Trekking through a jungle in the mountains. Chugging up and down precariously steep dirt roads on scooters. All while balancing heavy loads of rice, fresh produce, spices and other food items — necessities to nourish families in Bali on the verge of having to do without. 

It’s all in a day’s work for Wayan Ariani and Made “Arry” Pryatnata who have been traipsing all over Bali to deliver food packages to its most remote communities, who are hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic.  

In this traveller’s paradise, the past year has been “a nightmare” for the many who depend on tourism for their livelihoods, as Wayan puts it. 

One moment, Wayan and Arry were villa managers at different properties, catering to the thousands of travellers that throng Bali each year to revel amid its beautiful beaches, views of lush paddy fields, and rich culture. 

The next, they were out of work, as COVID-19 led to a sudden halt in international travel, and tourism dollars dried up overnight. 

“We stopped work, but we have to continue paying our debt, for our [temple] ceremony, daily expenses and also for my children's school,” Wayan shares. 

Arry adds: “Now, everyone wants to sell everything, sell the car to get something, buy some food for the family. That's very, very sad.”

Fast forward a year, and neither have gotten their jobs back, but they are fuelled by their new mission of delivering food to Bali’s neediest — through Feed Bali. 

A recipe for feeding the hungry

Feed Bali is the brainchild of Adi and Frances Tse Ardika, founders of Tresna Bali Cooking School. 

As the pandemic took hold in Bali in March 2020, the couple, who have been married 18 years, decided to close their cooking school and cottages. Seeing their fellow villagers caught short by the shutdown and without income, they started a “Feed a Family” initiative to give food packages to families so that they could shelter at home as the pandemic spread, and eat nutritiously. 

Their goal was modest — to help 20 households around their school with food packages that would last two weeks for a family of four. Adi and Frances asked their friends and network of former guests to contribute funds for the packages, to mark their daughter Santi’s birthday.

The response from donors was overwhelming. “For the first two months, it was just Adi, Santi and me, to avoid any contact with others. Our day started at 4am going to the local market to buy vegetables, fruits and eggs. 

“Adi harvested spices from our cooking school gardens to donate immune-building ingredients and encourage our neighbours to plant their own spices. Santi and I packed the massive food packages. Together, we’d pile one package into a wheelbarrow to bring to each home in the afternoon,” recalls Frances.

“By the end of April, we were exhausted. We wanted to use up the rest of the donations and stop.” 

But when they shared the news on their social media platforms, their community urged them to keep going. “They were like, ‘You have to keep going, who else is going to do this?’” says Frances. 

With donations and suggestions coming in, Frances and Adi, former wedding and travel planners, decided to muster their organisational skills and launch a full-fledged operation — hiring a core team (among them Wayan and Arry) to help plan and execute Feed Bali’s distribution.

Integral to this were their Balinese roots and connections: Adi, who is Balinese, and Frances, who is Canadian, serve as holy people for their village, leading the Hindu temple ceremonies that are an important part of Bali's spiritual life. 

“We have lots of requests for help, my phone is almost exploding with messages,” says Adi, who painstakingly looks into each request by visiting the household to assess their needs, and consults village leaders on the ground situation. 

“I have to classify them like, the ones who need it most. It's always difficult to choose who to give to, but we have to make the hard choices,” he says. “To be honest, most Balinese need help now.” 

Arry and Wayan receive two food packages from Feed Bali each month, as well as a “survival salary” of IDR150,000 (US$10.50)  for every day they volunteer (about four days a week). This is a fraction of what they used to earn as villa managers but is more than many are earning on the island now, shares Frances. 

“The food package  is very important. Because we have food, I can save the [survival salary] for other needs, go to the doctor, things like that,” says Arry.

With no end to the pandemic in sight, Adi and Frances set a goal of distributing packages to 2,300 households by the end of 2020. 

As of May 2021, they have reached 3,540 households, equivalent to 396,480 nutritious meals. 

“So as long as we have donations, we will keep going,” says Adi. 

Markets in the morning, mountains in the afternoon

On most mornings, Wayan is up by 4am, ready to start another day at Feed Bali. 

Every Feed Bali package comprises 10kg of rice purchased directly from Balinese farmers, cooking oil, 30 locally-farmed eggs, salt, and kilos of fresh vegetables, fruit and aromatics like ginger, among other items. Fresh local produce is an imperative, with the team determined to provide nutritious food to the villages while supporting local farmers by buying their harvest.  

“It has to be 4am because we want the very fresh chillies,” says Wayan, a note of pride in her voice. “There are mini trucks that sell them wholesale at the morning market.”

She then returns home to cook breakfast for her family, before heading back to the cooking school to pack the spices for distribution. After packing hundreds of bags of spices, Wayan and her husband, Made Gunarta (Gun) drive an hour north to the Kintamani area to buy fresh vegetables directly from farmers. “We finish around maybe 5pm,” says Wayan. 

On distribution days, the team starts their journey as early as 6am. “To East Bali or North Bali, we have to be at Feed Bali at least 6am, and then by the time we come home, it is around 7pm,” says Arry.

Adds Adi: “We go from house to house, and it’s not like, you go to this house and you see the next house right after that. You go to the jungle, trek through the jungle, and then you see the next house.”

The villages receiving support also stepped up, with some volunteering to coordinate deliveries on the ground, especially when the homes are deep in the mountain or jungle.

These journeys have been eye-opening for the Feed Bali team. “I meet more people, I see many villages, and to see the poverty, to see so many people in need,” says Wayan.

Frances adds: “Most people only see Bali as a luxurious, paradise island in the media. People working in hospitality, maybe they have a house, or a car, but they have no savings.”

Communities living in poverty could previously rely on hospitality workers’ donations; when these workers lost their jobs, this precarious safety net vanished. “It makes me very sad that I cannot help them with money,” says Wayan.

A newfound mission

Although very much connected to their village, Adi and Frances did not set up Tresna Bali Cooking School with a social mission in mind. “We started with the intention of sharing our authentic Balinese food and culture,” says Frances. “Adi and I are highly involved in our community, our banjar (Indonesian for neighbourhood), but it was a personal thing, it wasn’t anything tied to our banjar or Tresna Bali.” 

The pandemic has opened their eyes to how their business could also be a platform for guests to give back to the community. “We have discussed how we can tie Feed Bali to our cooking school, maybe if you book a cooking class, you can also opt to feed a family,” says Frances. 

They have also started a programme dubbed Baa Baa Goat, where they have built a goat shelter and donate goats to impoverished families living in remote, arid areas where growing crops is not an option. 

Through Feed Bali, a goat farming expert advises the family on how to breed healthy goats, and the goats’ milk can be sold for additional income. The offspring of the goats will then be donated to the next family, creating a long-term, sustainable plan to improve livelihoods. 

“Sometimes people just need a hand. When we extend that hand and give support, everything changes,” says Frances.

An early “pioneer” of this programme is Wayan and Gunarta and their teenage children, who plan to sell the goat’s milk for extra income, while future generations of goat will be given to another qualified family.

The additional income is welcome, as there is no clear idea when things will “return to normal”. “When tourists come back, maybe it will be very slow. Even if some tourists come, we have so many hotels and villas, it will be a struggle to get guests,” says Wayan. 

Amid the challenges, there have been many moments of hope. “When we first started giving out food packages in our village, we identified a few families. And we had gone to three families, and when we reached the fourth family, we found that the third family had already given the fourth, half their package,” says Frances. “We were just blown away. They still thought of their neighbours, even when they were struggling.” 

Working with Feed Bali, says Arry, has taught him the value of sharing what he has, no matter how seemingly small. “I don’t have a lot, but a little thing can make others happy,” he says. 

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, is there a more iconic accessory than the ubiquitous face mask?

On the website of Noesa, a Jakarta-based favourite among the sustainable style-conscious set, face masks made with beautiful ikat fabric are front and centre, as part of their Corona Survival Kit collection. 

But these colourful textiles are more than just a symbol of these unusual times: they are part of the tapestry of empowerment and cultural preservation woven by Watubo, a collective from Sikka regency in Flores, Indonesia. 

A traveller could once participate in a weaving workshop by Watubo in their village of Watublapi, which provided the weavers a vital source of income while safeguarding their craft. But the pandemic has ground these efforts to a halt. 

With a little help from customers looking for something special, Watubo weavers hope to restore not only some of their income, but also their platform for sustaining and reinventing their ancestral craft.

Meet Rosvita 

“Ikat represents a woman’s worth,” says Rosvita Sensiana, an ikat artist with more than 20 years of experience. “Our ancestors didn’t have clothing stores, [so] to clothe her children and husband, a Sikkanese woman toils with her body to weave ikat.”

Ikat means “to bind” or “knot” in Indonesian languages, and Sikka regency is one of the most reputable producers of fine ikat in Indonesia, with centuries’ worth of vegetable dye traditions. Born into a family of Sikkanese master weavers, 36 year-old Rosvita is the founder of Watubo. 

Before the pandemic, Watubo made most of its income from taking part in national and international exhibitions, as well as hosting travellers to its ikat workshop, where participants could learn the craft while enjoying the sights, sounds and stories of Sikka. 

All this changed when the pandemic struck in 2020, but Rosvita is confident that Watubo will find a way to prosper again. “Watubo means ‘breathing rock’ or ‘living rock.’ It represents our belief that no matter how hard a place is, we will certainly survive,” she says.

Introduction to ikat

I met Rosvita in 2019 before the pandemic when I took part in Watubo’s ikat workshop, a collaboration between Watubo and Noesa. 

“An ikat workshop would attract visitors, which would help promote Watubo and increase weavers’ earnings,” said Rosvita then, adding that participants’ respect for ikat is also the goal.

Noesa provided the funds to build a homestay for guests and handled the online bookings. The workshops also included a tour of Sikka led by Rosvita. 

But these workshops are on hiatus indefinitely, and for now, avid travellers can only experience the rich history of Watubo’s ikat through the wares sold on Noesa. 

Ikat  is popular worldwide, but my interest in it is personal. My maternal great-grandmother, originally from Roti island near Timor, was a weaver who clothed her family in elegant, handwoven ikat bearing intricate motifs identifying their surnames.

I never met her, but I still hold a sarong that she wove for my grandmother in the 1950s — an heirloom no one in my diasporic extended family can replicate.Since my family had lost this cultural knowledge, I had come to Sikka to learn from another weaving culture. But even in Sikka, where ikat is considered to be thriving and current, perpetuating the culture has neither been easy nor straightforward.

Many Watubo weavers are alumni of Bliran Sina, an older collective founded by Rosvita’s father, which focuses on the most traditional forms of Sikkanese ikat, and subjects weavers to a myriad of protocols and taboos. 

Although Rosvita supports preserving tradition, she believes that innovation upgrades weaver’s livelihoods because it opens up markets otherwise impenetrable by traditional ikat.

In 2014, she started Watubo with Noesa’s support. The collective allows younger weavers to explore creative innovations such as novel colours and contemporary motifs. These updated iterations of ikat can be applied to products such as camera straps and wallets. In contrast, traditional ikat bear sacred images and cannot be used in the same way.  

Watubo became Noesa’s first artisan partner, connecting its weavers to Noesa’s urban consumers, and becoming a success story of a woman-led rural creative enterprise.

Threads of a rich history

A former Roman Catholic  kingdom that ruled parts of central Flores from 1607 to 1954, Sikka may not have royal heritage sites matching Java and Sumatra’s grand royal palaces , but it can hold up ikat as one of royal Sikka’s biggest remaining testaments. 

It is a discipline that is not only arduous, but also easily rendered meaningless when divorced from a practicing community and their culture, which provide ecological and historic context to the craft. 

Watubo’s workshop, named Orinila (“House of Indigo” in Sikkanese), aimed to preserve this connection. Guests are welcomed with a ceremony involving dance, music, offerings to Watublapi ancestors, a formal introduction to express the guest’s intention for visiting, chewing betelnut, and a Holy Communion-like ritual of eating chicken and rice. 

Next, the weavers and I discussed our lesson plan. I produced a grid paper drawing of my grandfather’s Johannes clan motif, to be woven into a scarf.

No newbie finishes a scarf in three days, so the workshop involves a dozen weavers demonstrating works-in-progress at different stages, and allocating time for a guest to practice each stage. Watubo then completes the scarf and ships it to the guest later.

On day one, I recognised my instructor Maria Genisa, having previously bought her work. Though I had only seen her photograph and name on a Watubo label, it felt like I was meeting an old friend.

Genisa and I spun hanks of cotton thread into balls, and wrapped them around a warp frame. I learned that Genisa’s husband Yohanes Mulyadi is a Watubo colourist. Yohanes also grows cloves, but he and Genisa found weaving a better source of income.

Meanwhile, on another frame, Virgensia Nurak taught me how to translate my paper study into the right proportions for resist binding — binding yarn with a tight wrapping applied in the desired pattern.

It was hard. The shape of my resist kept skewing as though it was having spasms, and I needed Virgensia to pull them back into the motif’s normal shape. We spent three laughter-filled hours together, where I only managed to bind 8cm of resist over 5cm of warp.

The next morning, Virgensia had finished binding the resist for my scarf, and it was ready for dyeing. 

Rosvita explains Watubo’s commitment to vegetable dye: “Firstly, it preserves our ancestors’ cultural heritage. Secondly, it is safe for women, children, and the environment. Thirdly, it encourages us to regrow and conserve culturally important plants, and harvest them sustainably.”

Vegetable dyeing also allows weavers to experiment and be surprised by the results. “Soaking threads in experimental vegetable dye recipes makes my heart pound,” says Rosvita.

Morinda red is the trickiest colour. Threads need prepping overnight in an oily candlenut pre-mordant before colouring red. I was already breaking a sweat as I pounded the pre-mordant using a tall wooden pestle and a deep stone mortar. After that, I still had tough morinda roots to cut up and pound into a pasty dye.

When I was done, I felt like I had finished rowing cardio at the gym, but with an awestruck feeling as I watched milky white threads turn crimson with a touch of berry.

I started day three watching the vibrant threads we dyed dry in the sun. Opening the resist and rearranging the resist-dyed threads over the warp frame to form the intended motif is painstaking work. 

When I finally sat at the loom, I moved the weft to and fro through the warps and watched them transform into fabric. In two hours, I weave a mere 4cm.

My emotions brimmed over the goodbye dinner. I’d always thought my urban lifestyle and career made it impossible for me to learn ikat, but Watubo made my first step in this long journey possible, immersing me in a labour-intensive process that revived our ancestors’ creative spirits. 

A pandemic pause

Rosvita has been vocal about how Watubo has financially changed her life. 

“I had nothing before Watubo,” Rosvita had told me during my visit. “[After Watubo] I’ve bought a house and a motorbike. I am reaching prosperity. I have everything I need.”

Other weavers have used money earned from Watubo to send  their children to university, or to develop farms from which they can earn even more.

Because of this, Watubo had become a full-time livelihood for many weavers and their families, who would otherwise earn less as farmers, labourers or working for the government.

Now it’s a different story. “During the pandemic our finances haven’t been as great,” says Rosvita. “Earnings from ikat have been difficult to rely on, so weavers currently rely more  on agriculture.”

The few sales that happened during the pandemic were mainly from Noesa and “very few other visitors,” mostly Flores locals. For now, Watubo has to sustain the resources to resume full production in future. “We hope this pandemic ends soon, to resume our activities and join exhibitions again,” says Rosvita. 

Until then, a simple ikat mask remains to tell the rich history of this inspiring collective.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, tourism was emerging as a boon to rural communities seeking to supplement their incomes while preserving their way of life. With little tourism to rely on as the coronavirus rages on, two rural communities in Indonesia are finding other ways to cope. 

Virtual voyages: Lakoat.Kujawas 

Can the magic of a revered water source in the Mollo highlands be felt across a virtual video tour?

Perhaps not as much as Dicky Senda would like. But with the COVID-19 pandemic shutting his hometown off from tourism revenue, such experiments provide a way  to bring the sights and sounds of his hometown into people’s homes and a means to sustain his community’s way of life. 

Just a little more than a year ago, Dicky had debuted the M’nahat Fe’u Heritage Trail and was looking forward to welcoming guests regularly in 2020. Run as a monthly day trip in Taiftob, South Central Timor by local collective Lakoat.Kujawas, the guided tour introduces guests to Mollo ecosystems, cuisine and narratives. Like its namesake, the Mollo Timorese m’nahat fe’u ritual, it celebrates the harvest season by serving new food.

But the COVID-19 pandemic ground the heritage trail, as well as the many livelihoods it created, to a halt. While Lakoat.Kujawas cooperative members are mostly farmers who could continue with agriculture, they lost the valuable supplementary income they earned as guides and cooks for travellers. The revenue from these endeavours had also been intended to go into a collective savings programme to fund critical needs of members’ children. 

Sales for their produce such as coffee, condiments and jagung bose (puffed maize for porridge) also declined, as these were sold mainly on the heritage trail.  Without these sales, the farmers are vulnerable to middlemen who set prices so unfairly low that farmers often leave produce unsold — a system that creates the poverty and hunger common throughout Indonesian Timor. 

“Economically we are impacted,” admits Dicky, co-founder of Lakoat.Kujawas, citing logistical problems such as closures of the postal services and sporadic operations of shuttles leaving Taiftob for the provincial capital Kupang. At one point, it took a fortnight for a package to reach Jakarta.

Nevertheless, with the help of friends, Dicky found opportunities to reinvent the heritage trail. 

Enter Pasar M’nahat Fe’u (“new food market”), one of Lakoat.Kujawas’ digital initiatives. Via its social media channels, anyone in South Central Timor can now pre-order lunch boxes containing healthy, traditional Timorese dishes normally served on the heritage trail, prepared and delivered by collective members. “Our open orders promote no MSG, no palm oil, only local coconut oil, traditional dishes and recipes, and a plastic-free lunch packaged in banana leaves,” said Dicky.

Lakoat.Kujawas also debuted a digital version of the M’nahat Fe’u Heritage Trail as part of the Virtual Heritage series on the travel platform Traval.co. The free pilot was sponsored by the Indonesian Ministry of Tourism; currently it is still available for free, but participants are encouraged to "pay-as-you-wish”.

Featuring singer and activist Rara Sekar as a special guest, the virtual tour, in Bahasa Indonesia only, recreates much of the M’nahat Fe’u experience in a part-live two-hour Zoom Meeting format. Explaining the need to pre-record some portions of the tour, Dicky elaborated, “Patchy internet is a challenge: nudge your phone and you lose the signal.  It’s impossible to broadcast live from the wellspring, Napjam Rock, etc.” 

In the virtual format, Lakoat.Kujawas has also introduced new seasonal elements, such as a tour inside an ume kbubu traditional house, a demonstration of how jagung bose is made, and a showcase of new preserved products such as sayur asin (pickled mustard greens), guava wine, ginger beer, and roselle jam.  Husband-and-wife team Willybrodus Oematan (guide) and Marlinda Nau (head cook) also presented segments of the virtual tour.

Local demand for Lakoat.Kujawas’ digital initiatives remains modest in the South Central Timor region. “But at least there is demand and it helps,” added Dicky, mentioning plans to open a Lakoat.Kujawas shop in Kupang where hot lunches can be prepared on-site and gluten-free sourdough bread and preserved goods can be sold.  

In the meantime, community empowerment remains Lakoat.Kujawas’ priority. In July 2020 it restarted its Skol Tamolok learning initiative for locals, after a forced hiatus due to the pandemic. It currently offers workshops on food fermentation and preservation, documenting the local dialect, video filming and editing, and traditional music and dance.

Post-pandemic preparation: Decotourism

Meanwhile in Flores, RMC Detusoko is planning for a post-pandemic comeback of Decotourism, with co-founder Nando Watu confident that tourism will recover.

RMC Detusoko is a farmers’ collective that creates opportunities for young  farmers through ecotourism ventures like homestays and artisan food production, to help them diversify their livelihoods while staying grounded in their agricultural and spiritual traditions. COVID-19, however, has dampened those efforts. 

“Tourism revenues are in trouble, but then tourism is a supplementary income rather than a main income for us,” says Nando, who has started serving as Head of Village Government in Detusoko Barat Village.  “We are focusing on things we can do now: developing village products, creating jobs related to infrastructure, and distributing help for those who need it.”  

In collaboration with the Department of Tourism and Universitas Flores, Nando is investing in capacity-building for homestay owners, guides, farmers, and other professionals so that Decotourism is ready when travellers return. 

The government is also funding jobs in local infrastructure improvements such as for roads, irrigation, pools for hot springs, and villages displaying traditional homes, while providing social security to many of the villagers during the pandemic. 

Nando also still occasionally handles a trickle of guests for Mount Kelimutu National Park, which currently allows a quota of 200 visitors per day with strict COVID-19 protocols, and regularly schedules fortnight-long closings for clean-ups and disinfection of indoor spaces.

But hope in physical travel does not mean not using technology to innovate. Since the pandemic, RMC has been marketing local produce to customers in Ende and Maumere via WhatsApp. 

The village administration also runs a Decotourism online shop where guests can book tours in Detusoko and Kelimutu, and buy coffee and condiments. Launched in late 2020, the online shop is primarily designed for Indonesian consumers, but an English site enabling payment via major credit cards and PayPal is in the works.

Not everything in the Decotourism store is suitable for shopping; perhaps a testament to the fact that some things can only be experienced in person. And both Decotourism and Lakoat.Kujuwas stand posted to receive guests, when borders open once more.