Follow the OranguVans and See The Difference

We know boasting isn’t the British thing to do, but we’d like to break with tradition for just a minute.

Some months back, we teamed up with a new not-for-profit video site called See The Difference (STD), and we were one of the very first charities in the UK to get involved. With STD, you can choose a charity project that means something to you (and, not being funny, but ours is totally awesome), know exactly where your money goes and then See The Difference you make as we will post feedback updated clips on on each project. Cool, huh?!

We got together with the team at See The Difference to make three initial videos, which we will show you over the next week or so (or just watch them all on See The Difference). The first one we will share with you shows you our OranguVan project. Many communities living near forests in Sumatra don’t know the importance of conservation. Equipped with a mobile environmental library and conservation cinema, our OranguVans travel around the island to teach locals about the forest, and the impact of deforestation on Orangutans and people.

Click on the picture below to see our video.

We worked closely with the STD producers to make it the very best we could… and, not being modest, we think we did a brilliant job!

So, now we’ve done a bit of bragging, it’s your turn! We wouldn’t want you to feel left out…

Imagine getting proof that you helped change the world? That’s got to be worth a decent amount of bragging right? Plus, you’ll be one of the first people ever to get involved!

If you do nothing else after reading this, please do go and watch our video… leave a comment, and go a bit crazy with the Share buttons! Post it to your Facebook, email it to friends, print out the page and glue it around town… whatever floats your boat!

Get vocal! It’ll be sooooo much easier for us to purchase a new OranguVan with your help!

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Orangutan Sculpture

Jason Hanaman is an American sculptor specialising in orangutans. He has created a sculpture of Abdul, an orangutan Lucy helped rehabilitate many years ago and 25% of money raised through sales is donated to SOS.

The story of Abdul

Abdul died in April 2008 after being shot by a local farmer. He was killed because he was raiding crops. This is further evidence that human-orangutan conflict is on the increase as the forest shrinks. Abdul was 19 years old when he died; a wild orangutan’s natural life span is around 50 years. He arrived at the Bohorok centre as a 4-year-old in 1993, when it was an active rehabilitation centre. SOS founding director, Lucy Wisdom, was actively involved with Abdul’s rehabilitation process. He was fully released into the wild in 1998, but found his way back to the Bohorok centre 7 months later. Looking healthy and mature, he was now sporting a beard. He was again released in 1999 but a few months later turned up at the centre. Lucy says, “In some ways it was reassuring to see him back, looking so well and knowing he had survived the past few months independently in the wild”. Most of his first four years were spent in a cage.

Abdul back in Bukit Lawang relaxing on the grass when he was still alive

Abdul was a good teacher for younger orangutans on the rehabilitation programme. Lucy said “I remember Abdul getting a pointy stick and working it into a hole in a tree. When he withdrew the stick it was covered in wild honey, which he promptly licked off, then repeated the process. Several younger orangutans watched him intently and copied his technique. I had no idea there was honey in this tree; it was in an area I often visited with my young charges as the lianas were good for climbing practice. After that I used it to teach orangutans about wild honey extraction.”

The Sculpture

Two versions are available

One is cast stone with a bronze coating and patina. Limited to 150 castings, price: $100

The other is an eco cold cast bronze made with environmentally friendly aqua resin and bronze powder. Limited to 100 castings, price: $150.

Size: 7 inches tall, 6 inches wide.

The Abdul sculpture

25% of money from sales of the sculpture will go to SOS (and 25% to Orangutan Republik)

Domestic shipping within the US: $12

International shipping: $30

To order your sculpture please e-mail: jssculpture@hotmail.com

Click here to see more of Jason’s work

The Abdul sculpture can be found here

Enjoy! XX

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Orphan Orangutan Rescue

On Monday evening our team in Sumatra received a report from a local farmer in Meka Makmur village, of an orphaned orangutan.
The story is conveyed by Putup (a RARE-OIC staff member); the farmer found the young orangutan in his durian tree. After hearing the orangutan crying, and searching for his mother, he decided that the orangutan was stressed as he had been "abandoned" by her. The farmer therefore climbed the durian tree, and gently teased the orphan to the ground. He then placed the orangutan in a small hut on his farmland before returning home for the evening.
The next morning the farmer returned to his hut bringing fruit and sweet tea for the orangutan. The orphan lived in this hut for a day or so until the farmer built him a small cage. One week later the farmer got in touch with Puput, telling him he had an orangutan and how he had come across it.

Miran from OIC was part of the urgent response team

That day we deployed two of the Human Orangutan Conflict Response Unit team, Rabin and Rudi, to verify this report. They joined Puput to go to the farmland where they found the orangutan and confirmed it is a one-year-old male. Within a couple of hours the team had removed the orphan from his cage and headed to an orangutan rescue and rehabilitation centre.

It is important to remember that infant orangutans are highly dependant on their mothers for survival and development, they stay with her for at least five years in order to learn enough to survive in the forest. The care of such a young orphan needs to be conducted by a trained orangutan rescue centre.

In order to obtain an infant for the pet trade, the mothers are killed. It has been estimated that for every infant that survives the process of capture and transport, at least 3 others will have been lost, and each of these infants also represents the death of an adult female orangutan. We do not know what happened with this infant’s mother, if she was killed accidentally or on purpose. The one thing we do know is that she would have never voluntarily left her baby’s side, and she would have put up a fight if someone tried to take him away.

The young orphan is now in safe hands, in the care of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme (SOCP) at their rescue centre just outside Medan.

Here at the SOS, we are continuously fundraising in order to keep all our projects rolling. It is important to find more money for human orangutan conflict mitigation, as well as our ongoing conservation work.

There are many ways you can help fund our projects: become a member, make a donation, leave a legacy, or fundraise for us. You can see more photos from the rescue on our Facebook page.

Background information:
Organizational information:
The Human Orangutan Conservation Response Unit (HOCRU) is trained specifically to deal with situations where orangutan and human interests conflict. It is a collaboration between SOS, the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC), SOCP and the Government. HOCRU works closely with our OIC community conservation team, identifying current and potential problems and how best to solve them. All SOS projects in Sumatra operate trough the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC), and SOCP deals with all rescues and rehabilitations of orangutans in Sumatra.

Illegal trading:
In theory, orangutans are protected in Sumatra by legislation dating from 1931, which prohibits the owning, killing, or capture of orangutans. In practice, poachers still hunt them, mostly for the pet trade. In international law, orangutans are listed on Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), prohibiting unlicensed trade due to the conservation status of the species in the wild. However, there is a huge local, national, and international demand for infant orangutans to be kept as pets. The maximum penalty for keeping an orangutan captive is 5 years in jail and 100 million rupiah fine (approx £7,500).

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We got there! £1000 for Rainforest Restoration Project

Thank you to everyone who helped support us during this past month.
As most of you may know we have been taking part in a special project competition on the GlobalGiving website.

Our aim was to make £1000 in donations from at least 50 different individuals, and it is with delight we can let you know that we just met that target.

Our fundraising work for this project is not yet over, as a matter of fact we still need to raise over £22,000 to meet our current Restore Rainforest goal, but now we will have the added help from the GlobalGiving community to meet this target.

Oh yes, and if we were to miraculously get another well...hmm... £1300 in donations before 23.59 BST tomorrow evening (that;s Friday 30th April) we would also win first prize in the challenge and that means an additional £1000 from the GG team.

We will definitively be keeping our fingers firmly crossed for that one.

Love from the SOS team
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Lucy Wisdom, SOS Founder, sadly passed away

Last month Lucy Wisdom, founder of SOS sadly lost her longstanding battle against cancer.
Lucy was working as a performance artist in Europe in 94, when a holiday to Indonesia to recuperate from cancer treatment unexpectedly changed her life.
On a visit to a rehabilitation centre for endangered Sumatran Orangutans, she found herself overwhelmed with the desire to help. For the next three years, Lucy visited Sumatra regularly as a volunteer to help orphaned ex-captive orangutans return to the wild. In 1997, Lucy set up SOS to raise funds and awareness about threat of logging to the orangutans disappearing habitat. Despite the constant political instability in Indonesia and the onset of secondary cancer three years ago, Lucy refused to give up the fight for the island’s estimated 6.600 wild orangutans.
Lucy founded the Orangutan Information Centre (OIC) in Medan In 2001, along with Panut Hadisiswoyo, to promote awareness of environmental and orangutan conservation issues amongst local communities living in North Sumatra and Aceh.
Her passion landed her the UK’s Women in Ethical Business Award in 2008 and saw her appear in the hero of the month pages of magazine Marie Claire.
Here in Bali we had a gathering celebrating her life where all her friends came together to reminisce her, and hold a Balinese ceremony.
Lucy will be much missed by all her friends and SOS who will continue her legacy by working to save the Sumatran orangutan and end deforestation in Indonesia.
Thank you Lucy for all your hard work

You can reach Lucy's tribute page by clicking here.


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Another Christmas Tree?

So firstly I want to wish everyone a merry Christmas! Here in Bali we celebrated with a traditional BBQ feast. The boys got up at 5am and went to the local market to get fresh fish, prawns and squid. We girls were in charge of gutting and preparing all the lovely seafood and the condiments so on Christmas day you could find us up to our heads in fish guts and chocolate mousse! A splendid mix if I may say so myself. Dewi and Widi, our local Balinese colleagues came over to celebrate their first Christmas with us and brought some lovely sambal and sumping which hit the right taste buds in a remarkable manner.
We are now back in the office and rearing to go! Here at SOS we have a goal to reach by the end of 2009, we want to plant 25,000 trees inside the Gunung Leuser National Park in Sumatra by the end of the year; currently we have 2568 trees to go before we reach our target. It costs £1 to plant one rainforest seedling, if you feel like getting another tree this Christmas; you can help us by visiting our webshop or our justgiving page.
Speak to you later!

XXX Ida


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Sumatran School Visit

During my time in Sumatra I also had the opportunity to go along to a school visit. SOS supports OIC so they can visit local schools, show presentations and films, have Q&A sessions, hand out activity books and even maintain a OranguVan –which contains mobile environmental libraries and film units. The school we visited is situated in the midst of a massive oil plantation area. Most of the children attending this government run school have parents who work on the plantations, making them the perfect target group for addressing local sustainable issues such as Palm Tree plantations and de-forestation. The group we met are called the Green Group, they meet every Wednesday to discuss environmental issues, recycle and do gardening work in their school garden. They run their own pioneering composting programme where they are turning palm oil branches into compost. These branches fall off the trees at regular intervals, and are usually left to rot or collected and incinerated. The children are collecting the branches with support from the plantation and creating good quality compost which they can use at their schools patch of land or take it home to their kitchen gardens. One idea we thought about when we were at the school, was if it is possible to extend this programme to other schools in the area and create our own compost to use on re-forestation sites. I’ll let you know if anything ever comes from this initial thought.
In our presentation we discussed the importance of water, especially clean water, for the ecology and how this affects both animals and humans. We then had a Q&A session where we got to test their environmental knowledge, and they got the chance to ask us about environmental issues and of course about our countries – after all, it’s not every day they have a visit from two English people, a Norwegian and an Australian. We also had the chance to hand out a new children’s book which SOS has helped fund; Teman Hutan, which was very popular with the young conservationists.

The book is printed in English and Bahasa Indonesia, and tells the story of Pongo, the orangutan. It is a great way of explaining to children why the rainforest is so important for the orangutans and the other wildlife who depend on the Sumatran forest. Check out Captain Freddie’s website for more information.
Catch you later,
Ida



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Replanting rainforest

After visiting the orangutans in Bukit Lawang we headed north to visit a replanting site in Besitang, North Sumatra. The area we went to used to be a massive illegal palm oil plantation and is actually located inside the national park; the main problem with the Palm oil here in Sumatra (simply put) is that so much rainforest is being cleared to make room for the plantations that is has a direct impact on wildlife and forest biodiversity. When palm trees plantations are created, little, if any wildlife can function in these new surroundings. The orangutans cannot swing from the branches of the palms and there are no fruit trees around to support their diet.




Oh, and did I mention that OIC is the first and only NGO allowed to conduct restoration work within the park? We have been, and are still in the process of removing Palm Oil trees, thus allowing us to plant indigenous species in their place. A local farmers group is the main force involved in the reforestation process and there are currently 25,000 seedlings in the surrounding nurseries, just waiting to become a part of the rainforest. To cut a long story short, our initial reforesting target is to replant 500 hectares of orangutan habitat lost to development such as plantations. We are doing this by working with the local community group and the local farmers. Not only is this project immensely important for the upkeep of the orangutans and wildlife, but it also provides the all important sustainable livelihoods for the local community. There is a real science to re-foresting areas such as these, and advice on what plants to grow, how to grow them and how to sustain them, is coming in from experts both within Sumatra and from external scientists. We are planting approximately 70% fast growing hardwood trees and the remaining are fruit trees which will serve as good orangutan grub.

In the old plantations of Besitang, we all got down and dirty in the mud and planted some yummy looking Durian trees alongside the workers, the land owner and forest rangers. This was the first time I had the opportunity to plant rainforest myself and I must say it felt good – you should definitively try it some time!

Or, if you don’t have the chance to visit a rainforest anytime soon, you can help by buying seedlings through our online shop, at £1 a pop, it really is a great way of helping us do more crucial reforestation work.

Au revoir


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Visiting the orangutans

One of the main SOS projects in Sumatra is an ecotourism programme in Bukit Lawang, site of the old Orangutan rehabilitation centre inside the Gunung Leuser National Park. Bukit Lawang is a small village about three hours away from the hustle and bustle of Medan city and our office. You can’t really go to Sumatra and not go trekking to see the jungle and hopefully some of the amazing wildlife. A group from SOS and OIC was already heading there so I jumped in the OranguVan and we headed due west.

Taking all the traffic chaos of Sumatra into account, we made it to Bukit Lawang before lunch, and made our initial stop at a building which SOS has just recently purchased. Once the renovations are completed this space will be used as an internet cafe/information centre and will be staffed by OIC. This will be a place where both tourists and locals can come to learn about the rainforest and the orangutans and will have loads of information about what we do as a charity.
Bukit Lawang used to house an orangutan rehabilitation project, and still gives visitors the chance to spot orangutans and other wildlife by trekking into the jungle. You hire a guide from the Bukit Lawang guide association and head into the wild. For various reasons (disease transmitting, increased dependence on humans etc.) it is strictly forbidden to feed, touch or disturb the orangutans in any way, and the rule is that one should always keep at a safe 10 meters distance of the animals (guidelines). Unfortunately, this is not always the case. The guides want to make money, and the tourists want their “real wildlife experience” and possibly a photo of themselves hugging the orangutan – a practise which the OIC are working to put a stop to. As we make our way through the jungle we spot an orangutan and her baby that have obviously just been fed by a tour group, we stick around for a while to ensure there is no more feeding and that no one is tempted to get a photo of themselves hugging either mother or child. In order to control these situations and hopefully put an end this practice, SOS are working with the guide association, providing an extensive training programme for guides in the area. We are also trying to generate more awareness with the tourists to encourage them to say “no thanks” if they are offered such close encounters with the animals.

During our trek we also visited a hectare of land that belongs to OIC. The land was previously part of a rubber plantation, placed just on the outskirts of the national park. SOS were able to buy the plot with the support of Patron Bill Bailey, a couple of months ago and is working to turn this area into rainforest once again. Fast growing indigenous tree seedlings have already been planted and hopefully it will not take too long time until the area is once again covered by the rainforest. Cheers Bill!

That’s it for now, catch you later!
Ida


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Ida Bondø – PR Volunteer, Ubud, Bali

Hi, and welcome to our newly created blog.
Through this blog we hope to spread the word about the Sumatran orangutans, the work we do in the Sumatran rainforest and how you can help us save a species.

About me- My name is Ida and I am going to be working with the Sumatran Orangutan Society for the next few months. I will be based in their Bali office in Ubud, which I am really looking forward to. With me I have my partner William Lee-Wright, who is also dedicating his time in Bali

to working with SOS.

Luckily for me, I arrived in Indonesia around the same time as Helen Buckland, the UK Director, made her annual trip out here. Which meant that I had the opportunity to go to Sumatra and visit some of the projects in the field before heading towards Bali.

Arriving in Medan was quite a culture shock. I came across from Malaysia on a small ferry, and stepping out of the boat it was immediately clear that the skyscrapers and Gucci filled shopping centres of Malaysia were several sea miles behind me. The roads, lack of roads and the rally-driving turned out to be a bit much even for the most hardened traveller, but eventually we made it to the hotel. Our room incidentally turned out to have the best view of the Medan’s main mosque, and we were woken up before the crack of dawn the following morning.

In Medan, SOS shares their offices with the Orangutan Information Centre, OIC, which is a local NGO doing much of the fieldwork here. So on Monday, holding on for our dear lives, we ventured into a ‘becac’ (a moped with a small chair-box on the left hand side) and headed towards the ex-pat community in Medan. Finally, one year and half a world since I first made contact with SOS, I got to meet Helen. We had a great introductory session where we talked about how I can best utilise my time in Bali to ensure I can provide maximum support to SOS throughout my stay. I also had the chance to meet the team working in Medan, including Dave the whistling Scientific Director, Panut the knowledgeable OIC Director and Aiba the energetic AUSAid Volunteer. I left the office with hands full of reading material and a brain full of new ideas to process.

My main projects will be PR related and I will introduce you to some of them as the weeks go by. Though, next week I will first have to tell you about our trip to Bukit Lawang, and my first encounter with some of the beautiful orangutans that live in the national forest.
Till then, take care...
Ida



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