A

group of Dutch students were seen cleaning an orangutan cage with enthusiasm on Friday at the Yogyakarta Animal Park in Kulonprogo, 25-kilometers from downtown Yogyakarta, while others were eagerly preparing food for the protected animals.

With masks covering their noses and mouths and gloves on both hands, they sprayed water, wiped dirt or put misplaced animal toys back in place without disgust. The same scene was also evident with the group that prepared for the food, mostly slices of various fruits.

“This is really interesting. I have never had such an experience before,” participating student, Tamara Recourt, of the Het College Weert high school, told The Jakarta Post on the sidelines of her activity on Friday.

Recourt said she joined the program because she wanted to help the orangutans and to see how they were treated at the park before they were returned to the jungle. “I don’t care if I have to deal with animal dirt and dung because we humans produce the same,” she said.

Almar Boudoin, a fourth grader of the Het Kwadrant high school, expressed the same idea, saying that joining the program had inspired him to help save endangered animals from extinction.

“Maybe in the future, when I have my own earnings, I can donate some money from my own pocket to help save these animals,’ he said.

Recourt and Boudoin are two of the 32 Dutch students on trip organized by Global Exploration, a Dutch organization.

Chairman of Global Exploration Indonesia Chapter, Koesoemo Sardjono, said that they were the second batch of students the organization had sent to Indonesia this year. They arrived in Yogyakarta on Tuesday and will leave on Sunday.

Yogyakarta is the third city on the trip after Bogor and Bandung in West Java and before Sintang in West Kalimantan.

Koesoemo said Yogyakarta Animal Park was deliberately chosen for the students to stay at because of the park’s excellent conservation service. The conservation service is helping to rescue endangered animals, mostly seized from illegal owners by the local Natural Resource Conservation Agency (BKSDA), before releasing them back to their natural habitats.

Exposing the students to the way the park treats these animals at its own expenses, he said, may help inspire the students to become future supporters of such activities.

“They may not donate yet this time but they might do so in the future,” said Koesoemo.

Koesoemo also said that apart from learning about conservation, the students were also given the opportunity to interact with both local high school students and the local community.

“We want them to really know how Indonesians live their lives in villages and erase the unnecessary stigmatizations stamped on Indonesians,” Koesoemo said.

He added that his organization, which was established six years ago by Dutch sports teacher Jos Smeet, had been sending between 600 and 700 students abroad annually to seven countries, namely Indonesia, Cambodia, Thailand, India, Nepal, Tanzania and Peru.

Separately, the park’s secretary Heru Catur said that the park had been spending some Rp 130 million (US$13,780) a month to treat some 150 animals of some 13 different species as part of preparations to release them back to their natural habitats.

Of these expenses, according to Heru, only about 60–70 percent were covered by the management company. “The rest still depends on private donors,” said Heru, while praising the Global Exploration program.