Sierra Patridge cross stepping at a remote Balinese break.
Von Hoesslin sharing with some of the ladies she works with.
A worker cleaning parts in a small dish of soapy water. When you bring commerce into a community of craftsmen, they begin like this.
NGO called the East Bali Poverty Project( EBPP).
The group of us embarked on the trip to Bali in an effort to give back and to explore additional methods of bringing commerce to the people Booth had literally dedicated his remaining years of life to saving and putting on the path to an economically, culturally and ecologically sustainable future.
This particular morning we rolled down the gravel drive of Villa Gayatri( our palatial trip headquarters) in Ubud with Gusti at the wheel. Thanks to planning, hope and circumstance, we were joined by four of Von Hoesslin’ s company iconsambassadors and filmmaker Aaron Marcellino for the two-hour drive into the mountains of East Bali.
We had been invited to attend a festival where most of the children who had been educated through the project would be participating in one great big party of sorts. It was part of a celebration of Balinese Independence Day.
In 1998 Booth set out specifically to find the poorest people on Bali. He figured that he should begin his plan by putting it to the most difficult of tests. He had heard rumors of a lost tribe, a group cut off from Balinese society by a volcano eruption and the ensuing simple fact that no one thought to ever look for them. Hiking deep into the mountainous country of Eastern Bali with a guide, he found them. They were a lost and dying tribe— people who, as Booth observed, never smiled.
Most who travel Bali have experienced the cultural blessing of the Balinese smile. It is a renowned national asset. The people smile— it is how they are set spiritually. But that wasn’ t the case for the long-lost tribe. They had lost their smiles and much more. Booth saw them as a test case for world cultural development. He began to develop a plan to restore them one person at a time. He would do it through the children.
No one is exactly sure where the tribe came from originally,
28 DEEP SURF MAGAZINE March / April 2012