A successful vision
Today, November 1st, 2017, I received the village head of Kedang Ipil in the “Rimba Room”, our camp restaurant, the very place where I started my first experience in the jungle of Borneo almost 40 years ago. Kedang Ipil is a village with thousands of sugar palms just north of the boundary of our almost half a million acres reforestation project in East Kalimantan. Before we set up the cooperation with the surrounding villages there were lots of issues with wood theft, encroachment and poaching.
Now by helping these people tap sugar palms their income and health improve, we can take visitors to their cultural festivals helping preserve their traditions and avoid conflicts while restoring the environment. The village head is only 35 years old and he brought representatives of two neighboring villages that now also want to join with our project. Preserving nature through the empowerment of local people, that is the vision and mission of Masarang that we now are spreading to other projects and locations in Indonesia!
Willie Smits, 1 November