Worst Job in Science

Every year Pop Sci Magazine publishes a list of the “Worst Jobs in Science.”  I usually read the list and scoff at the people who they have chosen.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job.  However, if I had a quarter for every time I have been pooped or peed on by a monkey, swarmed by annoying insects (many of them with painful stings), stuck in quicksand like mud, or been in close proximity to venomous snakes, I wouldn’t have to be writing grants.  Therefore, it was a strange day indeed when I find someone’s whose job actually might be the worst job in science. The person who wins the award for me is Mosquito Man.  Mosquito Man is studying how rates of deforestation influence the transmission of malaria and dengue through mosquito vectors.  It is a very important question that has the potential to help thousands (if not millions) of people.  However, the work required to collect this important data, sucks (pun intended).  First of all, Mosquito Man sits in the forest all by himself from the hours of 5:30 pm to 6:30 am.  To the person who likes to be asleep by 8pm, the hours alone sound horrible.  However, may I remind you that he is not sitting in an office somewhere; he is sitting alone in the tropical forest.  To understand what that means, let me explain to you the night he spent in my forest.  First, the forest he was studying became flooded, therefore he was stuck on a 3X3 feet island of trees, as the crocodile infested waters surrounded his previous forest escape path.  If that wasn’t enough, he happened to share that island with a 9 inch centipede.  For those of you that aren’t familiar with the centipedes of Borneo, their bites are more venomous than many of the scary snakes that also live in the forest (and often visit him).  However, that isn't even the worst part of his job.  On a good night, he will be bit by a high number of mosquitoes.  Remember, these aren’t your run of the mill Wisconsin mosquitoes that produce a nice itchy bite for a few days; these are tropical mosquitoes that carry such fun vectors of malaria (killed 780,000 people last year) and dengue.  Since he is interested in the transmission of these deadly diseases, he is actually hoping the mosquitoes that are biting him are carrying these diseases.  Talk about having conflicting views about your job.  After hanging out with mosquito man, I think I am going to stick to primate research, and am happy to award Mosquito Man as the Worst Job in Science.  

Top Ten Signs You Have Been in the Field Too Long

I am quickly approaching my one year anniversary of being in Indonesia.  Although it has been a great year, I have recently realized that things that have become part of my normal routine and experience are not necessarily normal things for the normal person (I also do not know what a normal person is, but I am pretty sure that I am not normal).  Therefore I devised a list of top ten signs that you might have been in the field too long. 

10. You don’t leave the house without applying at least SPF 85 and wearing a big hat. 

9. You pack everything from electronic equipment to clothes in dry sacs (even when going to the grocery store).

8. You shake out your pants and shoes before putting them on, because you never know who or what might be in them. 

7. You think it is normal to have to stand on a tree to get your emails and text messages. It is also normal for Gmail to take over 5 minutes to load, even if you use the version for “slower connections”.     

6. A toilet means digging a hole in the woods.  You haven’t seen a sit down toilet that flushes in a couple of months.  Showers are what you do with a bucket, often next to a river wearing a sarong. 

5. You are so accustomed to wearing your binoculars every day, you often reach for them even when you are in town (when you start wear your binos in town, you know it is time to go home). 

4. You forget that normal people don’t live in their tents.  Sleeping in tents is a thing called camping, not real life.  The same goes for not using your camping sleeping pad as an everyday mattress.

3. You can’t remember the last time a part of your body... hold on, I am scratching... didn’t itch. 

2. It is an extremely special and rare event when you can drink beer, eat chocolate, and speak English. 

1.  Seeing amazing and unique things becomes so mundane and normal, you can’t come up with anything to write about for your blog.   

Guest Blog from CIM

Rather than talking to myself for another blog, I decided to have someone else do the talking for me.  My fellow monkey lover, CIM, and her partner came to visit me... here is their story.  

According to the rain gauge, there has been more than a meter and a half of rain in the last 12 hours. It rained off and on all night. When the deafening sounds of the rainstorm on the tile roof quieted they were replaced by frogs bleating like sheep in surround sound. It sounded like they were tucked away in every corner of the house. We were supposed to be on the boat by 5:30 this morning but the rain has kept us indoors. It’s been raining off and on for the past four days and this is supposed to be the dry season! 

Jake and I are visiting my friend Katie in Indonesian Borneo (or Kalimantan Barat) for a few weeks.  Katie has been here since last October and has learned the local language, Bahasa Indonesian, quite quickly, which is necessary because not many people speak English. (We made sure to bring gifts of cheese and chocolate to pay for her translator fees…) She’s here studying the proboscis monkeys – orange pot-bellied monkeys with protruding noses that are endemic to Borneo’s riverine systems. Not much is known about the species in general, much less about the population here in Kalimantan Barat. Katie lives with a local family in the small coastal town of Tolak. It’s not the easiest of places to reach from the Southwestern US. We took four flights spread out over a day and a half to reach Jakarta, Indonesia’s capital located on the island of Java. From there we flew to the island of Borneo, spent the night Pontianak (Kalimantan Barat’s largest city), took an hour long flight to Ketapang, and finally jumped on a bus for an hour before arriving at the house three days after we left our own back in Tucson. From here camp is still another 18 km up the Sungai Tolak (Sungai means river in Bahasa) by long boat. 

“Camp Katie” is not much more than a small cleared area on the river that Katie and her two local assistants claimed for themselves. There are no permanent structures other than a wooden table, bench and a swing. There is a lot of logging traffic on the river and multiple small encampments perched along its banks. It has been disheartening and hard to escape the constant sounds of chainsaws creating destruction in the surrounding forest. We spent our first four days up at “Camp Katie” and were treated to some of Borneo’s many treasures as well as hot and dry weather. We had some great views of many of the river’s primate species, including an acrobatic water show starring a rather large group of proboscis monkeys. We stopped to watch a group along the river and quickly realized there were monkeys on both sides of the water. Not before long a few daring monkeys started diving out of trees into the river below and swimming to the other side. The most timid of the group slunk in at the shore and soon there was a steady stream of monkeys with their long noses above the water, swimming in a line to the other side. It was amazing!

We’ve been looking forward to a glimpse of Asia’s only great ape, the orangutan. Appropriately enough, orangutan means man of the forest in Bahasa. Katie doesn’t see them on a regular basis but she has, and they are here so we have been continuously scanning the trees for a large orange man of the forest. Our third day on the river we parked the boat and went for a walk on a logging trail in the forest. We lost track of Jake early on because he was busily snapping photos of every bird he came across. Katie and I decided to stop and wait for him to catch up. Not far from where we were standing something fell from the tree tops. Then something else fell in the same place. It wasn’t a group of monkeys; they make more noise and shake the foliage when they jump around. This thing wasn’t moving much but there was definitely something up there. We looked at each other without saying anything, I’m sure we were both thinking the same thing, and scrambled around the undergrowth for a better vantage point. And there he was, a giant flanged male orangutan high in a tree feeding on stinky durian fruit. Jake caught up with us and we all watched the orangutan feed for quite some time. Orangutans have no natural predators so it wasn’t surprising that he didn’t seem bothered by our presence in the least.

Jake has been hard at work identifying and recording every species of bird he can and has come up with a sizeable list for Katie’s site. I’ve been busy pointing out and counting monkeys as we cruise down the river in the long boat. We are hoping Katie hires us in the future as assistants…

 Katie took a break from work and we went north to Gunung Palung National Park for a three day expedition. We saw three more orangutans from our camp, a bunch of singing gibbons, radiant red-leaf monkeys, huge hornbills, glowing mushrooms, pygmy squirrels you could put in a coin purse, blood loving leaches, and monstrous insects. Camp was not what we were lead to believe it would be, Jake ended up sleeping on the floor by the French tourists, Katie and I shared a plywood platform, and the hike in and out was a little crazy with our packs. We are still kicking ourselves for not bringing the sleeping pads but really glad we had mosquito nets. Regardless, for what we saw, it was worth it. We spent our last night of Katie’s vacation down in Ketapang running errands, most importantly finding some cash as we nearly ran out of money and couldn’t find a working ATM near the park. Plus we wanted to eat extravagant foods like ice cream and burgers washed down with beer, a welcome break from the rice, veggies, and tempe we’ve been eating three times a day for the past couple weeks.

We are going to spend four more days in the field with Katie…if it ever stops raining. Then we are headed to Lombok and Bali to experience a very different side of Indonesia.

All the best from Borneo,

Corey and Jake

Interview Part 2

Katie: Hi KT, welcome back to our interview.

KT: Yes Katie, I apologize for the delay.  It is very hard to coordinate our schedules. 

Katie: So we actually received a few questions from our readers while you have been gone. 

KT: Oh really?

Katie: Well, actually it is the same question asked by a couple of people, so I guess that is a good place to start. 

Q. What is a typical day for you?

A. That is actually a really hard question to answer, it would be better to answer it with a flow chart, but this blog doesn’t support flow charts.  The answers depend on where I am and what type of data I need to collect that day.  The one consistency is that I usually wake up at about 4am and I am in bed (usually reading) by 8pm.  Besides that, I try to keep a 4:1 schedule, which means four forest days and one data day.  Many people would mistake my one data day as a day off; however, I often spend 10-14 hours on those days entering data, cleaning data, and writing reports (besides the necessary bucket washing of clothes).  For forest days, I have three different types of days: phenology days, census days, and bekantan behavior days.  On phenology days, we go to one of the four transect (scientific word for path in the forest) and record what the trees are doing.  They are often dancing and having lots of sex…you know, being crazy and throwing poop at researchers… wait that doesn’t seem right, these are trees not monkeys.  Really, we record if the tree is fruiting, flowering, or has new leaves.  I use this data to figure out what foods are available for the monkeys to eat; it also allows me to monitor if the loggers have cut down any of my trees.  On census days, we walk the same transects, but instead of looking at trees, we look at monkeys and other mammals.  This data will let us determine the densities of both the proboscis monkeys and other animals in the area.  On behavior days, we spend a lot of time looking for monkeys in the boat.  When we find them, we keep them as long as we can.  These activities all take place in the morning from about 5:30am to about 10:30-11am.  We then usually have a break, eat lunch, and then at about 3:30-4pm we head out to collect sleep site data.  Anytime between 6-7pm we return to our selected sleep site of the night, eat, bath, and go to sleep.    

Q. What do you usually wear in the forest?

I am the height of fashion in the forest.  My favorite pair of field pants is pair of old camouflaged military issue pants.  If we are going to walk in the forest, I wear my giant camouflaged rubber boats (they are of course a different pattern than my pants), however if we are staying in the boat, I often go barefoot.  On top, I usually wear a wicking t-shirt, with a long sleeved shirt over that (I have a blue one, a coral one, and a beige one… they all match great with my pants).  Although it is often 90 degrees, it is important to wear long pants and shirts for sun and bug protection.  I accessorize my outfit with my binoculars, my giant green hat or fun colored bandana (depending if we are walking in the forest or on the boat) and my pink cut off angel rainbow gloves (I have scars on my hands from the sunburn I got on my hands the first month- I guess SPF 75 sometimes just isn’t strong enough).  This field season, I have switched from my backpack to a fanny pack.  Besides trying to bring back the 80’s, the fanny pack is much cooler (temperature and style wise), and also I don’t get neck strain when looking up into the canopy.  I am really waiting for Jungle Chic (what I like to call my style) to pick up in the Jakarta Clubs. 

Q. What are the things that you miss the most?

A. Besides my family and friends, I miss cheese the most.  There is absolutely no cheese in my town, only really bad processed cheese (so processed it doesn’t need to be refrigerated) in Ketapang (1.5 hour bus ride away), and bad expensive cheese in Pontianak (8 hour ferry ride away).  In regards to other food, I also miss bread, and related bread products.  I especially miss the coffee house snacks, and lab mate’s and office mates’ bakery goods.  Finally, I miss intellectual thought.  As you can tell from this self interview, I talk to myself a lot.  However, it would be nice to have someone else’s ideas every once in awhile. 

Q. You have had 2 sets of visitors now, are there any observations they made about your life that you didn’t pick up on?

A. First, my visitors said they would write a guest blog (hint hint), so I am sure they will share with you all their insights.  However, the one thing that both sets of visitors noticed was that I have nothing soft (or remotely comfortable) to sit on.  On my boat, I sit on hard wood planks, in my house, I sit on the concrete floor (even when eating dinner), and in the forest I sit on logs. After they mentioned it, I remember being slightly in pain when I arrived, but I guess I have just developed butt pads (does this make me now a monkey and no longer an ape?).  Also, I have forgotten that in America, we only eat certain foods at certain times of the day.  For example, it would be strange to have fish in a curry sauce for breakfast in America.  However, here we eat the same thing three times a day. 

The Three- Hour Tour

In my youth, whenever I would go on a boat tour with my father, he would start singing the theme song to “Gulligan’s Island”.  The other day, my assistants and I went on a little Three-Hour Tour… and sure enough the theme song to Gilligan’s Island was in my head when we started.  It all began innocently enough, I was feeling like I didn’t have enough work to do with starting two research sites (why only work 14 hours a day, when you can work 18), that I figured I should check out a possible third site. The good news was that I could use my own boat to get to and explore the new site; the bad news was that we had to go out to sea to access the third river.  We arrived at the new river safely without any problems; after finding five proboscis monkey groups and buying some fresh fish at a boat thru fish shop (shop is a very generous word, basically a guy standing next to a cooler on a dock), we decided to head home.  As we approached the sea, I realized that this was not going to be a boat ride on smooth seas. I quickly wrapped all expensive electronic equipment into their various dry bags and boxes, tied everything down, and prepared for the ride.  We entered the sea, and when the first wave came over the edge of the boat…. I thought “Oh that wasn’t that bad”.  Then the second one came and smacked me in the face.  “Hmmm, sea water, good for the skin”.  As we headed out to sea, the waves started getting bigger and bigger, till the swells were about 3 to 5 feet.  Then just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, the winds started to pick up, the sky turned an eerie shade of dark grey, and it started to pour.  There is wet, and then there is really wet, we had passed the point of being really wet, as my entire body had already started to prune.  As my teeth began to chatter, and I started thinking about how I could use my dry bags as floatation devices (shhhh don’t tell my mom, but I didn’t have my life jacket with me), my assistants (who don’t know how to swim) decided that maybe it was time to turn back.  As we arrived back to the town of exploration, the people we bought the fish from were laughing when a very water logged American got off the little boat.  Now you would think the story ends there… but the American can’t sit under an awning of a building in the pouring rain.  One of my assistants found a motorcycle to borrow, to transport me back to our house.  Funny thing is that now he insisted that I put on my poncho (had the poncho the whole time, but it was covering my equipment), and I prayed that the end of this adventure was not going to end in a motorcycle crash (since my helmet was sitting at home with my life jacket).   Eight hours of wearing my polar fleece, wool socks, and skiing liner gloves, I finally shopped shivering... and you all laughed at me when I packed that stuff to live at 1 degree south of the equator.  Needless to say, I might be sticking to only two sites.  

Interview Part 1

So I posted a blog asking for questions; however, I received no questions. That means that no one actually has any questions, no one is actually reading my blog anymore, or people have questions but keep forgetting to ask them (I wrote this before I got my one question… which I will answer).  Well, it really doesn’t matter which one of those things it is.  These days, I talk to myself a lot as I am the only one who speaks English or Spanish (two languages I feel fluent in) in hundreds of miles; I try to speak to the Indonesians in Spanish and they just look at me funny. Anyways, I talk to myself, so I figured I would just interview myself, since I have some questions. Here is part one of my interview.

Hi KT, thanks for taking the time to sit down for this interview, I know you have a busy field schedule.

Oh thanks Katie, but it is my pleasure to take the time and share my research with others.

Q. So to start off with let us cover some of the things you have mentioned in your previous posts.  First, are you still eating nasi goreng or has your diet changed?

A. Oh yes, my diet has changed a lot.  I like to divide my diet into 4 food groups, rice, msg and salt, eggs, and noodles.  Plain white rice is a staple in Indonesian food; they like to say, “if you didn’t eat rice, you didn’t eat”. Sometimes, rather than rice, we will eat ramien noodles, but usually it is noodles with a side of rice.  An Indonesian in my village would have a diet of rice and fish; however, since I still don’t eat fish, I eat eggs instead.  Oh yes, and msg is added to everything.  When I am living in town, I keep trying to buy veggies (which are rare and hard to come by); however, my host mom doesn’t really know what to do with them.

Q. Have you found any better coffee now that you are off the island of Java?

A. Yes, I have, but it actually has very little coffee in it.  My host mom makes this thing called kopi campur which translates to country coffee.  It is roasted fresh coconut, rice, and a little coffee.  It is pretty good, much better than instant.

Q. What is the hardest part of your job?

A. Many people would think it would be the snakes, or the heat or maybe the bugs, but I would have to say the loneliness.  When I was at school, everyone around me was working on a post graduate degree.  They understood the stress, the frustration, and the drive.  Currently, I am living in a town with a fairly poor population; most of the adults have a 6^th grade or maybe 9^th grade education.  Therefore, to have someone who is not just working on a college degree but a PhD is a bit isolating.  Add on top of that, I come from a very different country with a very different culture.  The loneliness is compounded by a ‘lack of understand’.  I can explain the lack of understanding in three ways.  First, although my Indonesian is getting better, there is still stuff that I just don’t get yet or can’t express.  Secondly, the people do not speak Indonesian to each other; they speak this local language (which of course there is no dictionary to it).  And finally, there are things I want to express that they just don’t have any concept of.  I think the best example of this is when my new thermometer came.  I didn’t know the word for thermometer but I showed it to my assistant.  He asked me what it was, and I said it is to know the temperature.  We ran into my other field assistant who has worked with scientists for years, and he said the word in Indonesian and explained it; however, there was still this question of what it was and why would you need to know the temperature.  I guess when your temperature ranges about 10 degrees Fahrenheit the importance of knowing the temperature is less important. There are three temperatures here, digin (cold, under 83 degrees), panas (from 83-90 degrees), and panas sekali above 90 degrees.  Therefore even when there are words, sometimes things just can’t be explained.  I thank all of you out there who have chatted with me or sent me emails, it really helps the loneliness, and I really appreciate it.  

Is there a doctor in the house?

You can imagine the scene in a sitcom, someone yells for a doctor, and a person replies, well yes, I have a doctoral degree in (name obscure subject here), and cannot really help the situation because what they need is a medical doctor.  Well yesterday (now over a month ago), I realized that sometimes the doctoral candidate in primatology is the closest thing to a real doctor within 50 miles and therefore might really be able to help.  I was sitting at my makeshift office, working on the placement of my vegetative plots, when there was a distinct noise outside.  My host dad/ assistant and I rushed outside and saw there was a motorcycle crash down the way.  He told me to wait in the house and went running down the street.  Still trying to figure out my role in this society (being an educated female western scientists) in a poor Muslim town, I realized I should listen to him. However, after looking down the street and realizing that people are still milling around the accident scene, I realized that I am probably the most qualified to help.  I mean, I have read “Where There Is No Doctor” about a hundred times, taken First Aid and CPR sometime in the past, and have watched enough ER and Grey’s Anatomy to have at least  5% of a medical degree… all of which I have figured the local towns people have not done.  So I grabbed my “Wilderness First Aid Kit” (which by the way, I got on super sale at Steep and Cheap) and went running down the road.  As soon as I got to the scene, I busted out my plastic gloves and went to work.  Relatively speaking, it was a bit disappointing… there were a few cases of road rash (nothing bigger than an inch squared) and a potential sprained wrist…. I didn’t even get to use my butterfly closures.  Basically, I cleaned the wounds, put antibiotic ointment on them, and bandaged them up.  However, since I was bored, and wanted to demonstrate my expertise, I figured I should address the potential broken wrist.  Although I have a really nice ace bandage, I figured I might need that someday, so I made this awesome cast like contraption with a pencil and athletic tape.  Both kids (the victims couldn’t have been more than 18 years old) seemed pretty shocked, I think it was less from the accident and more from the crazy white lady with frizzy hair who kept putting more and more creams and ointments on their wounds.  Oh first aid and simple medical help, just one of the many services your local primatologist provides. 

Are there any questions?

There aare maany things to talk about; however, my current situation is preventing me from writing (using internet on a phone). I am taking this oppertunity to take any questions you might have regarding my life, the proboscis monkeys, or Indonesia. Please leave me a comment or send me an email.

Justin Beiber, Smoking, and Monkeys

What do Justin Beiber, smoking and monkeys all have in common?  Well these are the words that best summarize my first expedition to the field.  If you came up with something else, I would really like to know, because those are three things that I don't think generally go together.  So after many delays, setbacks, and false starts, I was finally able to go up to one of my sites, called Batubarat.  It is an interesting site because one side of the river is Gunung Palung National Park, while the other side is not protected.  Currently, the forest is rapidly being converted to palm oil plantations; however, more on that later. 

 

So back to Justin Beiber, smoking and monkeys.  Imagine sitting on the porch of a little wood bungalow overlooking palm trees, a tropical river, and mountains in the background.  As you sit amazed at the wonders of natural, you hear a familiar sound... is it a bird, maybe a gibbon calling to its mate, no... it is Justin Beiber's "Baby, Baby, Baby."  My assistants (all of which are grown Indonesian men) love this song; they play it when we get back from the forest, they play it when we are eating lunch, they play it while rowing down the river.  That song will forever be in my head when I think about Indonesia.  

When I first arrived in Indonesia, I was taking aback by how many people smoke.  In California, we haven't been able to smoke in bars and restaurants for years, let alone in offices.  A few weeks into my stay, I read an article in the Indonesian newspaper about how smoking is not bad for you and all the bad press about smoking is just Western  modern colonialism.  I hope they are right, because otherwise I have to stop worrying about the crocs eating me and start worrying about dying of lung cancer.  I think between my assistants, my homestay parents, and the random town people that stop and visit, I might be up to a 30 pack a day habit.  Maybe the large carbon emissions from Indonesia is not caused by deforestation but just from cigarette smoke.  

And finally, the good part... MONKEYS!!!! After waiting for more than 2 years to return to the field, my first day back, I was able to spot 2 groups of proboscis monkeys.  Granted this is a lot less than the last time I am here (my research will determine the reason for that), but still, I saw that face with the big nose looking at me, before it turned around and ran away.  I had 13 sightings of proboscis monkeys in 6.  Three of the days, we were in the forest setting up botanical plots so the goal was not to find monkeys those days.  I also was able to see long tailed macaques, leaf monkeys, and a tarsier.  I saw orangutan nests and heard gibbon calls, so they are there, just hiding.  I am taking a brief respite from Justin Beiber, smoking, and monkeys to deal with some permit issues... but will be heading to site number two this week.  

Where are the bekantan and the Borneo?

I have been writing this blog for 3 months now, and you might have noticed that there is little to no mention of bekantan (proboscis monkeys) or even the island of Borneo.  That is because I have spent the last 3 months collecting permits, avoiding large exploding volcanoes, and learning a little Bahasa Indonesia, all on the island of Java.  However, this is all going to change because next week (aka tomorrow), I am scheduled to return to Borneo.  The crowd cheers, yah!!!! I figured I would take this opportunity, while I still have free 24 access to internet, to explain why I am going to Borneo.  I have two main projects that I am trying to accomplish, I call one my conservation project and the other my science project... both involve the awesome, amazing, incredible proboscis monkeys (aka the bekantan).  For my conservation project, I am attempting to evaluate how different conservation  projects protect both the proboscis monkeys and the local people.  I will be specifically looking at an ecotourism project, a national park, a carbon credit trading project and an area with no conservation projects.  I am particularly excited to look at the carbon credit trading project because it has the potential to have a huge impact on how we do conservation in the future.  For my science project, I am looking at how proboscis monkeys response to variation in food availability (both variation due to seasonal changes, and also variation due to human caused alterations to habitats).  I will be measuring how proboscis monkeys change their feeding, their ranging and travel patterns, their grouping, and their activities.  I am very excited to return to the field, and will try to keep you all updated on the progress I make.  Hopefully from now on, there will be a lot more bekantans and Borneo in this blog.

Living in the Ring of Fire

On December 18^th, I did something that I am not proud of, yet something that I am glad I did.  I participated in disaster tourism, particularly; I visited the site where Mount Merapi devastated many villages when it had its worst eruption in recorded history.  Disaster tourism is a new thing in Indonesia; it is a way for the country to bring in funds after being struck by natural disasters, like tsunamis, earthquakes, and volcanoes.  I personally am against the idea; however, I felt that I had to go to Merapi because of our history together.  Mount Merapi, one of the most active volcanoes in Indonesia, erupted my second day in Indonesia.  The eruption continued and intensified for my first month in country, to the point that Fulbright evacuated all Fulbrighters living in towns near Merapi, included the location of my language school.  The continual eruption of Merapi controlled my life for the first month in country, it dictated where I could go, when I could go there, and for how long I went there.  When given the chance to see Merapi in person, I had to. 

They say a picture is worth 1,000 words. I have about 200 pictures (that I took over a course of 2 hours), so no wonder this blog post might be a little longer than my normal ones. However, when I was up there, I had to take pictures.  It was my way of coping.  If I was behind my camera, it made the things that I saw easier, it was like it wasn't real as long as I was looking through my camera.  For those of you that have known me for a long time, you might remember a period in my life when photography was a very large part of it.  I did not go anywhere without my camera.  However, when I entered college, I gave up photography completely.  I was tired of living through my camera lens and wanted to actually live life, not just capture life.  The necessity of my work, and my generous parents, combined for the purchase of a brand new camera.  That combined with my desire to create something and contribute something to society rather than just science has rekindled my interest in photography. 

I feel that I am in a special position that gives me the opportunity to travel to unique places and do my work.  One of the purposes of my work is to analysis the interaction between humans and nature, particularly primates.  I have realized that there are stories that have to be told; the stories of things and people with no voice.  There is the story of the monkeys losing their habitat, there is the story of the people who are trying to make a living along side some of the areas with the highest biodiversity, and today there is the story of the people that lost their lives, both physically and metaphorically to a natural disaster.  This is my first story… I hope I have the opportunity to tell more.

The story begins with a very early morning at a certain homestay in Yogyakarta.  After leaving the house at 6am, we traveled past sights that I have grown accustomed to from living in Indonesian cities for two months: mopeds zipping by, Baceks (Indonesian word for riksaw) pedaling away, and cell phone shops and warungs (local food stands) lining the streets.  However, the early morning traffic quickly thinned and the views out the window became more of the scenes that I imagine when I think of Indonesia.  Narrow streets lines with rice padi fields and banana plants, people in multicolored sarongs walking with loads of the seasonal crop on their back, and old men riding down the road on his bicycle.  The green from these sights was so blinding… I had forgotten how green Indonesia is. However, the green disappeared as quickly as it arrived.  Just 12 miles from the house that I live in, we reached the entry way for the Merapi Eruption Tourist Site.  We passed through a bamboo gate and everything was so different, it was like the small gate was not just to stop cars to collect their entrance fees, but instead a passage way to an alternative reality.  It was so shocking, I actually gasped for air. 

The first thing that hit me was the nothingness.  We went from a very densely vegetated area to an empty area with blackness.  As we traveled up the road, we saw ruminants of what used to be peoples’ lives.  Three motorcycles that looked like they had been discarded years ago, nothing but rusty frames remained… however, just a month and a half ago these were fully functioning bikes.  We parked on the side of the road and got out of the car.  A cool strong breeze hit me as I exited the car, reminded me of the power of nature, the power that caused all this destruction.  The landscape lacked the vibrant color of life that I saw on the way up, and everything that was in the path of Merapi was black. 

The only color on the scene was the items the relief workers brought in (brightly colored water tanks, tarps, and even makeshift bathrooms).  Next, I realized that things were not burned.  Merapi is known for its plumes of toxic hot gases, rather than its lava.   Therefore, most of the damage was from things melting and corroding away rather than being burnt.  As I began to walk around, it was interesting to see the things that survived.  Notebooks that had warped under the heat of the volcano but were otherwise intact with notes and scribbles of school children, while cars were just destroyed.  As I looked at the mountain side, bright green trees stood in contrast to the dark paths of nothingness, marking the fury of the volcano.  I wander around taking pictures, trying to capture the devastation and power of nature… but as I look at the pictures today and they don’t even begin to give the site justice.   

   

After about 20 minutes of walking around, I went back to my host mom and friend.  They were talking to an elderly lady that was standing in front of a makeshift snack bar.  I assumed she was just another person trying to make a profit on the natural disasters like the people selling videos and t-shirts.  I soon realized that she was not trying to make a profit but instead she was guarding the last remains of what was left of her life.  She began to tell me her story, and I realized that communication in humans means so much more than just formal language.  Although I could not understand most of the words that she told me I completely understood the message of the story.  

She told me her story in her eyes, the way that the  tears welled up in her eyes reflected the destruction of what was around her, she told me her story in her shoulders that were slumped under the burden of having her life destroyed by a volcano and she told me her story in the quiver of her voice as she described how she used to live here, and how that life was now gone.  I felt like she needed a hug, someone to hold her, to help support the weight of tragedy that she carried in her already frail body; however, I did not know how culturally appropriate it was.  I reached for her hand as my eyes filled with tears to tell her I understand, and maybe try to give her hope.  Besides not knowing the words in Bahasa Indonesia to comfort her, I really didn't have the correct words in any language.  There are no words in any language to bring relief to someone who lost so much.  It was in that lady that I started to understand what the eruption of Merapi really meant.  My host mom told me it was time to go, and as I left the lady, she started wandering around, lost in a place that she once knew so well. 

                 

As we followed the brightly colored yellow Merapi Tourist signs to the exit, I was able to have glimpses of how one begins to rebuild their lives.  Men worked on digging out the ash and debris that used to occupy someone’s living room.  That family was left with two walls and with a little hard work and money; they might be able to repair their house.  Further down the mountain, there was a house that was missing a roof and a large portion of a wall; however, it had clean brightly colored clothes hanging on the line.  To start to rebuild, one does what they can, anything to return  life to normalcy, even if that normalcy is hanging your wash in the front yard, back when there were actually things in your backyard.

As quickly as we entered the disaster area, we left it and were traveling through brightly colored rice fields once again.  These people were lucky and didn’t lose everything; however, the terror of the volcano changed them.  Houses upon houses had for sale signs on them.  For those people, they decided that it was best to try to rebuild a life that was not in the shadow of a volcano.