Last night in Indonesia

Hi everybody,
the last four entries is writing I did while there was still a bit of electricity at LS – we have some giant batteries and a generator. However the generator doesn’t charge the batteries for very long, so once I emptied them I didn’t get significant computer time again.

This is my last written entry, at least from Indonesia. I am writing this from Jakarta, just before the taxi arrives to take me to the airport. after the airport – Toronto, via Hong Kong! I am not really in my right mind right now, partly from emotional distress at leaving this wonderful country and my dear friends here, partly at not having eaten or slept since yesterday morning. The plan is to do those things on the plane(s), and thereby switch as soon as possible to a North American photoperiod.

The past week has been pretty intense. I did end up going to the rainforest last weekend, and it was an incredible experience. The birds were fantastic – everybody look up Asian Paradise-Flycatcher. oh, and the wonderfully-named Chestnut-backed Scimitar-Babbler (Kyla, I don’t think I could do better than that one!). The story of that trip is probably best told via photos on Flickr, which will have to wait for Canada, I’m afraid.

Unfortunately, reforestation is not quite finished. Still are about 25% of the plants to plant and about 50% of the seedlings have been measured. We are measuring every tree we plant, and are going to keep measuring it, eventually to get growth rates and other useful data. It’s awesome to be doing science, especially when a large team helps you collect large amounts of data. Is this what its like to be a prof??

OK, time to go check out of my (embarrassingly fancy) hotel. Thank you all for reading this blog and/or for putting me on your RSS and for your comments. I hope I get to see all of you this Christmas season. IT should be easy to get time to re-connect since I have no holiday plans – I’ll be too busy recovering from culture shock!

Love and thanks again for everything,
Andrew

PS speaking of Christmas – why not buy your loved one a goat?! Via ASRI you can donate a goat to a widow, who would otherwise have a hard time pulling together the money to feed her kids.

count these four — 03 Dec

Today was the first day of community planting. Kinari, Cam and Kari’s supervisor Chuck all came out for the event. We took two groups of local guys, five each, to practice the technique. We needed, of course, to begin the day with a suitably official speech from Kinari, our leader, fundraiser and visionary. Of course, being a first day, the experience was more about isolated problem solving than a triumphant off-to-the races, crack of the whip start. Examples: how to carry the seedlings to the field, when the uneven ground and abandoned logs makes a wheeled vehicle impossible? This morning we made three wooden boxes and suspended each from a wooden pole by two lenghts of rope, this apparatus was to be carried on the shoulders of two men. Loaded with 60 seedlings, these stretcher-type conveyances would complete all the seedlings needed for a plot in three trips. Trouble is it is crushingly heavy. Tomorrow we shall try a new method – women! Women typically carry heavy things: vegetables, firewood, water, children. However, gender roles are deep in this culture – and here we are trying to hire women to work alongside men, and pay them equivalent wages? Male workers offered a dozen reasons (they’re shy – busy with kids – working in the fields – don’t have transportation – won’t like it – won’t want to) why their wives, sisters and daughters should not get directly involved. I still think that it is natural that perhaps a half-dozen ladies with baskets strapped on their backs and braced on their heads would carry our baby trees just as easily as they carry baby people. What will be interesting is if some communities have women coming and some do not. If so, the families with both men and women working – in towns this size the women will definitely be the wives or sisters of at least some of the men working – will make more money, and jealousy will propel us the rest of the way to our goal. Of course, even more interestingly, some of these differences may be ethnic: I expect the Javanese ladies to be big, tough and strong. Will the Dayak womenfolk compare?

Everybody pray, OK? I want to add feminism to the long list of great virtues this Reforestation project accomplishes!

Also today I brought Kinari on a tour of the sick and wounded on our staff. There was the mild old grandfather with bloody mucous in his diarrhea (that took some dictionary work yesterday – I didn’t know the words for diarrhea or mucous). He has parasitic amoebas, and can be cured quickly with a drug we got yesterday from the ASRI mobile clinic which passed by on its way to a three-day stint in Sempurna. Other people have considerable-size abscessed infections in their legs or feet (“No, see its OK! I put these leaves on it!” “No, uh, actually you should come to the clinic and have that drained”). Many of these I didn’t even know about, because there were no complaints. Kinari points out how much people put up with in villages, how little access to healthcare there really is.

We discovered that many of our seedlings mixes have non-native trees in them! Specifically Jambu bigi and Jambu monyet (that’s guava and this Bellucia thing). So now we have a search-and-replace mission on top of everything else.

We spent a great deal of time perfecting the seedling planting technique. I hope we get faster at this, or else we will spend a great deal of time everyday just relating long DO and DO NOT lists.

The Taman National guy came by today – these are always very important men, who display their importance by never remaining long, refusing to drink coffee or see the experiment. They have many leatherbound books, people are always anxiously awaiting their arrival, they are run quite ragged. They are the only people for kilometers with potbellies We did, however, talk about a trip to Riam Berasap this weekend! Looks like I’m going!

This evening the major event was a very open, clear conversation between Doni, Kari and I. Using the aid of a talking prop – in fact a bug vial stolen from Peter’s lab and brought to Borneo for some reason – we discussed the future of the experiment and the ways we each want to be involved in it and in its result. We also talked about Kari’s research, which is going to be so interesting and I am looking forward to keeping in touch with her through the years ahead.

Today we arranged pictures on the computers. As I look at photos that I collected here, more and more I feel like this is the past, and I will soon be living this only in memory “yes, this was the place where we worked”.

But today Kinari said a wonderful thing to me. She looked me right in the eye and said “sometimes I tell a nurse, or a doctor, that at the end of your life you can count this patient as a life that you saved. Well, Andrew, at the end of your life you can count these four hectares of rainforest.”

You never forget that first time — 01 Dec

This morning I felt kind of crabby. The duration of the work is starting to get to me – the only explanation I can find for snapping this morning at my close friend Doni Anggoro, the reforestation coordinator. Doni is the guy that I came out here to help, and he and I share just about everything in and around our little field house: meals, jokes, sleeping space, most information, some responsibility and all the work.

Do you know how to cure a bad mood? Win a victory for humanity. This siang, we planted the first trees. This was a trial run, to perfect the quality of the planting technique and decide on standard practices. As usual, we timed the task to calculate the wage (we pay local people based on an estimate of how long a task takes, then calculate the unit price that would result in a decent daily salary (50 000Rp) for a day’s work. Of course everyone works much harder and faster than we estimate, but that is fine. The result is that everybody gets an excellent daily salary). Our first tree was planted by Doni himself, amid much ceremony and speeches (In joke for family: this is one part of Indonesia that Bri would like right away) and even public prayer. Cam delivered the address, speaking impromptu, photos clicking away from Etty, Kari and me, me whispering my typical broken translation in Kari’s ear. Cam planted the second tree, and myself the third. It will be interesting to compare later with the order of authors on the publication!

On a different mission, we went into the forest at the nearest point, ostensibly to look for soil – we want to spread soil on some plots rather than plant trees, in the hope that this will be effective and low-cost. Ideally we want some nice dirt under a big pioneer like a Macaranga. However this reason quickly became a pretext and went straight on to become a memory as I led the way, cleaving through lianas and ferns with my parang which is really rather alarmingly long. Cam proclaimed the forest to be ‘really good’ swamp-forest, unlikely to have been logged heavily because the swamp is too hard to negotiate. The effect of the rains has been to fill the forest floor with a network of pools, many quite deep – like our vernal pools but much bigger and longer lasting, and with fish. Most of our time was spent posing for photos, asking Cam ‘Oooh, what’s this!?’, and killing, with great glee, an invasive tree (Bellucia, I believe. Melastomaceae, for sure). This bastard is bird dispersed and fruits at a perversely young age, and is invading forest gaps, riverbeds, logging sites and forest edges all throughout Gunung Palung. Its wood is weak, and it is damn satisfying to swing a parang and slice right through it. Even more fun than killing Acacia mangifera.

I am going to try and take Cam’s advice and travel there every day, while i have the chance!

And tomorrow we begin the first day of organized community planting! With a mix of Javanese and Dayaks. This will be fascinating, exciting and hectic and I have already stayed up WAY too late playing with Linux distributions.

I’ll let you know how it goes!
Andrew

Cocktails that photosynthesize — 30 Nov

The young girl burst into the house and dropped her field backpack on the kitchen table. “Mom,” she called, “I’ve made my decision. I’m going to be an ecologist, just like Grandpa!”
“Are you sure, dear?” replied her mother, with the wistful pride of parents for the enthusiasm of youth. “Well, then I guess it’s time to give you this.” With a sigh, she drew a small box from the bottom of the cedar chest, “my father always said it was the one thing every ecologist needs”
The young girl’s eyes grew wide as she opened the box and held up a roundish lump of cheap metal. She turned it over in her hands, feeling the display and the single, well-worn button. Then she found the letters A.A.M.M.D engraved with permanent marker on the underside. She gasped audibly and locked eyes with her mother.
“Dad carried it everywhere. I don’t believe he ever did a single experiment without using at least one. He always said,” she chuckled, her eyes misting with memory, “every ecologist needs a good click-counter!”

Field ecology is taking a task that would be pleasant to perform once and doing it until it becomes bone-crushing — Peter Kotanen

Today the mission was to make seedling mixtures. Our logic is that we want the seedling mixes to be as similar as possible between treatments so that we can compare results. Of course, when most of the nursery is composed of random trees, many of which are difficult or impossible to narrow down to species, a certain relaxed attitude becomes necessary. We chose the 5 most common species (Rambutan, Durian, and three forest trees called Ubah, Nyatoh and Medang) and spread them among each plot in a way that guarantees that at least some proportions of individuals in each experimental plot are the same. The seedlings are mixed in proportion to their abundance, so Rambutan (as popular and cuddly as can be) contributes 28 seedlings, Durian 20, Ubah 8 and Nyatoh and Medang both 4. The remaining 113 seedlings are a random grab of the marching, faceless lineup of little green saplings we have on hand. (Sometimes, I feel that the Acadian Forest in Nova Scotia was like my hometown – I knew everyone, or at least heard of them. Lowland tropical rainforest is like Toronto or, perhaps, like Taiwan). So this morning I organized four guys with wheelbarrows (three of our four daily labourers, and the housekeeper’s husband) and dragged them over. And then tried to count the seedlings to make sure we had the correct amounts. Bone-crushing, indeed.

Maybe I’ll introduce the daily guys, because they are fun characters:
Nadi: our first worker, right from the start. Our nearest neighbour. Quiet and humble, he quit school earlier than the others and can sometimes be caught practicing his writing on scraps of cardboard. He has the loudest and most abandoned laugh.

Andri: the second guy to join, and quickly becoming a favourite. He is a human parang: impossibly thin, strong, sharp and damned useful. He cuts his hair as if he prays nightly to David Bowie and Michael Jackson, and surrounds himself with a cloud of kretek smoke and the same three shitty pop songs from his cell phone. He shows terrific promise.

Rossman: Andri’s childhood best friend. A Javanese (like the other two), his appearance on our work team – he is a Come From Away, having moved here to work with us – has prompted at least one drunk to come to our house and make snivelling threats. Readers from small towns (ie most of you) will understand. The most athletically-built of the troupe, Rossman will be a great employee if I can succeed in forcing him to stop wolf-whistling at EVERY female who passes by.

Yakub: A quiet, family man and a Dayak. Since none of those adjectives apply to any of the rest of us, Yakub brings us an important balance. A few days ago his right foot mysteriously swelled up; he came to work today with a poultice of red flowers in a ring around his ankle, in an attempt to drain the appendage. He has a Dayak’s careful, steady work drive and deep knowledge of trees. He is creative: it was he who devised a system of sticking a leaf in every tree we had counted, so that we could keep track.

Andrew, tell us what it is like to regrow a rainforest!

OK!

When I was in elementary school, my first grade teacher Ms. Guthro did an amazing thing. We had been reading that an acre of rainforest is destroyed every minute (someone should check that fact – is it true?). And she had us sit in silence while she pointed at the clock for an ENTIRE MINUTE, and then turned and said “an acre of rainforest has just been destroyed”

Who knows how that event contributed to my decision to do what I am doing now (or for that matter, to my fear of clocks). But at any rate, it takes only a fraction of the time to destroy what we have required months to reconstruct again! Labour intensive in the extreme! is how I would describe it.

We have this awesome experimental design

And this somewhat over-complicated factorial design. This project is fantastic and scratches every itch for me: carbon absorption, work for local people, animal habitat and ecology experiments! its fantastic!

and I have to rush off to join it again! more details soon.

Andrew

The move to Laman Satong

well, today I spent the afternoon and evening cleaning and scrubbing around the little house which will serve as our home and office while we regrow rainforest. It is a nice little place in a bungalow kind of way: simple and relaxed, without fancy things like running water or electricity. The spider density seems good and high, so that’s OK. we’ve been working on the place for a little while, having sub-let it (for free!) from the village-head’s son-in-law, who in turn rents from the Bishop down in Ketapang. Speaking of Bishops, the community is predominantly Dayak – therefore explaining, at one blow, the prevalance of pigs, the health of the dogs, the high density of Catholics and low density of wild vertebrates. But not everyone is Dayak. The immediate neighbours are all Javanese ‘transmigrasi’, supported by the government in Jakarta to pick up and move to Kalimantan. This is one way in which Indonesians can ‘Merantau’, a wonderful verb that means “to move away from home and seek your fortune in an unfamiliar land”. All these Javanese makes an interesting experience: my friends Doni and Etty are also Javanese, and they keep slipping into that language with the locals. I go from straining to grasp Indonesian – to being completely helpless. Like hitting a patch of linguistic black ice. it is a beautiful-sounding language, though, relaxed and cheerful, with lots of paired vowel sounds, a Sanskrit-derived alphabet and various levels of politeness which require complete changes in vocabulary.

The plan is to live here for the duration of the reforestation. I’ll send along pictures soon!

Home again!

From Friday morning to just now, I was on a trip to Malaysia. Yes, emergency: I overstayed my visa and had to rush to leave the country. At the border a youngish man, early come to the double-chin that marks his deskjob, communicated his nations’ displeasure at my temerity. I tried not to laugh in releif when he told me the fine: fully one fifth of my expectations.

But now, after something like 20 hours of bus time and 12 hours of speedboat, I am finally back in my little town of Sukadana. For 30 days, anyway. Back home I got a massage, had dinner with the guys and visited the girls. A perfect way to feel welcome back.

Time to start planting a forest!

Cheers – and remember: don’t overstay your visas!