Wehea Community

Driving to the Wehea Dayak community was a seven or 8 hour ordeal- bouncing around in a mitsubishi 4x4 truck, all of our gear tarped up in the back. Out the windows we watched all kinds of deforestation pass by; palm oil plantations, mining, forestry, etc etc. We stopped for lunch and stepped out of our air-conditioned cab and ate, sweating heavily as usual, in a nice hut overlooking treeless hillsides covered in rice-fields (not paddies, rice grown like wheat out of the ground) with palm oil seedlings ready to take the place of the rice.

When we arrived several hours later in the Wehea Dayak community, I was surprised because there was no rainforest that we had passed on the way in- while this community is so incredible partly because of it’s commitment to protect the rainforest. We were greeted warmly with a welcome ceremony, a chicken (chick actually) was sacrificed, and we had to have it’s blood applied to our foreheads, before we could participate in the dancing and singing that followed.

We were split into groups after this for our homestays, and moved our bags into their houses. My homestay family was so great, Hedrus the father, his wife, 5 children including infant Maya who was adorable.
I shared this homestay with Shandel, Micheala, Gillian, and Elise- we all felt blessed to have been selected to stay with such a wonderful family. Hedrus spoke some English, and we were able to communicate with him fairly well- he was very good to us, making sweet tea for us every chance he had.

We woke early to attend a ceremony that was being held for a baby in the village, she was days old, and they were celebrating her birth. We helped (mostly got in the way I’m sure) to put some of the bamboo segments filled with sticky-rice, coconut shavings and milk wrapped in a banana leaf over the coals of a cooking fire, and went across the river on small dugout canoes with buckets of slop to feed and entice the pigs there so that we could capture one for the sacrifice required in the ceremony. There was quite a lot of squealing and struggling- but a pig was bound up and carried back to the hut on the other side of the river by the Moss Brothers Tim and Matt.

By the time the ceremony was over and we had watched the pig being sacrificed, the singing, chanting, blood smearing and cooking in earnest, it was 9AM an time for us to pile in the back of a pickup truck with 10 other people to go to the community gardens. Hedrus was concerned for our white skin and brought us beautiful hats to protect us from the sun, and we went to his part of the farm with our whole group to see what the community is doing in the areas that have been already deforested. There is a community initiative to make the leftover grasslands from the deforestation useful by converting them first to ‘gardens’ with banana trees, peanuts, corn etc with rubber-trees which will grow up much more slowly, and eventually take the place of these other crops. The rubber trees provide the community with a valuable source of income, and are much ‘better for the environment’ than dry grass fields, even though they too end up being a monoculture.


While we were here my group of 4 (Jesse, Nadine and Spencer) decided that as an early birthday present they would buy me 23 rubber-tree seedlings that we all planted in some of Hedrus’ property (still grassland) next to his existing garden. It was a very, very cool birthday present, and one that I was certainly not expecting at all- I was very touched by this beautiful gesture both for me but also for the community- very thoughtful.



It was late morning by the time all of this was done, and we jumped back in the truck which drove to the rice-fields, where we had lunch. This was a very incredible experience because we were able to participate in the whole process of preparing an amazing feast- the same rice-coconut-cooked-wrapped-in-banana-leaves-inside-bamboo, along with vegetables cooked in wider segments of bamboo.

It was delicious of course, and everyone ate way too much because it was so tasty.

I spent the rest of the day mostly sitting on the large front porch with Micheala and Hedrus’ children trading friendship bracelets that we made and –playing some guitar. The children thought it was very funny when I read a couple of parts from a story-book in Indonesian to them- they corrected me on the pronunciation of almost every word. Later that night we were sooo lucky to have some of the village elders sing us a couple of their traditional songs,
it was wonderful to be a part of this cultural exchange- even though we felt we were far more on the receiving end. Later on Hedrus showed us his traditional dance-garb, and asked us to try it on for some pictures.



The following morning we took a few pictures of our host family and then some group shots to hopefully have printed in Balikpapan and send back to the village for them to put on their wall. Hedrus was quite excited to have these pictures made, because the few pictures he has of his family together are from quite a while ago when there are less children, and he so wanted to have something more recent to hang on his wall. I am looking forward to sending the pictures as a thank you for their wonderful hospitality.