How the Orangutan Foundation UK is doing voluntourism the right way
5x5 It’s easy to get volunteer tourism wrong (having an ugly abbreviation like voluntourism doesn’t help) but there are good projects making a difference, as I learned with the Orangutan Foundation UK.
I spent three weeks in the rainforest of southern central Kalimantan (that’s the Indonesian name for Borneo) as a volunteer with OFUK in August 2017. It wasn’t a journalistic assignment: I genuinely wanted to help our hairy orange cousins and see conservation in action; and I absolutely wanted to see orangutans and other jungle wildlife in their home.
Volunteer tourism has boomed in the past 20 years and is now a huge industry, so like any industry it’s attracted unscrupulous operators like the orphanages highlighted by JK Rowling. It’s also been ridiculed for becoming part of the ‘gap yah’ rites for overprivileged Western youth to prove how much they care about poor people, and perpetuating the myth that people in developing countries need saving by people from the first world.
There’s also no doubt that some projects also allow charities take paid labour away from local people who need it and get volunteers to do it for nothing. That’s not necessarily wrong: it’s a trade-off between achieving your immediate goals and investing in a broader social benefit. Development or disaster relief projects are also very different from conservation programmes.
So how did the OFUK project work, and why do I think they’re doing it right?
1 It’s a small, focussed project. Volunteer projects can be a production line where groups workers are brought in for a few weeks and then replaced by another, with another project always ready to take the next intake. The Orangutan Foundation does only a few projects every year (currently just one, but they used to do more).
They take a small group and give them a specific task to achieve in a limited time, although it’s not so short that the time you spend on the ground is outweighed by the travel time. Since you have gone halfway around the world, the Indonesian archipelago is also a great tourist location if you want to relax in Bali or see more wildlife on Flores and Lombok.
2 It’s locally lead. Although OFUK is based in Britain, the projects are developed and managed by the Indonesian staff. The UK leadership is only involved in the high-level approval of the project, recruiting the volunteers, and major financial decisions. The Indonesian staff work with the Indonesian state conservation authorities, the Orangutan Foundation International, a sibling organisation, and other local conservation NGOs to develop ideas for future projects where volunteers can have a positive impact.
On an everyday level, we were organised by either Arie or Matjurie, an Indonesian carpenter and the defacto foreman. We took our orders and got on with painting, hammering, sawing, drilling, chiselling and tidying the site. Matjurie and the other Indonesians frequently showed us how to do what they wanted, because most of us had never mitred a joist, and on very rare occasions we politely discussed alternative methods.
After hours, they’ll chat about their lives as much as our embarrassingly limited Indonesian and their much better English allows. Arie does a lot of translating and is delighted to discuss the challenge of conservation in a society which depends on palm oil, logging and mining for its income.
3 It unlocks local employment. Small charities have to be very smart about how they use their income. It’s often hard to fund capital projects like building and renovation without taking money from the charity’s everyday work.
Our project manager, Fembry Arianto, explained that a dozen volunteers paying £700 each brings an injection of capital that allows them to employ skilled local labour alongside us, as well as buying the materials for the project. Without us, the research centre we worked on would not have got the refurbishment it needed to continue monitoring the health of the rainforest and hosting Indonesian students to spread awareness of the urgent need to preserve the orangutans’ habitat.
4 It’s not all kids. At 44, I was worried about being a middle-aged man surrounded by gap-year kids. In the end, our team of 12 ranged from 17 to 60 years old, with an average age somewhere in the low 30s. That variety alone enriched my experience. Two of the group had been before — for our volunteer coordinator, Jo, it was her fourth OFUK project. Her previous groups, she told me, have varied from a much lower average to something approaching a Saga holiday.
OFUK used to operate up to three projects a year, lasting for up to seven weeks. Our project was just three weeks because that’s now the sweet spot for people who want to use their work holidays instead of taking a sabbatical. The booming voluntourist industry has made it harder to attract volunteers, although this remains one of the more financially accessible projects.
5 It’s not a safari. In a world where chimps are now dying of the common cold, tourists are often incredibly stupid about the risks of interacting with wildlife, and it’s easy to think that you might spend three weeks hugging baby orangutans with the occasional spot of jungle DIY. The rules for OFUK volunteers are strictly no physical contact with the wildlife, on pain of an early trip home.
That doesn’t mean that we didn’t see orangutans, both when they visited us and when we visited sites for feeding rehabilitated orangutans. That’s not to mention the various monkeys, birds, false gharials, crocodiles, snakes, frogs, spiders numerous bugs, mouse deer and tarsiers which crossed our paths.
And if a picture tells a thousand words, then being there goes beyond words. No TV show can prepare you for the almost claustrophobic scale of the rainforest soaring around your tiny encampment, the richness of the atmosphere, or the intense cacophony of the jungle at night. And yet, in a place where no cars go that seems like it’s beyond modern life, it was sobering to think that we were just a few kilometres from the nearest of the vast palm oil plantations which have all but obliterated the rainforest from the world’s third-largest island.
It’s only possible to grasp their scale by visiting a riverside village bordering the oil palm groves, which march off to the horizon in a monotonous rows at odds with the riotous growth of the rainforest they continue to devour.
Voluntourism isn’t the only way to see Kalimantan or the orangutans: our pier was occupied every night by tourist boats taking visitors upstream to Camp Leakey, home to pioneering primatologist Birutė Galdikas, one of several places you can see rehabilitated rescued orangutans come down from the trees for a banana feast very day. They’re often curious about the visitors, although not so much that they stick around once fed.
Nor is it a luxury experience: working in 30C heat and 100% humidity takes a week to get used to; you’re cut off from all communications and the hygiene facilities are basic. By the end of that first week, three of our 12 had decided to go home early, and Jo said this was the most comfortable project she’d worked on.
So if you’re looking for a place where volunteers are being used to support a conservation charity’s broader goals, start here.
