Borneo Orangutan Survivial Foundation - BOS UK

BOS - Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation I initially chose for the cute Orangutans. I had seen the Orangutan Diaries on the telly featuring the Nyaru Menteng Project and was hooked. Then it got a bit more complicated:

There is BOS International on their website called 'Save the Orangutan' and then there are independent charities which are affiliated to it like BOS UK called 'Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, Orangutan Outreach in the US and in Australia it is getting completely confusing with BOS Australia and The Australian Orangutan Project which is supporting the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation.

This is quite a bit of Orangutan, Survival, Borneo and Foundation going on, isn't it? And we haven't even touched the fact that there are Orangutans on Sumatra as well. Then I met Grainne McEntee on Twitter who is posting for BOS (@savetheorang) who got me started in my research.

And this is what I found out: There are several Orangutan projects going on in Malaysia and Indonesia and all the BOS affiliates are raising funds and supporting those projects. Their main focus is to give injured, starved and orphaned Orangutans a home and nurse them back to health until they can go back into the wild again. Additionally they are campaigning against use of palm oil which is not from sustainable sources and the destruction of Orangutan habitat, in particular illegal logging.

It however seems to be difficult to donate to a specific project. I for example was so attached to the Nyaru Menteng project featured by the Orangutan diaries, but I wasn't sure which of the BOS affiliates to use. I now know that BOS UK is sort of the fund-raising equivalent of Nyaru Menteng. While Lone Droscher-Nielsen was running the project in Indonesia, Michelle Desilets founded BOS UK to get the much needed financial support. This all started ten years ago and now the first of the hand reared orangutans are ready to go back into the wild. As if that weren't a huge challenge in itself it is made so much harder by the fact that the 'wild' is something that hardly still exists. Now Michelle founded a new charity 'Orangutan Land Trust' to preserve the land .