Health In Harmony partners with Alam Sehat Lestari, an Indonesian non-profit organization co-founded by Dr. Kinari Webb, Dr. Hotlin Ompusunggu and Dr. Antonia Gorog. The Indonesian name means Healthy Nature Everlasting and the shortening, ASRI, means harmoniously balanced. True to its name, ASRI combines health care, conservation, environmental education and medical training in Sukadana, West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Read more about the various project components by clicking on the individual project links located to the left.
ASRI works with local communities to integrate high-quality, affordable health care with strategies to protect the threatened rain forests of Gunung Palung National Park.
Because we believe that human and environmental health are inextricably linked, our work encompasses multiple fields of impact. It is at the intersection of these that the health of the whole – the whole person as well as the health of the whole planet – is achieved.
The daily news brings us stories of individuals, families and national health systems in crisis. A quieter, deeper crisis hums beneath these stories – one in which basic human needs and the integrity of the natural environment are pitted against each other.
When families in Indonesia must log tropical forests to pay for basic needs such as health care, the impacts are manifold: habitat for rare and endangered species is destroyed; fields are flooded and crops destroyed; increased standing water increases the incidence of diseases like malaria and dengue fever; and the degradation of global air quality impacts all of us, across the planet.
In West Kalimantan, Indonesia, poor health and grinding poverty push human populations to engage in illegal logging for survival, putting vital rainforest habitat at risk. Logging provides a short-term fix, with long-term consequences for valuable plant and animal species, human health, and global climate change.
We’re working to provide an innovative, effective solution that empowers individuals to safeguard their own health and the health of their families, while preserving the natural environment.
Health In Harmony’s critical support has made the following highlights possible:
- more than 14,000 patients & 20,000 patient visits since the clinic opened in July, 2007.
- established a DOTs program for prevention of drug-resistant tuberculosis
- created an incentive program to provide health care rewards in exchange for rainforest protection
- initiated an innovative reforestation program to restore damaged rainforest habitat
- began an organic farm training program to assist community members in establishing better livelihoods, better nutrition, and a healthier relationship with the natural environment
- distributed goats to widows to help provide a critical component to our organic farming work
As a pilot project, ASRI tests the concepts on which Health In Harmony was founded, and will serve as a model for replication in other parts of the world.