Indonesia – Environmental awareness improves in the Wakatobi

Written by and photos courtesy of Pippa Mansell

Feature photo courtesy of Adam Powell

For those of you who have been to Indonesia before you may be aware that there is the chance that a meeting, dinner, visit or presentation can just be sprung upon you out of the blue without much more than about 10 minutes warning! This is the situation that we found ourselves in on Hoga when 200 school children from Kaledupa descended on Hoga for an organised school trip to clean the beaches and bring in wooden waste baskets that they placed all over the island.

An excellent initiative and this is the first time that we have seen this happen here on Hoga so things are definitely working albeit slowly! The local manager here on the island explained what they were doing and Dave Smith asked if we could talk to the teachers, this suggestion turned into delivering a presentation to all 200 students 20 minutes later! Dave put together a presentation immediately with lots of great pictures and simple titles on each page to ensure that the students got the most from the presentation; this included pictures of the reefs around the world, the location of the coral triangle and location of Sulawesi within the triangle, the effects of crown of thorns along with the destructive effects of both dynamite and cyanide fishing. This was translated into Indonesian in such a way that the group could understand the impacts locally.

The presentation was very well received and there were some excellent questions asked by the group at the end, following on from which Dave also had a meeting with some school students from Java who were visiting the area.

In summary, it was a delight to see the Kaledupan students here and participating in the beach clean especially given the general lack of environmental activities here in Indonesia. One of those fortuitous moments that will inspire and benefit many.