J

akarta’s streets were filled with becak (pedicabs) and cars with manual starters. The smells of street stalls with varied dishes far outweighed the fumes of the cars that now blocked the streets of this metropolis. President Sukarno was still omnipresent when some 60 years ago I joined my husband on his assignment to the German Embassy in Jakarta. Shortly after arriving in Jakarta, my husband died, and I was alone.

As a young widow, I decided to stay and I sought solace in the old zoo in Cikini where the zoo director, Benjamin Galstaun, allowed me to use my paramedical skills from my German education to help the animals. I love animals. All animals! From mice to whales, I love them all, but orangutans have a special place in my heart. Five millimeters more love than for other animals.

And I visited them almost daily to bring them fruit. This is something I still do every day in Ragunan zoo, to this very day. More than a lifetime of looking into their eyes when they show me that they recognize me and happily accept the food I buy from my small pension every day.

Memories, I have many. I have lived in Jakarta under all of Indonesia’s presidents. And I have travelled far and wide in this amazing country of thousands of islands. And I love Indonesia. I always say, Germany is my fatherland and Indonesia is my motherland. Its beauty is beyond compare and I have been extremely privileged to see so much of this emerald archipelago and its wonderful people.

Now having spent more than six decades here, I am in my 90s and most of my school friends have long passed away. Not many people visit me anymore in my little house in the middle of the Ragunan Zoo. My body is getting frail, but my thoughts are still clear, although often filled with frustration.

My thoughts go back to 1965. The big change of the Soeharto era had started. And here we nervously traveled with lions and bears in flimsy cages, more or less sedated by beer, which was all we had to reduce the risk while moving them. We were moving to the rubber gardens of Ragunan, far outside the city, in a place free of flooding and with lots of space to build one of the worlds’ largest zoos. The Jakarta zoo is the world’s third oldest, and one of the largest and most visited zoos in the world. So much space in the 147 hectares, with so many fruit trees, what a paradise for animals this should be. We had every chance, and maybe still have, to make that a reality.

Governor Ali Sadikin and the Secretariat Cabinet of Indonesia granted me a permit to build a small house in the zoo to stay for the rest of my life and where I wanted to help the orangutans.

Many hugely expensive projects have been done here in Ragunan. And when we read in the Internet the reports of how many meetings, and consultations, and workshops, and, and, and… the zoo has held, it looks as if they care! And how much work this talking represents! But why did the expensive new cages not have feeders and why could they not be cleaned? Why do we have such a poor water system? It seems to me that the projects themselves were more important than what they were about!

There are so many more things that I see, but my words are filled with emotion and I seem too old to be listened too. So I write this letter in the twilight of my existence and hope that the Jakarta administration will finally give the Ragunan zoo a director who cares for the animals, a man who is brave enough to stand up for what is right and needed, a man who knows how a Zoo is run.

Please allow an old woman to make a last ditch effort to help the zoo and its inhabitants. Let us all try to make Ragunan Zoo into a place that helps both animals and people and one of which we can all be proud!

Ulla von Mengden
Jakarta