The sound of children's laughter wafted out of the house on Jalan Soekarno Hatta in East Alok subdistrict, Sikka regency. Twenty children were sitting around a large table. Katerina Dua Yovin, 16, straightened up and raised her hand. The other children fell silent.

Yovin, as she is known, began with a story about her neighborhood in Alok, where there were still many parents who beat their children for not doing their homework. "Have you experienced the same thing?" she asked. Alvira Novitasari raised her hand. "I did," she said. "The child is naughty, so he must be beaten."

Fighting corruption is nothing new in Indonesia. But the battle fought by people in rural areas may be something that is little known by the general public. According to Zainal Arifin Mochtar, Director of the Center for Anti-Corruption Studies at Gadjah Mada University, efforts by villagers to fight corruption have to be considered significant, because so far, awareness about fighting it is mostly present amongst the middle classes in urban centers.

Sulaeman does pretty well for himself. The 49-year-old employs four workers on his one-hectare oil palm estate in Sengeti village, about an hour-and-a-half's drive from his home in Tahtul Yaman village. Income from the harvests paid for his three children's college tuition, and for his motorbike.

Clearing Oil Palm in Leuser
Efforts to restore forest in the Leuser Ecosystem Zone that had lasted for six years ran aground when the gubernatorial succession took place. An environment-loving community in Aceh Tamiang tried hard to mend the damage.

The Perfect Sweetsop
A civil servant from Buleleng, Bali, self-taught himself how to crossbreed superior seeds. His influence has spread through Java and Bali.

No ordinary sweetsops hung on the trees at the Superior Fruit nursery in Singaraja, Bali. The skin of the fruit was a striking dark red, not green like the usual sweetsops (annona squamosa) found in Indonesia, and neither was it covered in bumps. Instead the surface was smooth with little dots. When it was broken open, the texture of the flesh was more like a common sweetsop, clear white in color. The taste was sweet and creamy like ice cream.

Indonesia is the country with the fifth-most bird species in the world. More than 1,600 species of bird live in the archipelago, and 380 of them are native to nowhere else. Of those endemic species, 13 are critically endangered. Jihad, a staffer of Burung Indonesia Bird Conservation, said many of the birds lived in especially small areas, making them more vulnerable to habitat disruption. "Birds that are only distributed on Sangihe Island like anis bentet (shrike thrush) face the high risk of extinction when the island is subjected to land conversion," he said.