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!

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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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