SHORT STORY BY LAI VOON LOONG

Photographs like this one require no planning. The best ones are taken instinctively.IMAGINE yourself torn from your native land and loved ones, thrown into a foreign country and forced to perform menial parlour tricks in some dodgy theme park resort. Or worse still, confined to solitary imprisonment as someone’s exotic pet?Hard to imagine but this is happening. Hundreds of rare and exotic orang utans have been taken illegally from faraway rainforests to be sold to private zoos and theme parks in Malaysia. The trafficking of endangered wildlife is rife, but occasionally the authorities get it right and some of these animals are rescued and repatriated to their homelands.I took this photo on one such repatriation project. The Malaysian authorities had confiscated several illegally held orang utans and were sending them back to Sumatra where there is an orang utan rehabilitation centre. It is here that repatriated orang utans spend several months in relative comfort in quarantine to prevent them from spreading diseases to the local orang utan population. Some of them, after having lived alone for years, have to learn to interact with other orang utans. They are then taught to live wild in the jungle again.

The writer and I went to Medan, Indonesia, to observe the repatriation and rehabilitation process. We had arrived several hours ahead of the primates and were told that they would arrive around 8pm.

As with most assignments, it was a case of “hurry up and wait”. The orang utans arrived around 11pm in their air transportation cages, which I thought were a little small. But they looked okay as I peered through the wire mesh. After travelling so far, they were obviously a little hungry and thirsty. Their handlers were well prepared with bottled water and fruit.

While the orang utans were being loaded onto a truck to be transported to the rehabilitation centre, one of them stuck its arm out of the cage through an open hatch and reached out to the orang utan beside it. The other one did likewise and both of them shook hands, as if saying “Well done, we made it back alive”.

It was at that point I thought that these noble creatures were so much like human beings. The need to interact with others and the sense of mutual support may have prompted that human-like gesture.

The photo I took was as simple as it was going to get. No special techniques, no special effects and very minimal work on it in PhotoShop, the image handling program. I did not even recrop or rotate the photo to straighten it. This particular photo was a straightforward, no nonsense snapshot of a poignant moment between two primates who had made an epic journey back to their homeland. It was taken on the spur of the moment, almost instinctively.

As a photojournalist, you have to be observant of your subjects and surroundings, as I have mentioned in earlier articles. More often than not, the important photos have little details that tell the story far more effectively than the “big picture”. For the orang utans, that small but significant gesture was the first of many steps on the road back home.

Source:
http://thestar.com.my/

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