The Jungle is Looking Back

The juice stings. The juice burns. The juice melts the gloves and gets on the skin and up the nose and it makes you feel like hell. Its Thailand-based manufacturers assert in small red type that the juice is safe when used in its diluted form but strongly recommend wearing thick rubber gloves when handling the concentrate. The juice has the insulting aroma of cheap third-world roach poison.

But the milky, bad-smelling juice of the Doktors Ombak kills mosquitoes, keeps them from buzzing in the ears of the villagers at night, piercing them with the Evil Sweat Spirit that lets the soul go wandering and makes the children shiver and die.

Unable to endure the searing equatorial sun any longer, I stagger into the stifling shade of the Taileleu village hall. Thick fluffy fumes of juice from the drying nets rise up to the hardwood rafters. I use my sodden t-shirt as a stopgap filter. Village workers – skinny Mentawai and Minangkabau men smoking sweet clove kretaks – periodically bring in dripping mosquito nets and hang them on plastic lines strung from side to side across the cavernous wooden hall. They see me hunched over and panting, expressing large beads of chili-flavored sweat from my forehead. They smile through cigarette-stained teeth and give me a big thumbs-up.

The juice is permethrin, a military-grade insecticide used for impregnating clothing and mosquito nets, thereby tripling their effectiveness against the female anopheles mosquito that transmits the malaria parasite. The US Marines use it for jungle warfare, which is close to how Dr. Dave Jenkins – part-time surfer and full-time medical director for Surf Aid International – describes his hut-to-hut guerilla ops against tropical disease here.

“It’s simple mathematics,” asserts Jenkins, a lumbering 43-year-old New Zealander who speaks in a nasal Kiwi drawl that turns “nets” into “nits”. “If I can get 90% of the people sleeping under nets, we halve the malaria transmission rate of this village within months. Less infected people means less infected mosquitoes. It’s the cheapest, most effective way to break the malaria cycle. For a seven-dollar net a kid gets a good night’s sleep and doesn’t have to die. Simple.”

Jenkins has seen a lot of dead children out here. He’s held their small, fever-racked bodies, felt their pint-sized death tremors as their brains seized up under a fatal stroke brought on by cerebral blood clots. He’s seen kids dying of common childhood diseases – measles, diphtheria, chicken pox – that could have been prevented with a course of commonplace vaccines costing less than a surf leash.

Outside in the mucky 90-degree heat, Jenkins cajoles and coaxes his small squad of doctors, nurses and village volunteers to not slacken the pace. Half of the 300 new nylon nets have been dipped since 10am, and if they don’t break for lunch they can finish by this afternoon, have a nap and sign off with a sunset surf session at ER’s.

The Surf Aid platoon sweats on. Ollie dips, Amanda wrings, Ben shuttles the nets inside. Liz fits the village workers with latex gloves and translates Bahasa to English for Dave with a French accent.

The local people seem to enjoy Dave’s latest attraction. Last month he invited a pair of tattooed Mentawai shamans, clad in traditional kerei beads and loincloths, to come down from their river village to bless a new microscope. His school play last March – a live-action malarial infomercial where small children dressed in black swarm in as mosquitoes and bite an unprotected sleeping man – was a huge hit among the entertainment-starved villagers.

When Jenkins first arrived in Taileleu two years ago most of the villagers assumed he was another Christian missionary – a label Jenkins resents.

By now, however, they’re convinced Dave is either a government doctor or just a slightly crazed tourist who likes to surf and help the children. They don’t know much else about Dave since Dave’s command of Indonesian is limited to the “Me-David-where-sick?” level. These days he is simply known as Doktor Ombak, the wave doctor.
Today Dave is fighting a cold. He bellows like a wounded mud buffalo, blowing an angered red nose into a rolled up wad of napkins. Jenkin’s normally florid face is pale and clammy; cheeks hollowed out by weeks of eating a monotonous diet of small fried fish, boiled jungle ferns and rice.

Jenkins is also working with the village nurse Erfina to take blood samples and test for malaria and other infectious diseases. Today Erfina is looking a bit under-the-gun as Liz translates and Dave scrutinizes her malaria logs. She’s been charged with taking blood samples and examining them for the malaria parasite. Although Erfina is diligent, her note keeping is not up to Dave’s exacting first-world standards.

These mundane questionnaires, however, are the key to Surf Aid International’s future financial survival. The arcane disease data Surf Aid is collecting on this fringe of the developing world – where jet-setting surfers might possibly be the Patient Zeros of infectious tropical disease – is invaluable to a deep-pocket’s health watchdog like the World Health Organization or CARE.

As the world heats up and sea levels rise, tropical disease is bouncing back in regions once eradicated of such exotic plagues as malaria and dengue fever. Low-lying populated coastal regions such as Florida and Australia’s Queensland coast are especially susceptible. As recently as last year, a rare but disturbing outbreak of malaria was reported near London’s Heathrow airport. The Mentawais, which are sinking at an alarming rate of 2-3cm a year, provide a textbook lab control for studying the effects of global warming and disease.

A reliable malaria vaccine – the Holy Grail of epidemiology akin to finding the cure for AIDS – has eluded researchers since the Middle Ages. Dave and the others just may hold the missing pieces to the puzzle. By accident or design, Jenkin’s barefoot crew of surfing do-gooders has found themselves unexpectedly on the cutting edge of global disease research.

Finally the last of the nets have been dipped and hung. Dave gathers up his medical kit and motions for his crew to head for the motor canoes. It’s a half hour crossing via Evinrude to the Surf Aid camp on Nyang Nyang, a small crescent-shaped island just off Siberut’s southern end.

Our hand-hewn longboat, named “Muttara Bunda”, is driven by a gregarious chainsmoking young Minangkabau man named Feri. It makes good time across the ten-mile channel. A powerful rhythmic groundswell lifts us auspiciously. The Indonesian sunset is a lurid, psychedelic swirl of carmine and rose. We arrive at the camp with just enough light to wash off the sweat and insecticide.

Jenkins, who’d been dozing under an umbrella, revives as the canoe ground itself on the white coral sand beach
“My God!” he proclaims to the hushed drooping palms. “Isn’t this just too freaking surreal?”

The camp children are bright, affectionate, filthy, and most likely diseased. Little Mual, 4, named for Emmanuel, is hot and squirming in my arms. He smiles up at me and snuggles close to play with my camera. I am alternatingly charmed and repulsed – as if handling a cute but rabid rabbit. He is a child, he craves knowledge and love. I am an adult, fearful of lice and malaria. I’m revolted by my uncharitable thoughts. But they’re there.

Later, the children sing to me. Their voices clear, unaffected and full of strange, doomed hope, nearly bring me to tears. These children have no sense of how they appear outside of their jungle home. They are not afraid to laugh or cry or sing loud and lustily without a parent moderating or feeding them camera cues. They are completely without self-perception. Strum of guitar, wail of harmonica, the distant putter of a generator. A single yellow light illuminates the main hut, drawing an entomologist’s motherlode of tropical flying insects, including mosquitoes. For the last week the Surf Aid crew has been pitched up in a half-built surf camp sited a stone’s throw from E-Bay, a treacherously shallow but photogenic left featured in a dozen surf videos to date.

The camp, which was being built by Padang boat-charter baron Rick Cameron as a hedge against the future, was abruptly stalled by the September 11th attacks in 2001. In lieu of paying customers, Cameron, who has supported Surf Aid since their inception, allows Jenkins and the others to use the camp as an R&R base. Dave sprawls on the verandah of the central hut blowing a mean blues riff on his harp. He used to front a popular frat-house band during his med school days in Dunedin, New Zealand. Dave’s ankles are covered with infected reef cuts and swollen insect bites. I asked if he’s ever had malaria. He said he wouldn’t know – he’s never been tested.

Three years ago Dave was living and working in Singapore, making $150,000 a year crunching actuarial numbers for a multinational health organisation. He played his sax, drank imported New Zealand chardonnays and entertained lavishly at his $5,000-a-month hillside home. He decided to take a surfing vacation to the Mentawais with his surf buddy Andy Lucas and brought his medical bag as an afterthought in case he or any of the other surfers got injured or ill.

One afternoon after a surf session at Lance’s Right, Jenkins and Lucas went ashore to the village of Katiet for diversion. As soon as word got out there was a doctor in town they were deluged with the walking wounded. Jenkins saw a constant parade of ulcerated sores and malnutrition. From dank little huts crawled the walking dead – wasted wretches left to die in torpid agony from malaria, diphtheria and typhoid fever. A woman dying from TB was carted up to Dave in a wheelbarrow. Suddenly he was Jesus among the lepers – disgusted, saddened, petrified.

“I knew right then that I had to do something. But I didn’t have a clue what that would be.”

A few months later Jenkins came back came to Indonesia and founded Surf Aid International. He and Lucas opened a storefront office in a rundown hotel in central Padang that would transform into a tourist brothel each night. He sold his house and poured his savings into his fledgling NGO. A year later, Andrew Griffiths, an Aukland-born investment banker, quit his high-paying London job to become Surf Aid’s admin man.

Dave draws no salary, nor does Andy or any of the other doctors. Only the office staff back in Padang receives a wage. His two teenage daughters from a previous marriage attend a public university on a poverty scholarship. “We get paid in waves,” he quips.

For six months last year Dave and Andy slept on the floor of a small house in Taileleu while they set up their immunization and education program. They lost weight and became listless, ground down by the sheer bottomless need of the people here.

“It’s not all beer and skittles out here, mate,” says Jenkins, who divides his time equally between fieldwork in the villages and office duties back in Padang. “This is a harsh environment for white people. There’s no privacy and everything you do is under scrutiny. The heat is draining; the lethargy relentless. There’s not a lot of stroking here; no “thank you doctor”. They are, in many respects, a very fatalistic people. Good health is not high on their list of priorities.”

A good portion of the village doesn’t believe Surf Aid will last. Over the last 30 years since Taileleu was established they’ve seen a host of missionaries and foreign aid workers come, then succumb, to the heat, disease, burnout and sheer despair. Dave relates how the UNESCO guys, both highly committed aid professionals, ended up in intensive care last year from stress and disease. What makes the difference for him and the others, he says, is getting stoked together on a regular basis.

“If we didn’t surf, doing this work would dry us up like that (snaps his fingers). Surfing re-energizes us. Not just the surfing but the chance to appreciate the beauty of the area – the sunsets and big sky. It’s so easy to miss that when your nose is up against the wall all the time. If you don’t take time for yourself in this business, you’re doomed.”

The Surf Aid crew is forced to work within the consensual hallucination that is post-Suharto Indonesia – a fragile cobbled-together democracy riddled with corruption, tribal hierarchies and a near-fatal language gap. They are running across diseases and weird skin-burrowing parasites only found in obscure medical texts written by 19th-century missionary doctors. Without telephone or short-wave radio they live as self-exiled Robinson Crusoes. Out here, nothing ever dries out, everything rots and communications revert to smudged pen and paper messages ferried hand-to-hand via dugout canoes. They are exposing themselves to life-threatening diseases on a daily basis. And they are surfing perfect empty waves and having the time of their lives.

Ben Gordon, 33, a Perth-born GP is newly arrived from Ireland with his fetching Chinese-Australian wife Amanda. Ben and Amanda deplaned in Padang seven weeks ago after quitting good-paying government jobs in Ireland. Neither of them spoke a word of Indonesian or Mentawai but they are tutoring themselves at night with books and tapes. Both are from comfortable middle-class upbringings so the culture shock is palpable. But so is the excitement of living overseas doing frontline work.

Ollie Jenkins (no relation to Dave), 22, is a fifth-year med student finishing his doctor’s training at Southhampton University in the UK. As Surf Aid’s medical grommet, he volunteers on summer holiday as part of his practical studies. Garrulous, laughing and characteristically Welsh, Ollie speaks in a rapid-fire Welsh brogue peppered with fashionable Cockney slang and surfisms. He studies for his upcoming exams listening to thumping hip-hop house beats through a pair of muff-sized earphones. In two weeks he will return to the UK to deliver his first baby.

Liz Henderson is a pretty 28-year-old French surfer nomad who has worked as a Mentawai boat cook for two seasons now. Originally trained as an import/export agent in Strasbourg, she chucked in her career six years ago to follow her dream of world travel. She started surfing in Australia and it quickly became her life’s passion and compass. Within two years she’d surf-trekked to Western Oz, South Africa, Morocco, Reunion, and Baja.

Liz eventually drifted in the global surf trades to the Mentawais. She established herself in Padang, learned Bahasa Indonesian, and ingratiated herself with the Padang academic community teaching French between boat trips at the local university.

By the end of her first season, however, she had become quite cynical about surfers and disillusioned with the whole commercialized surfing culture. It manifested itself in the empty Surf Aid donation boxes.

Between cooking gourmet meals for the ever-starving hordes of international surfers that came aboard her boats, Liz would gamely try to get the guys interested in the plight of the Mentawai villagers. After dinner she would put on the Surf Aid video and encourage the guys – many of them famous pros making six-figure salaries – to drop their pocket change into the collection boxes. Most just feigned interest, though a few seem genuinely concerned.

But after each trip when the surfers had left, Liz shook the poor box hopefully… and heard nothing. Not even a few thousand rupiah, less than a dollar US. Nothing. Just bags and bags of empty beer cans on the deck. It angered, then saddened her. Ultimately it forced her to radically alter her surfing belief system – and to question what had happened to the soul of surfing she’d revered for so long.

“I keep thinking that the next boat will be different, that someone on the boat will have a clue,” reflects Liz flatly.

“But they don’t. I used to have such a huge spark for surfing and surfers, but somewhere it went out. I think forever.”

At the end of good day of waves, the surfers on the great white boats, surfed out and full-bellied, lie under gently flapping tarpaulins sipping a cold Bintang. It’s then, often in bored moments of introspection, they might contemplate what lies behind the mute, unbroken wall of primeval jungle barricading the islands less than 100 feet away.

What they don’t realize is that the jungle is looking back.

Over 60,000 people live on the Mentawais, an archipelago of four main islands lining the southern half of Sumatra. Despite their close proximity to Sumatra, the Mentawais have existed in relative isolation. Although the Dutch colonialists used the islands for copra plantations, they contain some of the most primitive and pristine regions of Indonesia.

The Mentawai islanders are for the most part a melange of races made up mostly of indigenous Mentawai tribesmen and transplanted villagers from overcrowded islands like Sumatra and Java. A smattering of Chinese traders and European missionaries also live on the islands. Small pockets of stone-age tribes still exist in isolated pockets up river, living an ancient, animistic way of life that up to now has sidestepped the disastrous cultural and environmental impacts of colonialism.

However, it’s the end of the line for Mentawai’s native people and for much of the island itself. The Mentawais are under assault from multinational logging companies and palm-oil corporations who see the islands as a cheap source of rare hardwoods and unskilled labor. The Indonesian government continues its policy of cultural genocide against the Mentawai people by transmigration schemes and forbidding traditional Mentawai rituals such as tattooing and teeth filing. Both bans are based on Islamic tenets, not health issues.

Democracy has done little to improve their lot. Under post-Suharto autonomy, the Mentawais have been given two years to develop their own economy or face intervention from Jakarta. The pressure to exploit the last of the old-growth forests is irresistible. Although the western half of Siberut was declared a World Heritage biosphere in 1981, less than 60% of the 160 million hectares of Siberut rainforest remain. To build logging roads on the soggy, low-lying islands, the surrounding reefs are blown to rubble for road fill. Runoff and sewage chokes what’s left. Factory fishing boats from Taiwan and Japan hoovered up the fish years ago. An ancient forest culture that possesses plant cures for everything from snakebite to hookworms is being mowed down with the trees.

And while the island dies, surfers from around world use the ravaged reefs offshore as their playground and photo studio. The juxtaposition of the richest and poorest cultures of the world is akin to something out of a Josef Conrad novel. This is where the worried well meet the happily doomed.

A decade ago Indo pioneer Martin Daly began taking the first surf charters out the Mentawais. Boat trips allowed maximum access to the surf breaks while minimizing the exposure to malaria and other tropical diseases rife on the islands. The trips, although pricey by surfer standards, were an instant success. They represented the ultimate surfer fantasy of perfect, uncrowded and warm waves but without the infamous disease-plagued hell trips experienced by the early Indo surf explorers.

The Mentawai mystique sells well in the malls. Photos and film footage generated from various Mentawai boat trips are used in countless ads and editorial each year to promote the surfers sponsored by multimillion-dollar surfwear companies.

But the surf industry had been way behind the curve with support to the Mentawai people themselves. Few Mentawai people are employed on the boats and little, if any, of the charter money makes it way out to the islands. To date total contributions to Surf Aid from the surf industry – whose combined international income topped US$4 billion last year – has been less than $8000. The combined income from the donation boxes aboard the boats totaled less than $200. Most of Surf Aid’s money has come from outside the surf industry, most notably from Lonely Planet publications.

Jenkins has a civil but increasingly strained relationship with the surf-charter operators. Many are sympathetic but stop short of soliciting donations among the surfers for Surf Aid. Others offer Dave and his doctors free lifts to and from the Mentawais. But most keep Dave at arms length. Some are outright hostile to the whole concept of trying to help the islanders for fear of breeding native-born surfers. One uncharitable skipper refused to let his clients leave broken boards with the island kids.

“The last thing we need is for these fucking islanders is to learn how to surf,” he said. “We don’t want another Nias.”

Surfing is a young adolescent culture. Being completely insular and hedonistic, it comes as no surprise that it has no tradition of philanthropy. Surfer altruism is rare and can evaporate overnight in the face of cynicism, misplaced ideals, or the realities of living in the mud outside the western materialist media bubble.

After a feature article critical of the surf industry (Surf Inc. Invades an Island Paradise, June 22, 2002) came out in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph last June, Surf Aid’s marketing man Andrew Griffiths said he could hear wallets snapping shut across the surf industry.

But Surf Aid has proven irresistible to the mainstream media, who love the idea of a bunch of high-spirited surfing doctors practicing MASH-style preventive health care in the jungle. Australia’s “Foreign Correspondent” recently aired a Surf Aid segment showing the docs in a remote Siburut jungle highland village treating a young Mentawai mother dying of TB and sending her at their expense via motor-canoe to a government clinic in Muara Siburut. The show, which was broadcast nationally, brought a surge of small donations from little old ladies and various non-surf businesses.

Yanto is a half-Mentawai, half-Japanese surfer who runs “cultural tours” up to the traditional Mentawai villages. Under Yanto’s guidance adventuresome western tourists can sleep in the thatched umas at night and watch shamans do the “Dance of No Meaning” for their benefit. Yanto learned English from backpackers passing through Sumatra ten years ago when Sumatra was still on the must-see list for dirtbag travelers. He was born in Maura Siberut in 1969 before there was electricity or even a cash economy. He has stopped by the Surf Aid camp enroute to catching a ferry back to Padang.

His feelings for the Mentawais are ambivalent. A modern man with a tailored haircut and a house in Padang, he receives many of his clients via email on the net. He has no desire to grovel in the mud and return to the demon-filled night forest. He does not hear the calling to become a shaman.

Still, this is his home. He can see the changes civilization is bringing, or inflicting, on these people. He knows there’s no going back. The only thing he might be able to change is change.

He tells me that the villagers see the surfers as rich. Through satellite TV they realize they are poor. They want the toys. They want the TV’s and Discmans and the jetskis. They want electricity and flush toilets and air conditioning. And good health. It’s hard to go back to sweating in the malarial dark once you’ve had night lighting at the touch of a switch.

He lights a Marlboro…

“The Mentawai people do not want just money. They need education and medicine. But they need a plan right from the beginning or you will have another Bali or Nias. What they see right now is a lot of money for the boats, but none to cure malaria. They are beginning to question what surfing is doing for them. Everyone comes to the Mentawais to take, not to give.”

Some of the kids are learning to surf and they’re getting good quickly. As the surf scene develops, Yanto says, they don’t want to be just cooks and boat drivers. They want to be part of it.

“If they’re not, there could be problems”, he adds ominously.

He tells me that the boats from Malaysia came over a few years ago and dynamited the reefs. The logging companies buy off the village honchos with outboard motors and the promise of work.

During the week I spent at Nyang Nyang a haggard-looking timber freighter hovered like a rusty vulture off a nearby islet, gobbling freshly felled hardwood logs into its hold. As we cruised by to have a look, a scared crew of smoking, bare-chested Laskar deckhands cast straight out of a Sinbad matinee shooed us away yelling “no cameras!”

“The villagers only think for today,” says Yanto. “The challenge is to give them a tomorrow.”

From the bow of the Muttara Bunda I see Liz, Ben, Ollie and Dave hassling for the third wave of an overhead set out at ERs. Dave is in position but Liz is a goofyfooter, more experienced and more likely to make the fast crumbling lefts of ER (Emergency Rooms). But she pulls back to let him have it. He staggers to his feet, sticks out his ass, draws a line and draws a strict no-nonsense course to the shoulder. He paddles back looking pleased with himself.

ER, despite it’s foreboding name, is actually a fairly benign and predictable wave, perfectly suited for the middling surf skills of the surf docs.

Of all the Surf Aid docs, young Ollie is the most accomplished. He came from a surfing family in Wales and has spent a lot of summers surfing in France and Spain. Ben, from western Oz, is keen and competent but a bit rusty after a year’s layoff in Ireland. Dave’s surfing prowess could be diplomatically described as: “he goes hard and he has a lot of fun”. After the airing of Foreign Correspondent, which showed Dave wobbling backhand into an anemic four footer, he received an e-mail from an admirer: “Love your work but your roundhouse sucks.”

Ironically, Dave and the others surf much less than if they lived and worked ‘real’ jobs back in their respective home countries. In Ben and Amanda’s case, they live and work on the wave-less east side of Siberut. It’s a half-day’s canoe journey through a leech-infested mangrove swamp to the nearest surf break and Ben is loath to expend precious time and fuel on a surf check unless he can tie it in with some medical work along the way.

But you can tell they love their work. Most doctors will never have a chance to meld all their healing skills with their deepest human values. And in such freewheeling fashion. This is third-world medicine, improvised guerilla immunology done with bamboo and washtubs. In a sense, they’re artists.

Dave has a fondness for reciting the apocalyptic, sexually charged lyrics of Leonard Cohen and loves shouting them at full volume out in the line-up. “As I knelt at the delta…of her Alpha…and Omega,” he booms at me.

Dave and Andrew’s latest scheme to raise money from within the surf community is the proposed “Mentawai Charity Challenge”. Modeled on the OP Boat Challenge, the contest-cum-expression session would involve a handpicked celebrity roster and surf, drugs and rock and roll – the drugs being disease vaccines.

They’re angling for an angel, hopefully, but not limited to, the surf industry. Their pitch, under the guise of cause marketing, is that it would be great for a savvy surfwear company to do something that really benefits children and in the process make their employees proud of what their company does. That a surf logo could actually stand for something real.

“I know I’m dreaming,” he sighs. “But then again, the world was never changed by a reasonable man. I think the time’s ripe for a new legacy for surfing’

Jenkins scans the horizon, takes a beat, then retrieves his loopy leer.

“Besides, it’s been proven that philanthropy stimulates endorphins. It’s just good physiology – by far the best drug there is. So the proposition I put out there is: ‘just how good do you want to feel?’”

Dave takes in the sunset, where pink rain-fecund clouds drag themselves like recalcitrant pachyderms across the flat graveyard horizon

“My God…can you believe this place?

He spots a set and paddles off. I sit, gazing back at the palms, contemplating the end of the world.
And from somewhere deep in the jungle I hear children singing.

Since this article was published in 2002, SurfAid has grown into one of the most respected and recognised NGOs in the region, with branches appearing in NZ, USA and Australia. Earthquakes and tsunamis have dictated that they add Emergency Response and Disaster Risk Reduction to their wide-ranging remit of community development and education programs that are central to their mission statement “…to improve the health, wellbeing and self-reliance of people living in isolated regions connected to us through surfing”. The surfing industry has gradually come to the party with more corporate donations, including major support from Billabong, Quiksilver, SIMA and others. Resort and charter boat operators are compelled by law to collect a daily tax from each visiting surfer on behalf of the Mentawai Regency Government.

First published in Surfer Magazine, November, 2002, Volume 43 No.12