Kelsey Jacobsen

This summer I spent eight weeks in Indonesia with Operation Wallacea, a British organization which facilitates conservation-oriented marine and terrestrial research endeavors for PhD students, university students and volunteers in six locations around the world. The Indonesian marine operation, which is located on Hoga Island near Sulawesi, is sponsored by the World Bank and is located within the Wallacea Marine Protected Area, which was established by Operation Wallacea and one of the largest marine reserves in Indonesia .

My first two weeks were spent at the rainforest site on Buton Island getting to know the culture of the people I would be working with for the remainder of my internship. I participated in Jungle Training, an introduction to life in the rainforest. In week two, I changed my plans in order to participate in the Wakatobi Culture and Language course, in which we learned basic Indonesian, visited various villages and their leaders and participated in local crafts and cooking.

During my time on Hoga, I completed my PADI Divemaster training. As a divemaster trainee, I was considered part of the island staff and therefore participated in all of the staff activities, which included staff meetings, radio monitoring, leading dive boats and being on-call for the fast action response team for missing divers. Being a boat leader means taking attendance and air pressure measurements for each person, helping with gear transportation and assembly, making sure everyone gets safely into the water, and doing boat and dive briefings. A boat briefing points out emergency procedures and equipment onboard, and a dive briefing includes a general dive plan including maximum time and depth, direction, site-specific precautions and important hand signals.

In addition to these duties, I was also expected to complete academic and practical, in-water tasks. I studied for and passed exams on subjects such as dive physics and physiology, supervising certified and uncertified divers in the water, equipment, divemaster-conducted programs, decompression theory and the dive tables and wheel. As for the practical side of my training, I was required to act as an instructor's assistant in many training sessions for beginning dive students, and to lead dives, follow divers during led dives to correct problems with buoyancy, demonstrate thirteen skills underwater, conduct a mock scuba review session, swim, snorkel and tread water for specified times and distances, demonstrate proper rescue techniques, and perform a ‘stress test' in which another diver and I traded equipment underwater while buddy breathing.

Coming into this internship, these were not the objectives that I planned to accomplish. The research assistant jobs that I had originally signed up for turned out to be very informal positions that wouldn't have offered a lot of experience or knowledge about the projects I would have helped with, so after participating in the compulsory Coral Reef Ecology course, I changed my schedule to divemaster training, an endeavor that I had given considered previously, but hadn't planned on completing so soon. Looking back on the experience, I am thrilled that I made the decision to switch. My original objectives about understanding the scientific intricacies of the coral reefs on Hoga and interacting with locals who I had assumed would be accessible were not met because of the nature of my potential duties as a research assistant, and the simple fact that there is no village on Hoga, and therefore very few locals to interact with. However, I did achieve many unplanned accomplishments.

Not everything that I was required to do for my training was easy, and there were times when I did not feel very confident about my progress as a potential divemaster. But this is what made the experience so rewarding in the end. When I hit a stumbling point, my instructor remained encouraging and I repeated the task until I had it mastered, which was very satisfying. When I moved on to taking a leadership role with students in the water, I was intimidated by having to demonstrate skills for them with instructor-quality ability, but I was congratulated for doing a good job each time. I was also put in some difficult leadership situations at the beginning of my training, in which I found myself on radio duty when emergencies on boats arose and I was left to coordinate emergency plans and mediate between boats. While it was very stressful at the time, I'm glad I was able to stay level-headed and work through these predicaments in order to make sure everyone ended up as safe and healthy as possible.

Overall, my experience in Indonesia has prepared me for my integrative project in an experiential rather than scholastic way. I was able to experience protected terrestrial and marine environments and a bit of the culture of the people who inhabit them. I saw some of the effects of the marine protected area (MPA), as well as some of the destructive fishing practices that it attempts to eliminate. I also got a down-to-earth look at the people who depend on these resources, a perspective that I believe is crucial when discussing implementation of protected areas that affect local lifestyle and livelihood. I plan to work from this vantage point in my senior integrative project, which will attempt to characterize an effective MPA by balancing the ecological and social influences they have in tropical developing countries.