(My personal story: why I am building Huma Inay Space, and why your support truly matters)

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I grew up in Central Kalimantan of Borneo. I am Dayak: Ma’anyan through my father, To’mun through my mother, and Dayak Ngaju is the language that shaped my daily life, spoken side by side with Banjar and Bahasa Indonesia.

 

My identity has always been formed by many streams at once: land, culture, resilience, curiosity and the instinct to keep learning so I can one day return home with something meaningful to offer.

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Photo: Dayak-inspired tattoos—a hornbill and Nepenthes—from my jungle journey. Inked by Aman Durga Sipatiti.

 

From my earliest years, I was drawn not to big cities but to rivers, forests, and peatlands—to listening, observing, and quietly absorbing the worlds that shaped people’s lives. I spent countless hours roaming the waterways and forests: fishing, swimming, and simply being alongside the families who lived along the riverbanks, even if I rarely spoke.

 

Sometimes I wandered alone into the forest to sit on the buttress roots of giant peat-swamp trees, watching the obsidian-like stream flow past—once even getting bitten by a huge green, mossie-like insect whose sting was so sharp and startling that the burning sensation is still etched in my memory.

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I would canoe across the river with friends to forage for wild fruit, often finding orangutans lounging in the trees above us. We would quickly run to keep our distance, there were visible back then. And sometimes I would crawl under people’s stilt houses just to play with the spiders hiding there. It was the quiet, observant side of my childhood, adventurous in its own way, and it shaped how I experience nature, people, and place even now.

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That same curiosity carried me through my studies at the University of Palangka Raya, where agricultural science became my window into community stories, peatland fires, and the fragile relationships between people and the land.

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While still a student, I found myself in places people rarely see, accompanying scientists to remote villages, navigating peat swamp forests and rivers, undertaking fire research, supporting my lecturers, and assisting international researchers from the Netherlands, Australia, the US, UK, Japan, Norway, Denmark, Germany, and France.

 

I taught myself English, figured things out, and became a fixer as I went. Many nights I took notes in the pitch-black darkness by the river—sometimes cruising through heavy rain and the haze from forest fire that engulfed villages and waterways—and it was in those moments that I learned to observe quietly and listen deeply to elders, miners, mothers, fishermen, farmers, and the environment.

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Photo: The Barito River Initiative for Nature Conservation and Communities (BRINCC) expedition team, curious nerds, led by the Dayak Punan wisdom of local guides. From left: Rianto, A/Prof. Lary Reeves, Pak Rusni, Me, Jana Nejedla, Nick Boyd, Dr. Peter Houlihan, Dr. Nadia Drake,  Ian Segebarth, Eric Perlett. Photo by Eric Perlett, 2014.

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I have worked with local and international NGOs, with conservationists and companies, with farmers and miners, with academics, international scientists, science writer, film makers, artists, and policymakers. I have done research in forests, mining pits, corporate boardrooms, and remote villages. I have travelled through winding 4WD-only rugged roads deep into Borneo’s interior, often finding myself in remote and isolated places, simply to reach the communities or companies I needed to visit and interview.

 

I have walked over ground that concealed a maze of unstable tunnels in artisanal and small-scale gold mines as far as West Sumbawa, listening to miners whose days are shaped by danger, mercury fumes, and impossible choices. I have slept in jungles where gibbons woke me at dawn, watched hornbills whoosh their powerful wings over a quiet river above the canopy, and taken boats upriver through thousands of rapids to reach communities invisible on any map. There, I sat with people who shared their ways of life, and I absorbed a mix of emotions—their wisdom and humour, their joys and fears, their food and traditional wine, and local stories of co-existing with spirits, crocodiles and the “dragons” of their rivers and forests.​

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My journey carried me far beyond what I ever imagined

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo: Indigenous Land Management field study in the Northern Territory, Australia, travelling overland from Darwin to Arnhem Land in 2016. We learned from the Aboriginal Clan, Otto family, about their deep relationship to Country, ancestral knowledge, the intersection of modern education and traditional ecological knowledge, bush tucker, traditional crafts, co-existence with invasive species, and cultural burning to reduce wildfire risk.

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In 2015, I received an Australia Awards Scholarship and completed my Master of Environment at the University of Melbourne (2016–2018). That opportunity opened entire continents to me, studying Indigenous Land Management in Arnhem Land with Aboriginal elders, exploring forestry and community dynamics in Laos and Vietnam, and travelling with public health students to rural India to understand how livelihoods, gender, mental health, climate, and culture intersect. One of my greatest academic joys was studying International Law and Development with Professor Sundhya Pahuja at Melbourne Law School—the subject that most ignited my curiosity.

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​​While studying in Melbourne, I stepped far beyond the university bubble. I joined a citizen science community called "Science for All", founded by my dear friend, Dr. Jack Nunn,  whereby people from diverse backgrounds spent weekends camping under the stars, listening to birdsong at dawn, learning from each other, and talking around campfires about everything from possums to Indigenous art to cosmology. Melbourne’s creative spirit shaped me too; the city’s galleries, rich conversations, and creative multicultural community helped me understand how art, science, and community can sit together in one space. I carried those insights with me, holding them close to my Dayak roots.

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I travelled and camped widely across Australia, from the mountains to the roaring seas, across the Nullarbor’s endless plains, and into the red earth of the Northern Territory, learning the stories of connection, and witnessing how people care for Country in ways that reflect my own culture’s relationship with land.

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Beyond Australia, my journey continued. I worked in remote regions of Indonesia and lived on New Britain Island, also spending time in Bougainville—immersed in the island lifeways of Papua New Guinea. I met people from all walks of life, built friendships that still hold me today, and learned firsthand about health inequity, cultural resilience, local aspirations for development, food security, local cuisines, and the profound ties between place, community, and wellbeing.

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I have always been committed to practical, culturally grounded, community-led solutions. Over the years, with support from Krisno and Dr. Sanders and spirit of Tuanan community, I helped organise fundraising to build a school for the Tuanan community in Kapuas, an effort that began from a simple act of listening. Eleven years later, that school still stands and continues to empower children in the village.​

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​Photo: Krisno, Dr. Sanders, and I at the newly constructed Tuanan School (left), built through the fundraising I led (2015). When I returned in January 2025, it was thriving with more students (right).

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I co-founded the Kalimantan Weaving Initiative with Dr. Wendy Miles, a volunteer initiative supporting Dayak women rattan weavers and bringing their artistry to the international buyers—from the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai‘i to Traditions Fair Trade in Olympia, Washington, and Melbourne. To this day, I continue to order bags from the women whenever possible. I occasionally resell them, but more often I give them as gifts to friends and colleagues.

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Photo: (Left) Rattan bags I shipped from the village, displayed at the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai‘i in 2015. (Right) The women artisans, rattan weavers, and me during my 2014 visit.

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​Everywhere I went—from Australia to India, from Laos to Vietnam, from Papua New Guinea to Indonesian Borneo—the lesson was always the same:
People thrive when they have space, connection, genuine support, dignity, and community-driven solutions.

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For over a decade, I returned again and again to communities facing environmental destruction, peat fires, floods, hazardous mining, and the loss of land that once held their identities. I worked on the Mercury Project for four years with scientists and both local and international organisations, advocating for safer alternatives in small-scale gold mining and raising awareness about the health risks that disproportionately affect women and children. I helped researchers translate their ethnographic toolkit for orangutan conservation—vernacularising the language so that non-academics could genuinely engage with and understand it. More recently, I worked as a community engagement specialist and independent researcher on an Australian Government–funded climate and peatland restoration project, immersed in deep ethnographic work, storytelling, and amplifying local voices.

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Without doubt, people often assume I am confident. But I have always been shy, always carrying an invisible layer of imposter syndrome. I pushed myself not out of bravery, but out of deep curiosity and a feeling of connection to the people and places around me. Only this year, after being diagnosed as neurodivergent, did I finally understand why my inner world felt so different from how people perceived me: why I felt deeply, sensed deeply, random, chaotic, and moved through life in non-linear ways. It is wild in its own way, but I have learned to accept it. And interestingly, my quirks have a way of attracting those on the same wavelength—Higgs boson style—and the Huma Inay Space x Women Empowering Women Collective is the manifestation of this alignment.​

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Throughout my life journey, I have seen structural inequities. I have seen resilience. And I have seen how often women carry the weight of change without receiving the resources they need.​

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These experiences—across countries, cultures, art forms, and landscapes—are not just stories from my past. They are the foundation of the work I want to build now at Huma Inay: a space where knowledge becomes movement, where culture becomes healing, and where women and communities can shape their own futures.

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​That understanding—along with the unique encounters that came with it—has shaped my purpose, one that has been gently nudged and affirmed by the women and friends around me: to create a space where people, especially women and neurodivergent individuals, can simply be—unmasked, unjudged, and unafraid. They saw my potential and the possibility of what Huma Inay Space could grow into as an anchor for Women Empowering Women Collective. Now, it is my turn to trust myself and shape this haven together with them.