Willie Smits II - How kids helped him save the rain forest

A couple of days ago my dad told me Willie's miracle saving the rain forest began with kids helping him. This is exactly the kind of story I want you guys to be inspired by. Real kid power! I e-mailed Willie and asked him if he would tell me what the kids did and how they did it. His answer follows. Thank you Willie for what you do and for telling us about real stuff kids can do that matters to the environment.

"To answer your question, indeed, all that I do now came about not because of some government program, not because there was some big nature conservation organization giving a lot of money, but only because schools in Balikpapan, an oil city on the East coast of Borneo, decided that they simply would begin and go for it.

They were children your age that were willing to do spelling contests, drawings, bake cookies, sold some of their old stuff, etc to raise that first 5.000 Dollar in one week time! Then a local company doubled the money and I could start building the first facilities. But the children continued, they set aside every month parts of their pocket money, they came out to bring food to the orangutans, they made pictures and produced their first Hyperstacks, an old fashioned but at that time revolutionary method of organizing and linking pages in the form of what we now know as HTML, on the very small screen MacIntosh computers. At those days I was the first person to have a Commodore 64 computer and the army would come to check on whether I was not doing dangerous things with this computer. Moreover so when I was the first person in Borneo to have a telex machine with which you could make a perforated strip of paper that you then had to run through a special tool to send individual letters through the telephone line to the other side of the world! Now in the modern age.... But those children made these very first CD's with their rain forest project on it and sent it by mail off to other schools around the world, to Korea, Japan, Chili, the USA. And they would every morning, when I would bring my three sons to school before leaving for the jungle, come running and tell me when more support had come from some part of the world as a reply to the CD and request for help they had sent. And they would smile!!!

It were those schoolchildren, your age, that used the most modern technologies at that time, that just did it. What they started has now become the worlds' largest primate conservation effort. What are our politicians waiting for? Don't we have enough evidence to know that we are destroying the world for your generation? If the founders fathers of America had had such short term vision, what would have become of your country? We just need to begin moving. When you stand still the target will always be far away, but when you begin at least you get closer and can see better what needs to be done next."