The Wild Woman of Borneo

AK lives in a bustling household on stilts in remote Kalimantan, with no phone service, electricity, or running water. If things get dicey on the ground—as in the old days of tigers & tribal warfare--you can always pull up the ladder.

This is the southern part of the island of Borneo, a place I knew growing up because my mother would call us—a compliment--
“the wild women of Borneo”.

AK studies agriculture & has socked herself indefinitely deep into the Indonesian bush to study the effects of oil palm plantations on the land & local economy. A blue-eyed blond, she’s understated & reserved, but with a lot to say. Her husband, N, has a grant from NSF to look at forestry in the same places. She moves between two towns, one of 600 people & one of 2000, both of them hours from the cities from which motorcycles bring in vegetables & butter. Recently she’s been laboring in the rice fields with local women. Perhaps to better understand the culture & economy from the seedlings on up. It's very hot, though, & she can't keep up with the locals.

“There’s nothing like honey water after a day cutting rice,” she says with evident relish. This is boiled river water flavored with wild honey from the forest trees, the best honey she’s ever had in her life. Her blonde’s tan is newly dark & the women she works with in the fields joke that her husband won’t want her now that she’s stopped being white.

Here are some details of her story that struck me:

• The river is everything: you drink & cook from it; wash in it; play in it; dispose of trash in it; defecate in it; fish from it. She’s been in country over a year & claims to have never gotten sick.

• Every part of life is public, but modesty is essential. People know to look away, but she had to learn to change clothes & bathe in a sarong. "The sarong shimmy." The women laughed at her clumsy first attempts: ‘can’t even bathe yourself!’

• Those in the small village still hunt for wild pigs in the forest. Some use guns, but many still use poisoned blow darts!

• This is deep jungle, terrain historically beloved of missionaries. Almost all the villagers are Christian.

• Unlike EJM’s town in Sulawesi, most women AK knows in the Kalimantan villages are on birth control (& very interested in discussing it). They get a shot from clinics in the city every three months.

• Inside the houses on stilts, there’s no plumbing. When women need to pee, they squat over a crack in the kitchen floorboards.

• High in the karst cliffs, men gather swallow’s nests, the special spit-made nests that the Chinese prize for swallow’s nest soup. Merchants pay millions of rupiah for a single teaspoon of genuine swallows nest. Men scale frighteningly high scaffolds of bamboo, climbing without gear to harvest them. The nests are so valuable that pirates will kill crews for them, forcing village men to ‘hire’ companies for armed protection & the use of climbing gear. They end up giving a huge cut to these companies, & then eventually just working for them.

• The older generations grew up with the forest as a source of food, medicine, building materials, fuel, solitude, spirituality & sense of self. The younger generations want civilization.

• It is 200 times more profitable to sell timber illegally than legally.

• It was a woman with no electricity who informed AK of the Virginia school shootings one day. She’d heard it on a battery-powered radio, broadcast all the way out to the Kalimantan bush, & ran over to tell the American. One Indonesian was among the dead.

• The head man of 2K person village made a deal with the oil palm company 20 years ago, which is the amount of time it takes for oil palms to reach maturity. The 600 person village’s head man, still in his ancestral forest, is thinking about making a deal. Thus the comparison study. Palm oil is used primarily for cooking, but is an ingredient in all sort of things. Now it’s starting to be billed as a bio-fuel. It is not a very efficient fuel.

Once you plant oil palms, you can’t plant any crop there again. The Jakarta Post writers hate oil palms. Articles excoriate the species & plantations every week for their ruinous effects on the ecology. The companies clear cut the forests (Indonesia is about to enter the Guiness Book of World Records for the fasted rate of deforestation), promising a dedicated percentage of the land for the village’s own trees. Sometimes they never plant that part; AK has seen the promised fields still barren a decade later. Sometimes the numbers don’t add up; she has read the contracts & done the math.

When you speak to the headmen of the smaller village, I ask her, the one considering the company’s offer, do you tell them what you see happening in the large village?

Never, she says. If they want to know, they can go see it themselves. If the palm oil companies even suspected her of influencing a village against them, AK would be labeled a provocateur. The least that happens to that sort of provocateur is deportation, she says, never to be allowed in the country again.

The villagers end up working in the plantation at base wages. But they have motorcycles, digital watches, & plastic. From a distance, environmentalists & human rights activists find the deal & the product patently appalling. “But who are we to tell them no?” says AK. “To say, ‘I’m sorry, the globe needs your biodiversity & primitivist culture more than you need a cash economy, so you need to stay hunter-gatherers.’?”

What could stop it?

Nothing, she says with a degree of emotionally equanimity I envy. They’ll take the deal eventually. The forest will be leveled & their culture will change forever. Is this a tragedy? She shrugs, “They will lose their honey trees. But they will have civilization.”



Here’s this small person in the middle of a jungle with lots of knowledge (& 5 languages) at her disposal, no power & no particular plan. She knows the entire forest & village she lives in will be gone one day. A strange sort of home, that. This is not a person with an agenda. She knows what she knows, but she doesn’t know how to make meaningful data out of it yet. She is a young, independent scholar right now, her expertise representing no one. She conspicuously lacks methodology. Her opinions are personal & only dangerous.

So she labors in the rice field, perhaps waiting for inspiration. She reads contracts, interviews headmen & company men & the women who advise them in private. She measures the soil & crops, & looks at ‘civilization’, which she seems happy to take or leave. She records her findings on a laptop. Or when the generator is down: a notepad. She's looking for what she needs to know. And--maybe separately--what needs to be known by others.

Later that week, I saw on TV what I thought at first was a nature program: sweeping aerial views of dense, super-green forests & free, charismatic mega-fauna with gleaming eyes. “Malaysian Palm Oil,” soothed the announcer. “Good for Nature, Good for Life.”

Women have asked her to bring them recipes from Jakarta. They want cakes that they can bake in wood stoves & without milk. They made pineapple upside-down cake one time in tin cans, just like we used to do in the Girl Scouts over the coals. So she’s scanning the internet in the evenings at our hotel, looking for recipes.