My Uncle Binny

Uploaded by Wilson Wang on 2013-09-20.

The orangutans of Kalimantan feel like long-lost relatives from a far away place.  It has taken a while to find them:  Forty-three years, a two hour flight from Jakarta, a chartered boat in the companionship of wild children, a two day journey up a river bleeding of bronze, iron and coal.  The orangutans are more ornery, less agile and as mangee as imagined.  They walk like caretakers of the forest, their backs hunched, their four-appendage gait a wobbling three-step. If you get in their way, they bristle, unnecessarily bumping you with their shoulders as they go by.  The matriarchs upon our arrival quickly take to the trees.  They know that we visitors instinctively want to hold their bald babies with wispy red hair and give them a stylish comb over.  The mother orangutans climb straight up bleached white saplings, progeny clinging to their necks.  Upon reaching a significant height, they stretch out between an adjacent tree, their arms, legs and potbellies forming an audacious “X”.   Peering down, their posture says quite clearly, behold.  Look at us.  This is who we are.  The Mama orangutans pee.

Uploaded by Wilson Wang on 2013-09-20.

written rules of the forest

As we intruders scatter towards the bushes, I think melodramatically, it was their hands.  It is their hands that connect us—We humans to ‘orang-hutan’ or ‘people-forest’.  You see their hands and you realize that we are not unique at all.   Their hands peel bananas and bend trees.  Their fingers ripple with skin and muscle.  Their nails sound from twenty meters as they reach down at a mosquito bite to scratch. 

Another sentence that enters my head is rip off your face.   I know this is entirely unfair because a two-year-old story about a captive chimpanzee in upstate New York has nothing to do with what is happening here. I guess this is what happens when you get out of touch, grow old.  You fall back to tired stories and comfort zones.  I resolve not to grow old, later.

It is my dear nieces Ana and Lucia that brought me here.  Two years ago with the help of their mom (my eldest sister, Nancy) they created a program called ASRI kids (http://asrikids.tumblr.com) which brings children from the town of Sukadana to show them the environment a clinic in their community called Health in Harmony (http://www.healthinharmony.org/asri/) is trying to save.  The clinic rationalizes that if it can provide free health care to residents, the money saved will mean residents are less likely to cut down the forest.  If there is less forest cut down, its inhabitants including orangutans will not have to encroach on human farms and risk being trapped or shot.  If there are less maimed orangutans, this will eliminate the need for a nature reserve like this one to rehabilitate them.

I am not sure if health care for the people of Sukadana will do much to save the forest.  I believe people will cut down the forest so long as they don’t have an alternative livelihood to cutting down the forest.  Hell, it is rich people behind much of the cutting and I am quite sure that they have adequate health care plans.  But an expansive view of health includes the forest and the benefit to children in them is unmistakable.  Ana and Lucia described to me how none of the kids from had ever ridden an airplane before.  In getting to the airport their families followed the trip bus for four hours in the rain on motorcycles in difficult terrain to send their loved ones off.  On the tarmac, there were tears and fears but children are children.  By the time I meet the group at the base of the Sekonyer River, the group is armed and ready with hats and packs and sacks.  They talk of the plane ride as if it were all at once an experience of a lifetime and not a big deal.  The children seem much like little adults readying for a trip.  They have formed alliances.  They double-check their supply lines of candy, bread and socks.  They make last second calls on their cell phones and inquire impatiently when the boat will leave.

I am initially put in charge of one boat of children.  I am a stranger, there are eighteen kids who speak a language I barely know and about four nominal chaperones, who stick to themselves on the starboard deck corner eating sticky sweets.  My sister Nancy has given me the simple task of making sure everyone is entertained, included and that no one falls off the boat.  In moments like this, I might tend towards nervousness, but there is no time.  The double-storied house- boat already chutts up river on its two-day course.  Many of the children are already journaling and chatting and singing like well trained Asian kids.  Lucia has pulled out a cup and is demonstrating an amazingly addictive rhythm called the cup song.  I decide to show others how to do a hand clapping game called the slide.  We pass out snacks.  Later, when I spy one or two loner students, I ask them who they are, what they think and they hold their hands over their teeth because they can barely understand me and laugh.

Uploaded by Wilson Wang on 2013-09-20.

The river contains the refuse, riches and history of communities upstream.  From afar they impress as if bank-side with their character, complexity, hope, even pain.  You can’t escape it.  We are riding on it.  At some point, we will bathe in it.  We probably are even drinking it.  What is the story?  Is it a lineage of minors paid $10 dollars a day to sift the land for gold?  Is it a small girl doing the family’s laundry in advance of her years?  Is it a school boy, who understands both the distance the river represents and his way out?  Maybe it’s simply a water lizard’s morning lap and lapse on a glistening stone.  A lazy white butterfly flits by.

Across two house-boats, we all fast become friends.  It is like camp, where eating, playing, sleeping, and stinking together simply makes you close.  The cup song, the clapping game, and the book of traditional Indonesian stories I brought from Jakarta to study, have gone viral.   There is regular cross-pollination between the vessels.  Whenever the two boats get close, limbs and luggage move quickly across their gunnels in violation of an unenforceable policy on boat safety.  Laughter comes easily on this cruise as does the luxury of late morning and afternoon naps.

 

 

A rock, a river, a tree.  This is the beginning of one of Maya Angelou’s most famous poems, ‘On the Pulse of the Morning’ about which I naturally think on in this place.  I can’t remember well the rest of the poem and will look it up later.  Yet, I have a good feeling the poem captures very well the spirit and possibility being created by the forest and its inhabitants and all its guests right now

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‘On the Pulse of the Morning’

A Rock, A River, A Tree

Hosts to species long since departed,

Marked the mastodon.

The dinosaur, who left dry tokens

Of their sojourn here

On our planet floor,

Any broad alarm of their hastening doom

Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,

Come, you may stand upon my

Back and face your distant destiny,

But seek no haven in my shadow.

I will give you no more hiding place down here.

You, created only a little lower than

The angels, have crouched too long in

The bruising darkness,

Have lain too long

Face down in ignorance.

Your mouths spilling words

Armed for slaughter.

The Rock cries out today, you may stand on me,

But do not hide your face.

Across the wall of the world,

A River sings a beautiful song,

Come rest here by my side…