Editor's note: Gibsons teen Marc Desaulniers is currently in Borneo in month five of his Canada World Youth exchange. He has sent home a few emails to his family and friends updating them of his experience. This story is based on those emails home.
I guess I'll start with the weather. It is intensely hot over here, 30-plus most of the time. It is the rainy season, which basically means it will be a torrential downpour for a few hours, then be sunny for a few hours and then downpour again.
I've seem some cool wildlife, an abundance of strange bugs and critters and also some poisonous snakes (I think they are). There was a small cobra outside my front door a few days ago, but my host dad killed it by spearing it with a long trident and then bashing it with a big piece of wood.
On our night jungle walk, which apparently isn't a good idea according to the locals - we only did it twice and don't do it anymore - we saw a small jungle cat, some sort of leopard looking thing but a lot smaller, actually just larger than a house cat.
The village here is really interesting with many wonderful positives and a few troubling negatives. The thing that first stands out in my mind is the interfaith co-operation and community.
During Christmas, the Muslims in the village go around to the Christian houses and wish them a good holiday. There is no animosity or division among the people because of the religions here, which shouldn't be that shocking or surprising if people weren't killing each other for the same reasons in other pars of the world. They have also retained some of the mystical traditions and beliefs.
We got to witness and take part in a traditional ancestor ceremony. They built a small house and filled it with offerings and said blessings. Then they played traditional music and danced around the house for hours drinking traditional casava root alcohol called baram. They invited me and a few others from our group to dance around the house and drink baram with them - it was really neat. They danced around until one of the grandmothers became possessed and they started talking to all the spirits of people from the village who died that year to make sure everything was all right. The ceremony lasted two days and the morning of the second day they slaughtered a pig, but we missed that part.
The village, and it seems Indonesia as a whole, has really poor waste management, at least in terms of garbage collection. It really is not part of the collective consciousness. Here it is culturally acceptable to just throw your garbage on the ground wherever you stand. It doesn't matter that there are very few proper landfills because most of the people just burn their garbage, which is really distressing. It seems most of the people here just live day-by-day with no concern for the future. They live in this sort of beautifully innocent and carefree lifestyle, which is unfortunately not compatible anymore with the changes going on in other parts of the world. The pollution and growing inequalities are hard to look at, but really just on par with the rest of the developing world.
My work placement is at Balai Bibbit, which is the governmental agriculture centre. Dimas, an Indonesian participant, and I were stationed there because our community project has to do with spirulina. Spirulina is a micro algae that Dimas grew in Truro. It is a super food that contains pretty much every nutrient you need to eat in a day and has been used to treat malnutrition emergencies in different places around the world. Globally it seems it is relatively unnoticed, despite its amazing benefits and potential for health prevention.
There are commercial companies that sell it at too high a price for it to be practical in a humanitarian sense to get it to the people who need it.
Our experience at Balai Bibbit has really brought to the forefront of our minds and shown us firsthand the challenges Indonesia faces as a developing country.
We have been using the facility to try to grow spirulina ourselves, but we are a landscaper and an art major using old semi-functioning equipment and the chances of our personal success at developing it regretfully seem quite slim.
We have decided that we want to try to get the university in Palangkaraya involved and see if there is a possibility of making a partnership with Balai Bibbit or other organizations in the area.
We are here for such a short time we really need to make an emotional impact so the progress made doesn't just get abandoned as soon as we leave. Unfortunately there seems to be a fairly substantial apathy to the larger goings on in the world outside of their direct sphere of attention. We'll see how it goes - right now I am just meeting people, making friends and trying to integrate.
