Seto Hari Wibowo

It was pouring rain today in the streets of old Jakarta with thunder and lightning msking it dramatic, but I was inside listening to tales of bold orangutan rescues in West Kalimantan on the island of Borneo.

Seto Hari Wibowo was telling me this is why he joined the Centre for Orangutan Protection eighteen months ago.

The centre is a core group of ten men and women in their twenties who feel so strongly about protecting orangutans that they have abandoned relatively more lucrative careers as journalists and artists to make public protests against the devastation of the rainforests and the mistreatment of orangutans held in small zoos or in homes.

Seto is a twenty-seven-year-old photographer from east Java with a thick head of curly black hair. He is married, with a daughter. His title with the organization is captivity program co-ordinator.

Seto has done dozens of rescues since he has joined the organization. He told me a story about one rescue of an orangutan held illegally as a pet in the home of a police officer in West Kalimantan. Yes, this is a country where the police ignore the law when it is convenient for them.

Seto went to the home of the officer with three policemen and three forestry officials because he alone does not have the legal power to confiscate an orangutan.

The wife of the officer came to the door and tried to shoo them away, but the seven men insisted and had the woman sign a release form.

The orangutan was a two-year-old male kept in a bare cage at the front of the house for entertainment. Seto believes the wife was afraid of the creature.

Seto took the orangutan to a temporary shelter, where he would be moved four months later to the rehabilitation centre of Lone Droscher-Nielsen, who I met at her centre near Palangkaraya several years ago. The Danish woman founded the rehabilitation centre and it is now filling to the seams with orangutans.

Seto was worried about the orangutan at the temporary shelter because he was alone, in a strange place, in another bare cage. So, to comfort the creature he gave it a leaf, which is a gesture an orangutan would understand and appreciate.

It was at that moment that Seto saw tears in the eyes of the orangutan.

"I think it's just sad," Seto told me. "It's deeply sad. He's so young and he needs his mother's care. They have no friends."

I was sitting listening to this with Kili Pringgodigdo, who quit her job at the Jakarta Post to work at the orangutan centre for half the salary at the newspaper because she loves the creatures like the others do. The stories about orangutans were affecting Kili so much that I could see the tears starting to form in her eyes.

Meanwhile, outside, the streets of Jakarta were awash with a cooling rain and life went on in the city as usual.