased need to buy many things that the now-vanished forest previously provided for “free.” Oil palm workers can no longer farm to produce their own food, and water supplies are depleted and fouled by the plantations. All of this requires workers and their families to spend their new-found money on survival, in ways they did not need to before the forest was cleared.

Pengli (above) can make about US$3/day picking oil palm fruits and tending the plantations between harvests, which provides for a very simple life that is just a step above subsistence. Through a complex leasing arrangement with the oil palm companies, landowners like Isar (below), make only about 50 percent more. In the process they bind their land to produce oil palm for 12 years, after which they gain full ownership of both the land and the trees. But by then the palm oil trees will be well beyond their prime production – which peaks at about 7-8 years–and the fragile tropical soil will be largely depleted, no longer suitable for other forms of farming.

Agriculture
The forests have been a resource for the people of Borneo for thousands of years, but as population grows and forested areas shrink, the traditional methods of shifting agriculture, or “slash-and-burn” farming, are no longer sustainable. Yayorin is working in Borneo’s communities and with local farmers to build demonstration gardens and to teach people about alternative, more sustainable agricultural practices referred to here as “intensive farming.” The idea is to use and reuse previously cleared areas, employing techniques such as maintaining local wells for water, composting for fertilizer, and planting nurseries for crop maintenance.

Using a previously burned, farmed, and abandoned area as a demonstration plot, Yayorin is showing the community how it is possible to continue farming season after season on the same small area of land. Such “intensive” practices reduce or eliminate the need to clear new land each period.

Emoy has been working with Yayorin for the last year-and-a-half to learn intensive farming practices. With little more than a machete and short-handled hoe, he’s planted corn, cucumbers and peppers for quick income; and banana, coconut, mango, and rubber trees for the long-term on about 1.5 ha of his 4ha farm in Babual-Babuti.

Forest Products
Forests also provide a variety of traditional products harvested by local people. As the forested areas become smaller and smaller, such harvests exert pressure on the ecosystem that is no longer sustainable.

Tongkat Ali, or Ali’s Cane, is thought to have medicinal qualities and increase sexual stamina.

Threatened hardwoods like ulin, or ironwood, are still used locally for such basic construction applications such as roofing shingles.

Mostly tapped by women, local rubber trees can provide a steady and sustainable source of income. Luparia taps 400 trees, harvesting up to 10kg of latex a day. That’s worth about $3/day after she pays the trees’ owner.

Handicrafts & Other Services
Retail services and handicrafts for local use make up most of the remaining economic activity in these small villages.

Fuel is sold in small quantities in plastic bottles in front of a roadside shop.

Rattan baskets, for rice and other household uses, are hand-woven by women in the villages. Each basket may take as long as two days to weave; it will sell for less than US$1. As the forests are cleared and converted to oil palm plantations, finding the rattan used in these crafts becomes increasingly difficult.

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Photographer Jason Houston and writer William deBuys head into the field to see the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve and adjacent buffer zone.

Click here to view Jason’s Lamandau slide show!

My feet are stained yellow from tannins in the water and swollen red from multiple rounds of attack by fire ants. There’s a rash from an unidentified source on my neck, and the small wound where the leech was attached to my shin bleeds profusely each time it gets wet, which out here is all the time. I’ve learned to go to the bathroom without toilet paper (and know to greet and eat with only my right hand), and I now look forward to bathing in the dark, soft, highly-acidic, and relatively cool waters of the Rasau River. Yesterday we awoke to a chorus of hooting gibbons in the distance and, closer by, the raspy response of a flock of hornbills. Each evening ends with one of Borneo’s brief but colorful equatorial sunsets, chased by a lightning storm and followed by the steady drumming of another evening’s rain on the tin roofs.

We’ve spent the last four days boating and trekking through the lowland tropical forests and black-water swamps of Central Kalimantan. After two days in the main town of Pangkalan Bun talking with Hari Kushardanto (Rare’s Senior Pride Program Manager in Indonesia) and Togu Simorangkir and Eddy Santoso from Yayorin (Rare’s local partner in this effort), we began the first of two multi-day excursions into the field. Our goal is to see first-hand the conservation programs, issues, and challenges that make up the complex social and environmental conservation dynamics so common in areas like this, where the needs of people and nature are so inextricably intertwined.

Leading our travels was Stephen Brend of the Orangutan Foundation U.K., along with some of his staff and a ranger from the Central Kalimantan Forest Department. Our plan included visits to an orangutan release camp and several reserve guard posts throughout the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve to see the different landscapes of the protected area, as well as the critically important buffer zone all along its western border.

While the majority of the current biological conservation activities take place inside the boundaries of the protected area of the Reserve, it’s the buffer zone and the surrounding communities that are the primary concern and main focus of Yayorin’s upcoming Pride Campaign. As a potential habitat for orangutans, this buffer zone actually has more viable forest land than the reserve itself; finding some way to keep it natural could add as much as 25,000 ha to the current 54,000 ha of officially protected area. But the area is owned and controlled by the local government and threatened by several large proposed oil palm plantations.

Securing protected status is possible for a small portion of the buffer zone that is surrounded on three sides by the Reserve and could be added to it, but that’s not likely for the majority of the buffer area. If this landscape is to have a future as a healthy forest (and thus as a suitable habitat for orangutans and a sustaining resource for the local communities), that will require new or revived ways of valuing the land.

Since 2007, Yayorin and Orangutan Foundation have been working on the project “Promoting the conservation and sustainable management of the lowland forests of south Central Kalimantan” supported by funding from the European Union. Yayorin’s Pride Campaign in this area will build on the non-governmental organization’s experience providing education, awareness, and empowerment towards sustainable livelihoods. The campaign will focus on the support a healthy forest can provide a community. Also, it plans to coordinate within a larger collaborative framework involving other local and international non-governmental organizations known as REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation).

Click here to view a captioned slide show of images from our visit to the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve and the nearby buffer area.

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Photojournalist Jason Houston is on the road with writer William duBuys visiting the Pride site of Eddy Santoso in Borneo! Continue to follow Jason’s journey.  

We spent most of today doing a few video interviews with Togu, the Director of the conservation group Yayorin, and Eddy, the Pride campaign manager of the site. The rest of the day we planned and prepped for our four-day trek into the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve and surrounding buffer zone.

Tasks included begging a permission letter from a local official and charging all of the batteries we can. We leave in the morning by boat, traveling several hours upriver to remote research camps with no electricity or other services. The excursion is to see the place this Pride campaign is working to save (and, with luck, some of the orangutans as well), but also to witness many of the threats the reserve faces. I’ll post a full report and lots of pictures when we return.

In the mean time, here, just for fun, are a few images of things we’ve eaten:

Dried fish laid out on the boardwalk above the river’s edge in Pangkalan Bun.

Fresh papaya from Yayorin’s demonstration gardens. A part of Yayorin’s mission is to share empowering knowledge with local communities, such as how to grow many different fruits and vegetables well and sustainably in Kalimantan’s poor, sandy soil (including such temperate crops as cabbage and strawberries!)

More dried fish in a local market stand.

 
Coconuts


Whole, deep-fried fish in a local restaurant.

Bananas


The mini-bar at the Blue Kecubung Hotel in Pangkalan Bun (where alcohol has been banned).

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Photographer and Orion magazine picture editor Jason Houston is traveling with writer William deBuys to Central Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo) to visit Eddy Santoso and the conservation organization Yayorin. Santoso and his team are incorporating Rare Pride into their work to protect the orangutans and the forest habitat in and around the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve. Follow their adventures and share in their exploration of what goes into making a Pride campaign as Jason sends periodic blogs from the field—at least when he has electricity and an internet connection!

Eddy Santoso at Yayorin’s office in Pangkalan Bun

My journey began at 3:30am in the chilly northeast United States. Five flights later and after more than 30 hours in the air we arrived in Pangkalan Bun, on the southern edge of Borneo, the third-largest island in the world. I’ve been to some amazing places visiting Rare Pride programs around the world: the southernmost rainforests along Nicaragua’s Rio San Juan; high in the Ecuadorean Andes; the green hills of Kenya’s Rift Valley; Belize; Mexico; and the idyllic Seychelles. But I think this is the most exotic location yet. It’s certainly the farthest away. If it were a couple of dozen degrees farther south, I’d be almost exactly on the opposite side of the world from my home in Massachusetts.

Pangkalan Bun sits on the banks of the Arut River and is a central hub for the region. The streets are walkable, everyone is welcoming, and during sunset (which here on the equator goes from the first inklings of evening to darkness in maybe 20 minutes), the raised boardwalks and assorted floating docks along the river’s bank come alive with families washing, shopkeepers selling, fishermen returning, and all sorts of friendly socializing.

Evening on the Arut River in Pangkalan Bun

Pangkalan Bun is also the home base for Yayorin, Eddy Santoso’s organization and the host for this new Pride campaign. The target area is the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve and the adjacent buffer area. Together they make up a 77,000 ha area of peat swamp and lowland tropical forest that is home to some of Borneo’s amazing biodiversity, including proboscis monkeys, rhinoceros hornbills, crocodiles, sun bears, rare orchids, hundreds of bird species, and, of course, the legendary orangutan. Threats to this biodiversity include the clearing of land for subsistence agriculture, illegal logging, and some unsustainable or illegal hunting, fishing, and fuelwood collection. Larger threats on the horizon include proposals for industrial-scale oil palm plantations, which would mean clearing a significant majority of the buffer zone. (Demand for palm oil has skyrocketed as worldwide hunger for biofuels has grown.)

Togu Simorangkir, the Director of Yayorin, discusses some of the group’s programs, which include teaching alternative agroforestry. Yayorin has always focused on environmental awareness and community empowerment. Rare’s Pride program brings a more strategic methodology for working with target communities, along with new ways of measuring the effectiveness of programs.

One of the most interesting aspects for me in this ongoing series of site visits (this trip to Kalimantan is my eighth for Rare) is that each campaign is so different from the next. There are always different campaign managers with different backgrounds, and partner organizations of all sizes with a broad diversity of issues on their table and goals to achieve. In each case there is a different set of distinct issues within the local communities, and those are mixed in with the complexities of the ecosystems in which people live. And it’s always been interesting to me to see the adaptability of both Rare’s methodology and the campaign managers themselves as they attempt to pull it all together into an effective program.

But this campaign visit is different from the others I’ve seen in another, more fundamental way. At the previous seven sites I’ve visited, all the campaigns have been well-engaged in visible activities—the mascots, community outreach, and school visits we most readily associate with Pride. But Bill DeBuys and I are here to visit Eddy and Yayorin in Lamandau at the very beginning of their Pride campaign. We want to see what sort of place and situation merits Rare’s distinct brand of conservation, and witness some of what goes into actually getting a Pride campaign off the ground. Eddy returned from his Rare Pride university courses only recently and is just now working on his project plan. His preparations will build knowledge and inform the strategies that will shape the mascot’s songs, outreach posters, and community meetings, etc.—all designed to modify core values, lower behavioral barriers, and address the most urgent environmental issues.

Eddy’s notes and a copy of his concept model, or a flow chart of threats to his site, and his survey questions.Return to this blog in the coming weeks as Jason continues to share his observations and photographs about the early stage planning of a Pride campaign and his efforts  to protect the orangutans and the forest habitat in and around the Lamandau Wildlife Reserve.      
                                                                                                                       
  

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Rare’s Vice President of Asia and Pacific, Nigel Sizer, recently visited Malaysia spending time in Tun Mustapha, and with a local people in the village of Sibogo who are known as Sea Gypsies. Through the series of blogs below, travel with Nigel and learn about dynamite and cyanide fishing practices and how they are tarnishing the areas reefs and marine life. Meet Pride Campaign Manager Suzie Ramlee and hear how she, with WWF and Rare, plan to dramatically reduce destructive fishing in the area. 

The village of Sibogo in Malaysia, home of the “Sea Gypsies.”

A View from the Top

I left home in Bali in the early evening for the three-hour flight to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s gleaming, modern capital.  It’s always a bit odd flying into their new international airport since it is completely surrounded by vast oil palm plantations, quite unlike any other major airport I have seen. This always helps remind me of the continuing need to build the economies of Southeast Asia, but also how much of this growth comes at the expense of biological diversity. Where Kuala Lumpur’s airport and verdant oil palm now stands there was once luxuriant lowland tropical rainforest, home to tapir, tigers and countless other species.

Meeting, Greeting, and A New Face Joins the Team

Ralph Dixon, who works closely with Ruth Yeoh, a member of Rare’s Board of Trustees who is from Malaysia, joined me for breakfast and an update on Rare’s program in Malaysia and the region. Thanks to support from Ruth and her family, Rare was able to launch a new program in Malaysia in 2008.  The first Pride campaign in the country is now underway in partnership with WWF Malaysia. The campaign aims to build community support for marine conservation in the region soon to become the Tun Mustapha Marine Park, located at the far northern tip on the island of Borneo, in the Malaysian state of Sabah.

The afternoon was spent with WWF Malaysia’s senior management team at their offices just outside Kuala Lumpur in Petaling Jaya, affectionately known as “PJ.”  I have yet to find a taxi driver who can find their way to this office without recourse to several phone calls to the ever-patient WWF receptionist.

Dato Dr Dino Sharma, WWF’s CEO, met me for a discussion about our ongoing partnership and potential for future collaboration. He and senior colleagues are keen to see more Pride training partnerships with WWF staff and sites around the country. In the short term these will have a marine conservation focus.

In the evening I had a lovely dinner with Sudeep Mohandas, his wife Padma, and their two teenage girls. After ten years with WWF Malaysia, currently serving as head of operations and deputy to the CEO, Sudeep has decided to join Rare’s team and will become our first Director for Southeast Asia. His family had lots of questions about the pending move to Bogor, Indonesia, where our regional office is located.  We look forward to having Sudeep join our team starting the beginning of July this year.  Meanwhile, his top priority is to recruit and train a successor and ensure a smooth transition at WWF.

Great Prospects: The Tun Mustaphe Marine Park

I was up at four am for the first flight to Kota Kinabalu, capital of Sabah State.  Here I met up with Rare Pride Program Manager, Hari Kushardanto, as well as Rejani Kunjappan, who leads WWF Malaysia’s national team of community outreach specialists. 

Suzie, Rejani, and Hari.

Sabah is one of the region’s top tourist destinations, and it’s immediately obvious why.  The city is small, green, and sits beside a wide breezy bay with views of forest-covered islands.  Bars and restaurants line the seafront. A few miles inland mighty Mount Kinabalu rises to its peak at 13, 400 feet above sea level, with temperatures that plunge below freezing at night. The lower slopes of the mountain are covered in tropical rain forest. The state is dotted with forest reserves and is one of the world’s top scuba diving and ecotourism locations.

We jumped into WWF’s minivan, painted with environmental slogans, turtles and fish, and drove four hours north to the sleepy fishing town of Kudat. There we met up with Pride Campaign Manager Suzianah Ramlee (“Suzie”) and her colleague Sofia.  Both serve as WWF Malaysia’s community outreach officers for the vast area of ocean and islands north of Kudat. This one million hectare plus region is slated to become the Tun Mustaphe Marine Park.

Dynamite Fishing Destruction

We all gathered for a traditional Malaysian breakfast of nasi lemak (rice cooked in coconut with a spicy chili sauce, peanuts, boiled egg and fried anchovies sprinkled on top –  really delicious!), except Hari, who seems to prefer cake –  and lots of it — to get his energy up before a day out in the islands.

By eight o’clock we were in WWF’s speedboat, and with 200 horsepower engines behind us we sped out into the ocean, ably guided by Asri, WWF’s master scuba diver, and an equally skilled boat captain.

Our first stop, about 45 minutes from Kudat, was the home of Mr. Jamili, his wife and seven children, ranging from strapping young men in their twenties to a one-year-old still happily breast feeding. Friendly cats, fat in fish, quickly found warm homes on our laps as we chatted. 

Jamili, far right, speaks to the group. Nigel, far left, listens in.

Jamili has taken the extraordinary initiative of personally protecting a wide area of ocean in front his beachfront home. This area sustains his family with fish which are put on ice and sold fresh in Kudat. It’s hard to say how large the area is that he is managing, but it looked to be over 200 hectares. 

The problem is that young men from nearby villages, and even as far afield as the Philippines, are keen to get their hands on Jamili’s fish, and their preferred method is using homemade bombs or cyanide. Throwing a bomb in the water kills hundreds of fish instantly, some of which float up to the top of the water and are quickly gathered. Their flesh is damaged, but they can be dried and salted and are then indistinguishable from fish caught normally. Cyanide is squirted into the water and stuns fish, making them easy to catch live, put into water-filled containers and then sold to the live fish trade, with high prices paid by restaurants in local towns, and even as far away as Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Hong Kong. The cyanide kills the reef and some fish and is highly destructive. Both bomb and cyanide fishing are strictly illegal in Malaysia, but enforcement is hard along the thousands of kilometers of coastline.

Live fish, caught with Cyanide, waiting for sale.

Jamili’s efforts to keep out the bombs and cyanide have landed him in trouble.  Fishermen have threatened to kill him and he and his family now live in fear of retribution. The Malaysian government does not formally recognize his resource use rights, and the local marine police are stretched to help him. WWF Malaysia has done a great job of offering him moral support, starting to highlight his plight with the local government agencies. They’ve given him a camera so that he can photograph those he sees using illegal fishing techniques and this has resulted in the marine police confiscating boats and equipment.

Jamili and Nigel  at the locally managed protected area.

The Pride campaign led by Suzie will further highlight the efforts of Jamili, and others like him in the area, enhancing their status in the communities, encouraging government agencies to better recognize these community-led conservation efforts, and building upon them to create larger locally managed marine areas. They will also organize meetings to get like-minded locals together to help them plan and support each other in their efforts, and assist them to become honorary wildlife wardens under a scheme developed by the government.

An Afternoon with Sea Gypsies and Pride’s Call to Action

Sibogo, the village on stilts.

From Jamili’s idyllic beach we ploughed through the waves for another hour on the WWF launch to visit the other end of the illegal destructive fishing problem. 

The village of Sebogor appears in the distance to be floating on the water complete with a mosque. As we got closer we could see that it is entirely built on stilts, apparently with no connection to the nearby land. It is home to about 100 families of Orang Bajau people or “sea gypsies”.  These remarkable communities spend their entire existences living over the ocean, and occasionally dismantle their sturdy wooden homes and relocate to fresh and less depleted fishing grounds.  The people of Sebogor have an even more colorful past.  They are refugees who fled the fighting in the Philippines in the 1960s.  Many are now fully legal residents of Malaysia, but some are stateless with limited or no rights, prone to harassment and even deportation by the authorities. The village is also in the so-called “red zone,” where there is elevated risk of kidnapping and other threats – fortunately our WWF colleagues had not told Hari and me about this before we arrived, so we were happily oblivious to any danger!

A resident of Sibogo

From a distance the village looks grim, ramshackle, and appears to be an extremely unpleasant place to eek out a living, raise children and grow old in the hot, salty humidity barely a stone’s throw from the maritime border with the Philippines.

I was surprised and deeply impressed when we tied up at their jetty and were greeted by one of the village elders.  Nearby four men, immensely skilled, were building the 10 meter hull of a boat, perched above the water on rickety planks. With no sign of plans, or tools other than a hammer, a power drill (they have a generator), and some chisels, the beautiful traditional boat was taking shape. They said they would sell it when complete for about USD12,000. Women were smoking dried sea cucumbers in a large circular tray.  Young men tended to buckets full of hundreds of abalone, soon to be sold to traders from Kudat for a handsome profit. The homes were spacious and airy, and many had televisions and radios, refrigerators and fans.

Sea cucumbers being dried and smoked.

We were taken to the home of the village elder that had met us, and sat on the floor with his family. The bookshelves were full, and I noted thick tomes in English on financial management theory.  He explained that his older children had gone to university in Malaysia, and many in the village had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. My perception of this as a hardscrabble community living on the edge of extreme poverty was changing!  These are entrepreneurial, hard-working people, who manage to send their children to higher education, practice extraordinary craftsmanship with their boat building, and have a rich cultural life centered around their stilted mosque.

The group talking with the village elder.

They also seem perfectly happy to use bombs and cyanide as their preferred fishing techniques. They spoke openly about this, even though it is illegal. When asked if they were concerned about declining fish stocks and damage to resources, they responded that if the fish disappear then they will simply move. We also know that the men who have threatened to kill Jamili probably live in Sebogor. The police very rarely come to the village.

From Sebogor we headed to the main town on the island of Banggi, where Suzie grew up. There, WWF has built a colorful environmental education center, open to all the local people, showing videos, organizing environmental events, and rallying an energetic and growing cadre of local volunteers, all wearing bright blue WWF T-shirts. 

Nigel with the WWF volunteers.

Our final stop was a small island south of Banggi, called Maliangin, where we donned scuba gear and made a quick underwater tour of one of the better diving sites in the area.  There is very little scuba diving in Tun Mustapha. The visibility tends to be a bit low, and the overfishing and destructive fishing have eliminated most of the larger fish and damaged much of the coral. But we did see quite good coral cover and diversity, even though there was evidence of probable damage from bombing (characterized by lots of coral rubble and large broken pieces of coral) and cyanide (leaving telltale patches of dead, white coral).  I was struck most, however, by the fish life. While the diversity looked high, I didn’t see a single fish longer than about six inches – the classic sign of overfishing. With the large predator fish so depleted the ecology of the entire reef changes, and, of course, the local fishery suffers.

Large fish for sale.

Campaign Manager Suzie is daunted by the challenge of reducing illegal fishing by the people of Sebogor and other nearby communities. But has a few cards up her sleeve. She grew up nearby and her father is a prominent imam. She is completely at ease with the local people who welcome her into their homes. 

That evening we discussed how she will use social marketing to begin to build awareness about the impacts and dangers associated with destructive fishing, and thereby start to change attitudes.  The village imams, wives and children of fishermen could all help to catalyze conversations about these issues, in turn leading at least some in the communities to start to question their heavy involvement in blast and poison fishing, and become more open to alternatives. 

Meanwhile, Rare has some homework to do.  Hari and I will find a regional specialist in alternatives to destructive fishing and get that person to Tun Mustapha by mid-April to help WWF put together a detailed plan to provide alternative fishing techniques to the local communities. Pride will open minds to different practices and as soon as that happens, WWF must be ready to help the fishermen adopt new approaches.

Plans for Pride, Plans Malaysia

Back in Kudat, after a very good night’s sleep, we regrouped over breakfast to agree on next steps and encourage Suzie to make the next big steps with her campaign.  Then it was the long drive back to Kota Kinabalu. That afternoon, Hari, Rejani and I, met with Robecca Jumin, Suzie’s supervisor, and Ken Kassem, who leads WWF’s marine program in Sabah.  We brought Rebecca up to speed and agreed to keep in close touch with weekly phone calls in the months to come.  Frequent communication is key to head off any problems and challenges before they become overly serious.

We ended our visit by hearing from Ken about Semporna, a new site for WWF, where work is about to begin on a major marine conservation program.  The site includes world-famous Sipadan island, the top scuba diving destination in Malaysia, and many other extraordinary reefs and communities. Once again, overfishing and destructive fishing top the list of threats at this new site. Rare Pride training will begin there next year, together – we hope – with eleven other sites facing similar challenges.  Suzie’s pioneering efforts in Tun Mustapha will help chart the course that many others will follow and she will soon graduate from being a trainee to being one of Pride’s many alumni, mentoring other campaign managers across Sabah and beyond.