Mangroves Making a Comeback in South Sulawesi

Tanakeke is a small island in South Sulawesi where villagers who cruise around in boats rather than cars or motorbikes are rehabilitating their mangroves. There is no soil across most of Tanakeke, so the houses are built and boats are tethered to conglomerations of dead coral glued together with cement. It's not easy place to eke out a living.

Mangroves here were destroyed in the '80s and '90s to make room for shrimp farms, most of which boosted incomes for a few years then failed due to virus infestation. The areas where land meets sea are now being rehabilitated with mangroves. The mangroves provide various benefits including storm buffer, seafood nursery and timber source.

Hundreds of villagers are involved in mangrove rehabilitation. Over 400 hectares of mangroves, a third of what was once destroyed, have been rehabilitated over the past five years by teams of villagers with support from Mangrove Action Project (MAP)-Indonesia. 

Meanwhile, seaweed cultivation is providing more sustainable livelihoods in Tanakeke. Seaweed requires less labor as well as less capital. It also grows spontaneously in this seascape environment. 

People in Tanakeke report that sea levels are rising. During the rainy season, their homes, schools and mosques flood with high tide. It's unclear how they'll face the future if the ocean continues to encroach upon their villages. One solution most here seem to agree on is that a step backward, to a time when mangroves were valued rather than destroyed, may be two steps forward in the end.

Support Gentle Birth Options for Indonesian Families

Christmas is coming! I know…. It’s only October…. But it isn’t too early to start thinking about gifts you can give your loved ones. Here’s a great way to also give a gift to an Indonesian family you’ve never even met…

Yayasan Bumi Sehat is a non-profit organization based in Ubud, Bali, that serves Indonesian families for free. Most of their services are directed to pre- and post-natal care for mothers and babies and helping families birth their babies as gently and naturally as possible. YBS offers holistic, natural, culturally appropriate and respectful family care—for FREE!

How does YBS do this? Donations, of course. Midwife and YBS founder Ibu Robin Lim is tireless crusader for mother and babies. In 2011, Ibu Robin was recognized by CNN as their Hero of the Year for her work through YBS.

Everyone loves mothers and babies, right?

Now you can shop for yourself or your loved ones on Amazon and donate 0.5% of your total purchase price to the charity of your choice, and you can choose Yayasan Bumi Sehat.

You can order Becoming Home: A Memoir of Birth in Bali and learn more about my experience as an expat living in Bali and giving birth at Bumi Sehat. It was a really positive experience for my family, and I hope you will find the story inspiring.

Or (if you already have a copy of Becoming Home, of course) you can order anything else on Amazon and donate to Yayasan Bumi Sehat through the Amazon Smile program. It does not raise the price of your order; it just funnels a few dollars to a very worthwhile cause.

Every baby matters. Every mother matters. Every dollar makes a difference.

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon Visits Green School Bali

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon visited Green School Bali to speak with students and sign an agreement to promote environmentally aware education throughout Indonesia.

The UN Office for REDD+ Coordination in Indonesia (UN ORCID), the Republic of Indonesia and Green School Bali signed a Memorandum of Understanding to create Green Schools for Sustainable Development. The aim is to educate one million Green Youth Ambassadors across Indonesia by 2017.

Indonesia is one of the world’s largest carbon emitters, in large measure due to deforestation. REDD stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation.

Green School Bali is build almost entirely out of bamboo, a fast-growing grass that sequesters carbon as it grows, can be harvested frequently once mature, and provides very strong (and bio-degradable) building material. In 2012, the Washington, DC-based Center for Green Schools awarded Green School Bali its Greenest School on Earth Award.

“This Green School is an outstanding proof of concept,” H.E. Mr. Heru Prasetyo, Head of the Indonesian National REDD+ Agency (BP REDD+) said, as quoted in a UN ORCID press release. “The next step is to achieve proof of scale. By 2017, we aim to have one million ‘green youth ambassadors’ in Indonesia”. Supporting Green Schools and strengthening environmentally sensitive school curricula, is one of the ten imperative actions of the National REDD+ Agency in 2014.

Read the UN ORCID press release for more official info.

Photo by Carol Da Riva

A Lesson from Sumatra, to Bali and Beyond

My husband and I chose to give birth at a small clinic in our neighborhood in Ubud, Bali, rather than returning home to the USA, where we were both born. Maternal and post-natal mortality rates are much higher in Indonesia than in the USA, but our pregnancy was textbook normal with no complications. We felt well-supported by the loving and attentive midwives at Yayasan Bumi Sehat.

After our daughter’s birth, we kept the placenta attached for about 24 hours, cradled in a small basket filled with flowers next to our newborn. There is credible research suggesting that leaving the placenta attached to a newborn baby for minutes or even seconds, rather than the standard practice of clamping and cutting it immediately after birth, can significantly reduce the baby’s risk of anemia and benefit brain development.

Where I come from, newborns’ umbilical cords are routinely clamped and cut within a few seconds after birth. Leaving them attached for even 30 seconds after an uncomplicated birth is better, as the cord continues to pulse with blood. About a third of the newborn’s blood remains in the placenta and umbilical cord immediately after birth. Waiting two to five minutes, until the cord stops visibly pulsing with blood, is even better for the baby.

Rather than implementing any standard practice without consultation, our midwife Ibu Robin asked us how we wanted to handle it. We said we didn’t want to keep her attached for a full lotus birth, which means waiting until the whole umbilicus and placenta dry and fall off on their own. We felt a little awkward holding our incredibly tiny and vulnerable little daughter. We anticipated feeling even more awkward if we tried to leave her attached to a flower-filled basket by nature’s strongest string for days, worrying that we might accidently tug away the short umbilicus and cause her belly to bleed. After 24 hours, her cord was certainly finished pulsing with blood.

Ibu Robin suggested we try a ceremony in which we would burn through the cord, rather than cutting it. She had originated this practice in Aceh, where her team had opened up a clinic to serve Sumatran families after the devastating tsunami of December 2004 that left them without so many and so much. She insisted that the burning was not only maximally hygienic—its original reason for being, with a shortage of hygienic equipment in the aftermath of the tsunami—but also had the benefit of driving any remaining chi or life force energy from the placenta into the baby. We liked this idea, so this is how we separated our new daughter from her placenta, ‘the forgotten chakra’ as Ibu Robin calls it.

My daughter and I curled on the bed, with my husband huddled beside us, and we placed a small piece of cardboard with a slice removed to accommodate the placenta between our baby and the fire. Ibu Robin and midwife Tracy sang the Gayatri mantra again as the candle’s flame seared through this lifeline to which she had always been attached. Our baby’s attention flared with the flame, and her eyes remained on its white-yellow light as we all bore witness to this early rite. We would take the placenta home along with her, in its own basket.

Tracy volunteered to help us dry and encapsulate part of it for me to take in case I had any post-partum depression. Pak Pastika from Bumi Sehat also helped us get a small mango tree and large pot, so that we could plant the rest of the placenta under the tree. Perhaps as it grows, we thought, we can transfer the tree to the earth, and it will still be here in Ubud, if some day our daughter returns to visit her birth place.

Order your copy of Becoming Home: A Memoir of Birth in Bali at CreateSpace or Amazon.

Nemo Defends Territory with a Little Help from his Friends

Rarely do fish and fishermen find themselves on the same team, resisting an adversary threatening the very lives of both. Word from North Sulawesi's Bangka island is that a rare convergence of interests pits fish, fishermen, tarsiers, dive tourists and nature lovers against the mining company PT Mikgro Metal Perdana (PT MMP).

"Bangka Island’s 2,700 residents make their living fishing, tending coconut and cashew plantations, and catering to a growing tourism trade based on the coral reef," according to a report from Inside Indonesia. "Residents are virtually united in their rejection of the mine, concerned it will threaten coral reefs and diminish fishing yields."

Legal battles have ensued to determine the rights of the mining company and those of local residents. It's hard to see how everyone could come out a winner. 

"Should the protest groups lose their struggle, the implications for the surrounding diving tourist economy and local food security are likely to be significant," writes Tessa Toumbourou, an environmental governance researcher based in Jakarta.

"As with other locations allocated for mining in Indonesia, the full social, cultural, economic and economic costs must be factored into decision-making over land use. These social and environmental costs must not be thrust upon local communities, who are the least able to shoulder additional burdens."

Wild honey sustains health, sweet tooth and forests

Not all sweets are created equally. The latest and greatest news about wild honey is that this sinfully sweet elixir is good for you! Alas, not all products that purport to be wild honey are, in fact, the genuine article. Many of them are actually blends of other sugars, without the health benefits of real wild honey.

‘Honey Laundering’, as it is known to members of the Indonesia Forest Honey Network (a.k.a. Jaringan Madu Hutan Indonesia or JMHI), is distastefully common.  Even honey that purports to be the genuine article in Indonesia is often a blend or a fake.

Sourcing honey from the forest helps preserve both the flavor and health benefits of pure, wild honey. It also helps preserve the forests where honey bees thrive. Local honey harvesters with an economic incentive to preserve a pristine environment for wild honey bees are less likely to succumb to the pressures of illegal logging, land conversion and burning that have steadily transformed huge swathes of tropical forest throughout Indonesia. JMHI works with over 1,000 small-scale, local harvesters of wild honey.

JMHI honey is….

·         Naturally produced
·         Not blended with larvae (bee brood)
·         Not mixed with water
·         Not mixed with sugar (alternative woof)
·         Not heated

Slow Food Bali and JMHI recently hosted an event offering a taste of real, wild honey—six tastes, actually! We had the pleasure of sampling wild honey from Flores, Java, Kalimantan, Sulawesi, Sumatra and Sumbawa. Each tasted remarkably distinct, reflecting the local floral nectar from their respective home environments. Forest bees hunt for nectars within a radius of only about three kilometers from their comb, according to JMHI.

Wild honey from Java had the lightest yellow hue and strikingly sweet taste. Sumbawa’s delicious honey is a classic favorite in Indonesia. Sulawesi’s wild honey had a rather distinctive, though (ahem) less popular flavor.  Tasters voted to choose their favorite honey of the evening, and a luscious, floral favorite emerged: Flores!

Bye Bye Plastic Bags on Bali

You're strolling along the beach in paradise, with the cool waters of the Indian Ocean licking your toes when suddenly you feel something fishy glomming on to your foot. A jellyfish? No, it's garbage. Yuck.

Plastic waste is inundating Bali's famous beaches, collecting in layers among the emerald rice paddies, and chocking river ravines across the island. Two middle school students Melati, age 13, and her sister Isabel, age 11, have started a campaign to put stop to this.

Read more about their campaign.


Bye Bye Plastic Bags is their campaign to raise awareness about the glut of plastic and collect 1 million signatures to put a stop to it. Everyone can use and re-use cloth bags, the girls suggest, which should even be provided to local households and at the airport, where millions of visitors enter the island each year.

Melati and Isabel have initiated a petition to encourage Bali Governor Made Mangku Pastika to implement a law banning the use of plastic bags in Bali.

Read and sign the petition.

Melati and Isabel aim to collect 1 million signatures in 2014, and the clock is ticking. They are giving presentations in both English and Bahasa Indonesia about their project in local schools around Bali.

Let's hope the signatures pile up as fast as the plastic bags!