Project Description
During my 30s I lived and worked in Indonesia. I moved there is 1991 to set-up a collaborative conservation programme between the Indonesian Directorate General of Forest Protection & Nature Conservation and Birdlife International.
This was a time when Indonesia was being severely criticised for trading parrots out of East Indonesia and when BirdLife was extending its international reach into Indonesia. I was pretty much on my own: communication with the BirdLife secretariat was by occasional fax and an annual visit. I mostly relied on two mentors in the local ICBP section and the advice of the government officials I worked with and the small community of expatriate conservation professionals.
I recruited a group of Indonesian graduates and established an office and together we implemented a programme off parrot surveys, a project to save the critically endangered Bali Starling and survey and assessment the lead to the designation of new protected areas (including two national parks) in east Indonesia.
This was a rewarding period of my career but hard graft and at times quite lonely – I was either a boss, competitor, technical advisor or outsider and Bogor was a provincial city with little cultural life. It was a time when I learnt about cross-cultural management, how to build and organisation, the vital importance of management systems, how to build a productive working relationship with a government bureaucracy, and how to navigate (and recover from!) the pitfalls of working in a less developed country. it was also a period of travel and adventure – of coming to know and understand a rich and diverse culture and country quite different from my own.