Against the Odds

by John Keeble

Imagine this: you are holding, as I am, an orangutan baby. He is about the same size as a small human baby and he has the same need to be loved and nurtured. His mother has been shot by illegal loggers and he is alone in the world.

You want to help him. And the other half dozen in their makeshift cribs. And the 60 or so other young orphans nearby, all under three years old and spoiling for fun and excitement. And the others, including older ones rescued from captivity, cruelty and exploitation…three partly or completely paralysed.

Welcome to the Orangutan Foundation International’s care centre in Kalimantan Tengah, central Indonesian Borneo, where hundreds of orang-utans are being nurtured and prepared for new lives in the wild until they can be released, or, in hopeless cases, kept in kindness and safety.

But their future, their very survival, is under threat as never before. You are here to help: what can you do? The problem is that orangutans’ habitat, the rain forest, is being ripped out faster than ever to make way for commercial interests… government-encouraged palm oil plantations are the worst offenders but there is also mining - and logging which can be called illegal and at the same time have officials involved rather than trying to stop it. And illegal animal traders happily shoot a mother to steal her babies.

“It is always difficult,” said Dr Biruté Galdikas, known worldwide for her life work on orangutan studies, conservation and protection. “It is often just us who have to do whatever is necessary to protect the forest and the orangutans.”
The OFI website is even more blunt. It says: “Palm oil frenzy threatens to wipe out the orangutans.”

We were there to help, in a very small way compared with her enormous commitment spanning four decades, as the first of OFI’s two pilot volunteer building groups – our role was to construct a raised walkway through the swampy jungle to enable the carers to take the young orangutans deeper into the trees for their daily encounters with freedom and their natural habitat.

But luck was running against OFI and us… and the three weeks saw us dodging officials and the media, clearing up jungle, digging a crocodile pit, hiding out in what locals called a brothel and being banged up in a closed zoo as a quarantine while three of our group were held in the isolation hospital, watched day and night, with swine flu and, in one case, malaria.

Later, after everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, the project got back on course, our walkway work pushed it further into the forest, and we spent time with the orangutans – the babies in the nursery who needed holding, feeding and having their nappies changed (I left that to the girls: they like that kind of thing); the four-year-olds, 30 of them on the day we joined them, out for fun in the “kid’s” playground and training area; and with the adults deep in the jungle at Camp Leakey where the dominant male, four times the size of females and dwarfing the care assistants, ruled the jungle.

And something else happened too: as one blow after another came out of the blue, a little social magic drew our group members closer together, facing everything cheerfully, supporting each other and acting with determination to make our time with OFI count.

We had a group of 12 people, 10 from North America, one from Lithuania and I hopped over from southern Thailand via Kuala Lumpur and Jakarta. The ages ranged from 18-year-old Julius from Lithuania to 68-year-old Bob from New Mexico. We all – including Dr Biruté - met at Pangkalan Bun, the airport and town nearest the Tanjung Puting National Park where orangutans live.

We had signed up to build the raised walkway from OFI’s care centre some 20km outside Pangkalan Bun and got down to it the day after we arrived. It was tough work for softies like most of us and we got drenched in perspiration within a few hours… literally soaked before we even set foot in the swamp.

As we worked during the next couple of days - making the components with the guidance of Indonesian carpenters, lugging the ironwood planks and posts half a kilometre to the swamp and then helping with the construction – the young orangutans were brought out by their carers and stopped for a friendly half hour before taking to the trees.

One liked my colourful belt and was determined to have it. We sparred for a bit and then agreed that I would keep the belt and she would have a swing through the trees. My arms were too tired from working to do it the other way round. Later I was wearing my shirt outside my trousers to disguise the belt but she recognised me, clever ape, before I (less clever ape) recognised her and in a flash she had lifted my shirt and grabbed the belt.

Another companion from the natural world was Rita, a baby leaf-eating orphan monkey which had decided that our volunteer co-ordinator was her mother and clung to her all the time.

It was in the first week when illnesses started to show. One girl was so poorly she was moved to an air-conditioned room and then to the hospital where they diagnosed malaria and, as official alarm spread all the way to government level in Jakarta, swine flu. She and her husband were sent off to a secure isolation hospital.

Then one of the others, a triathlon athlete, went down with something that seemed like swine flu – a brief trip to the hospital and then into isolation without choice or appeal.

“The reporters were terrible,” said Dr Biruté, who walked into a media frenzy at the hospital and had to retreat rather than drag OFI further into the news… I felt uneasy as she told us, knowing from first-hand experience about the pressure to get the story and at the same time feeling sympathy for our own. One photographer walked into the hospital for a snap of a sick group member and, we heard later, it was printed in the Indonesian press.

Meanwhile, away from the media and health officials, the rest of us got on with the walkway, which rapidly stretched out like a finger pointing to a better life for the young orangutans.

Then early one evening, as we relaxed at our wood and tarpaulin shelter, where we slept and ate, the bad news arrived: we were all swine flu suspects until the test results for the hospitalised three were back from Jakarta.

But, worse, we could be a risk to the orangutans which share most of our genes and most of our susceptibility to illnesses. So they were all being examined and moved… including Yolanda, who had been living in a wooden cage outside the care centre’s quarantine area waiting to join others of her age. She was a great favourite, holding hands with all of us, examining our arms, kissing our hands as she tried to pull us in with her.

“She has had more contact with you all than any of the others,” Dr Biruté, as we called her in the Indonesian and OFI style of title and first name, told us at an impromptu meeting at our shelter. “We can hope she will be all right but, whichever way, her fate is sealed.”

For us, the first thing was to keep on the medical masks sent by the hospital. Health officials were coming from the hospital to examine us. Maybe tap a little blood. Oh well, guess it’s necessary…

Then they were not coming and we were getting out while the going was good – straight into hiding where we could not do any damage to orangutans or people. It was a hotel, empty apart from us. I cannot name it because if I did I could not tell you that it was allegedly used as the local brothel. But it was just for a night and no one else would take us…

We settled in, had a fruit party on the floor of one of the rooms: durian, rambutans and watermelon while we speculated on the next move, one jump ahead of the blood tappers, and welcomed a British celebrity TV programme maker – actor Dexter Fletcher, of Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels - and his Lithuanian colleague. They had just arrived to film documentary footage.

Next day, next move – to a zoo bought out and closed by OFI. Should be OK. No one had lived there for some time, but everyone thinks most of the escaped crocodiles had been recaptured or gone off to rivers new. There was no electricity or running water but maybe something could be done.

The medical authorities and the police knew we were there. Eventually. And no one was being forced into isolation hospital decisions. We were just keeping a very low official profile while hiding out from the rest of the population and media. Mine was even lower than most when almost immediately I fell through one of the rotten walkways in the four hectares of primary jungle which we shared with two troops of monkeys (macaques and proboscis) as well as an assortment of birds, squirrels, snakes, scorpions and a fascinating array of butterflies, moths and other winged insects.
The house, made from ironwood, was beautiful. And so was the jungle. And we even had work… the former zoo’s fish-eating crocodile was at risk of becoming a tasty snack for three anything-eating crocodiles and needed to be re-homed. We were to make the space and dig the pit, an odd situation for a group of dedicated opponents to rain forest clearance.

One of our number was skilled in plumbing work and soon helped local staff to get the house water running, though on occasion it was us doing the running with buckets of water from the well 200 metres away. And then the dispute over the previous owner’s electricity bill was settled and we had electricity. So far, so good.

Working day one saw us clear the crocodile enclosure ground; day two had us starting digging the pit; and day three got us below the water table and enabled us and the local kids to play in the mud soup. When the last of us finally reckoned we had dug enough and emerged, the water pipe from the well was dry. A slight problem. But two of the Dayak staff who had taken their turns in the pit had an answer: we could go down to a tributary where it joins the crocodile river. There they scrubbed us down much like I’ve seen elephants cleaned up after dragging logs from the jungle mud.

It was the next day when we got the news that all three of our hospitalised friends had proved positive for swine flu, and one also had malaria – bad for them and five days of official quarantine at the zoo and a mandatory course of Tamiflu capsules for us.

We were not taking that lying down. The croc pit had to be fenced, the walkways (all between 4ft and 10ft above the jungle floor) either ripped out as a hazard or repaired, the jungle had to be cleaned up where litter had been thrown, and – joy of joys – we could attack the walkways to the cages and the cages themselves for salvage wood and wood to burn at the care centre.

Then little Rita died. No one has ever raised that kind of monkey and there was always a very big risk of her dying but the actuality was a terrible blow to everyone.

As our quarantine period expired, the hospitalised three were also released and returned to us. We were still viewed with official suspicion and going back to work at the care centre, where the carpenters had continued working on the raised walkway, meant trucking in the back way and trekking through the swamp to the work area. The orangutans, including Yolanda, were OK too – much to our relief.

And we were back! Eager to get as much done as possible before we handed over to Group 2 for the completion… we were beginning to realise just how much more effort was needed for the project and time was against us. And one of our group, cleared of swine flu, got down to her skilled massaging of the disabled orangutans.

In the last few days, we made up for being parted from the orangutans. The visit to the nursery and our playtime with the kids were followed by a trip into the jungle, with Dr Biruté and Mr Ralph, her 89-year-old volunteer photographer… a couple of hours by our fleet of speed boats to Camp Leakey, famous for the work led by Dr Biruté on orangutans and spearheading the fight for their survival.

As OFI volunteers with “Ibu Professor” (Mother Professor), we were allowed to stay overnight in one of the old buildings and given access beyond the normal for visitors. Plus, of course, having the benefit of the insights and stories of Dr Biruté.

I had been there only a very short time , sitting under a tree watching orangutans ambling through, when one of the attendants came up and asked if I knew one of his friends - I certainly did: she was leading a British-organised group working deep in the jungle and had left a message at Camp Leakey for me. These travel networks…

It was there that I met the young Biruté, her picture on the front of an old National Geographic and where I also got a sense of family as the names and relatives of the orangutans stretched back to the 1970s. There was also a sense of history at Camp Leakey – where research still goes on while the caring and releasing happens mostly in other places.

It also had a sharp reminder of the danger to the forest: the river leading from Pangkalan Bun is jet black with the discharges from gold mining. The nearest village, which OFI has supported for years, is seeing incidences of cancers while river life is throwing up deformed offspring. No one knows if there is a link.

Meanwhile, the palm oil industry is destroying not just the jungle but everything that lives in it: almost nothing can live in a palm oil plantation, although the operators determinedly try to show biodiversity. The land goes from a forest teeming with life to the silence of monoculture for profit.

And there is another threat to the orangutans. Within a few years, all must be returned to the wild by Indonesian government order: a superficially enticing idea but in reality it will mean no care for the orphans whose mothers have been killed by the forest clearers and the centre of campaigning for the orangutans will no longer have a practical care role.

In the past decade, it is thought by those working on conservation, world orangutan numbers have been halved to between 50,000 and 60,000 in the wild.

“We have to fight or there will be no orangutans left in the wild,” said Dr Biruté, now married to a Dayak farmer.

When our volunteer time expired, others got their flights out but I had a week to spare and stayed on with the second of the two pilot groups. The nine of us quickly got to work on the walkway and we were within sneezing distance of finishing it by the time I had to leave. Not that anyone had been sneezing or doing anything else that could get them locked up…

As my turn came to move on, I felt it had been worthwhile, an adventure where we had risen above misfortune, and socially rewarding with both groups getting the best out of the opportunities for doing some good and having a good time.

All the farewells – group members, OFI people and Dayak ‘locals’ who cooked and helped – were sad, but one was strange beyond the ordinary. I got quite fond of our fish-eating crocodile, which loved the pit so much he spent almost all his time submerged in it. I used to see just his snout, sometimes, when I called in to check how he and the other three crocs were doing.

But on the morning I left, I went along to the pit and stood for a short time and he surfaced, turned round, swam to the end nearest to me and just stayed on the surface facing me until I went. Coincidence, I guess… but it felt like he was saying goodbye.