Paman Boy et Muchtar

This portrait will also be about two Community Rangers living near the Conservation Response Unit (CRU, see project description) of Sampoiniet. I met them during my last visit to the CRU in Sampoiniet at a meeting discussing the extension of the patrol area by the Community Rangers and Mahouts (elephant trainers). I was impressed by their knowledge about the paths used by wild elephants around the CRU and the passages which they passed through to get into inhabited territories (a proposed project for FFI to reduce wild elephants access to fields by putting up barriers using chilis which act as a repellent). I learned more about two of the Community Rangers who accompanied us during an elephant trek, Paman Boy (right in the photo) and Muchtar (left in the photo). Paman Boy, who is the team leader of Community Rangers, answered the majority of my questions, making this portrait primarily about him. However, Muchtar was also present, he confirmed all the information provided by Paman Boy and added a few comments.

Paman Boy began by telling me his relationship with elephants. He told me that even before becoming a Community Ranger, he had intervened in human-elephant conflicts during ravages of agricultural fields. He tells me he has never been afraid and it was his mission to push the elephant back to the forest, his “goal was not injure or hurt the elephants and the elephants will respond the same, as long as they don’t feel threatened, so I was not afraid.” However, he told me a little later that before becoming a Community Ranger, he practiced illegal logging to make a living. Whenever he and his colleagues were in the forest and heard wild elephants nearby, they started running. The reason, Paman Boy explains, is “we felt guilty about destroying their habitat and so we thought they would be upset at us and become aggressive.”

In 2007, Paman Boy met the team from Flora and Fauna International (FFI, see project description) during a human-elephant conflict intervention. After this first interaction, he became a regular volunteer. FFI subsequently offered him a position as a Community Ranger. They also requested a list of all the people in the village who practiced illegal logging so that they could also invite them to the training to become a Community Ranger. The program for the Community Ranger is a small part of a program to strengthen the development in peace in Aceh (CPDA), which is supported by the World Bank. They have trained more than 280 people, divided into 14 groups around Aceh, on how to become a Community Ranger. The EU has also supported the training of four groups representing 63 additional Community Rangers. At this time, Sampoiniet is an area where frequent human-elephant conflicts arise; this made Paman Boy feel that “there was something wrong in the way they interacted with the forest.” Thereafter, he has tried to explain this message to his friends and encourages them to pass it along.

Since becoming a Community Ranger, FFI has supported the development of a rubber plantation for the local population, which no longer has access to the equipment used for illegal logging. He says that he “never thought about illegal logging again.” He is happy with his new job as a Community Ranger and is happy to help local farmers with human-elephant conflicts. According to him, the villagers already have a tolerance to wild elephant interactions, but repeated interactions and conflicts makes them install traps or poison the animals. He feels his role is to “ensure that it does not reach this stage, but also to limit the destruction of the elephants habitat to prevent the conflict at its source.” He goes on explaining that he knows the behavior of elephants, to always follow the same path, “repelling them once is not enough since they always return on the same path. So we need the cooperation of the villagers to tell us when they come back.” This collaboration has not always been easy, but with the creation of the CRU in 2009 and with time, they have been working together and feel that the locals are beginning to see the landscape as a shared space with wildlife.

Paman Boy says that the only area for improvement in the CRU is the time it takes to respond to a conflict. Today’s conflicts are more distant from the CRU and Community Rangers do not have access to a means of transportation and must find a way to get there on their own. Sometimes it takes too much time and makes the intervention impossible. Paman Boy is also excited to continue their socialization program, to help create barriers for farmers with species of crops that repel wild elephants. Three villages have already begun a transition from cocoa plantations to a coffee plantation, which, for Paman Boy, means a long term solution.