Kinari Webb’s philosophy as a scientist is shaped by her experience of the fall of the Berlin Wall as a teenager.

Kinari Webb first developed the vision for Health In Harmony when studying orangutans in 1993 at Gunung Palung National Park in Indonesia. There she encountered not only a beautiful and threatened natural environment but also the dire health needs of the people surrounding the National Park. After this experience, Kinari decided to become a physician and return to Indonesia to work together with local communities both to improve their health and to preserve the natural environment. She graduated from Yale University School of Medicine with honors and then completed her residency in Family Medicine at Contra Costa Regional Medical Center in Martinez, California. Kinari founded Health In Harmony in 2005 to support the combined human and environmental work that she planned in Indonesia. After a year of traveling around Indonesia looking for the best site for this program (unmet health care needs, forest that could still be saved and a responsive government), Kinari helped co-found the Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI, which means “harmoniously balanced”) program in West Kalimantan with Hotlin Ompusunggu and Antonia Gorog. She is also an Ashoka Social Entrepreneur and Rainier Amhold Fellow. Kinari currently splits her time between Indonesia and the US.

This story originally aired on Sept. 1, 2017 in an episode titled “Metamorphosis.”

Story Transcript

It is 1989 and I am a sixteen-year-old exchange student from the U.S. and I have just walked up to the Berlin Wall for the first time.  My hands traced the giant graffiti letters in front of me that say, Weg mit der mauer. Get rid of the wall.  But that wall is so solid.  It is hard concrete. 

Behind me, I go up on a viewing platform so I can see to the other side.  On the western side, it’s just a green park that goes right up to the edge of a colorful wall.  But on the other side, there is just this desolate no-man’s land.  And the wall on the other side has not a speck of graffiti.  It is all gray.  There are soldiers patrolling with orders to shoot to kill, and I am horrified. 

So the reason I’m in Berlin is that I have this amazing opportunity to go with my host sister’s class on a rare trip into East Germany.  So the classes had the history explained to us about how Germany was divided after World War II into four occupied zones including Berlin, which was in the soviet section.  But then millions of refugees were flooding out of the east bloc so they closed the border and then they built a wall around West Berlin, creating an island within East Germany. 

And one of the only ways through that wall is called Checkpoint Charlie.  So all the students, we line up there and we are getting ready to go through and wind your way down to this kind of steel box where the doors close on both sides.  Then this soldier examines my paperwork and he's looking through my passport and he's just glaring at me.  I think he's just taking so long I think there is no way he is going to let me through.  But finally, with one last glare, he stamps me into the country and I emerge into a foreign world. 

It turns out that it isn’t just the other side of the wall that is colorless.  It feels like all of East Germany is gray.  The buildings are covered in coal soot, the only two types of cars just come in muted colors, and even the clothing just is drab.  But over the coming days as we get to know people, I realize that the bleakest part of the landscape is people’s souls.  People tell us about their despair and their hopelessness.  Then they ask us for ballpoint pens because those don’t occur there.  The whole situation feels completely absurd to me. 

Then one night we stay in a youth hostel and there's an East German class staying there as well and we end up staying up late into the night hearing their stories.  In hushed voices, they tell us their hopes and dreams. 

One young man in particular, Mikhael, seems to develop a little bit of a crush on me especially when he finds out that I’m from New Mexico and I even ride horses on mesa tops.  He has somehow acquired a poster of the American southwest and he wants nothing more in life than to be able to see those beautiful, stark, wild open spaces.  But he knows that that is impossible, that never in his lifetime will he be able to travel, and that he can be punished even for wanting that. 

That night, I begin to know my freedom in a way I had never even come close to before. 

A few days later, we meet up with Mikhael again, and the designated meeting place turns out to be this giant communist square.  So my host sister and I show up and there's thousands of people in the square, and we think there is no possible way that we are going to find him.  But then suddenly he emerges out of the crowd and we said, “How did you find us?” 

He says, “It was easy.  No one in East Germany wears purple.” 

So that was May of 1989.  In July, I return to New Mexico.  Shortly after arriving, I sit my father down at the kitchen table and I tell him, “Dad, we have to do something.  There is a wall, to keep people in.  This is not okay.” 

My father just kind of laughs at me and holds up his hands, and he says, “But you know, I don't think that there's anything we can do and I’m quite sure that nothing is ever gonna change.  And you know, it’s really kinda complicated.” 

But to my sixteen-year-old brain, it does not seem complicated at all.  It seems totally clear and simple.  The wall is wrong and my friend Mikhael is on the other side. 

So Mikhael and I are writing letters to each other and each one takes about a month to get through.  But I have to tell him that I’m actually in love with someone else, but he's fine with that and we enjoy having a friendship that crosses this terrible divide.  Initially, his letters are just filled with more despair.  But then in September he starts to write about political unrest and protests.  And then his letters start to have hope creeping in. 

But still, in November, on the ninth, when the evening news says the East Germans can now cross the border, we are all in total shock and delight.  So Mikhael and I join the world in just elation. 

At Christmas, I return to visit my host family in West Germany and then I go to Berlin for New Year’s.  On the 31st, I arrive, I drop my bags, I hop on a train, head to the wall, I get off at the last stop, and from afar it is the noise coming from the wall.  You just couldn’t believe it.  It was like fireworks exploding and popping of champagne corks and laugher and delight.  As you got closer and closer it got louder and louder, until suddenly there I am on the wall and this time it is totally different. 

I slap my hands on the wall, and then a moment later I get boosted up onto the top of the wall with hundreds of other people.  It’s been cleared off and I look down on the eastern side and there are these soldiers looking up at us clearly having not a clue what to do. 

All along the wall, people are using hammers to break off souvenirs, but shortly we all begin to feel that this just isn’t enough.  So the barricades, these metal barricades get kind of ripped apart and become makeshift sledgehammers, and then we just start bashing away at the wall. 

In our section, we take turns and, after a while, we have a hole big enough that we can peer through and we can greet the guard on the other side who just looks back bewildered at us.  Then, after a while, we have a hole big enough that I reach through and I grab four East Germans who have ventured across the Death Zone and they step through. 

Then a group of us take them on their first tour of the west.  And in one neon-lit bar, I remember West Germans competing with each other and buying them colorful cocktails and kissing their stunned faces. 

The next day I just stride over the remains of the wall and get on a train to go visit Mikhael, to go surprise him.  There are no phones so I can’t warn him, but I just show up that afternoon at his door and start knocking on it.  From all around me, behind curtains, are these wary eyes watching me.  But when Mikhael opens the door he is elated. 

And then, six months later, Mikhael returns the surprise and I come home one day in New Mexico and find him delightedly swinging in my hammock. 

So we have remained friends over the years and it has been fascinating to watch his life evolve.  At one point, he told me about this thing that happened, that they broke into the Secret Police headquarters and sent everyone their Stasi files.  His contained everything he had ever done on his birthday for his whole life, a copy of every single letter we had written to each other including some that never made it through, and exact details of every single meeting we had.  I still feel like I want to vomit when I think about how much the wall reached into every single part of their lives. 

But for both of us, the wall coming down changed everything.  For Mikhael, it meant that he then started his own business and he has had this great life where he's travelled all over the world.  And for me, no one could ever tell me again that change wasn’t possible, or that it couldn’t happen unexpectedly fast.  I often wonder what impossible thing is going to happen five months from now.  You know, the political structures that we think are as solid as concrete can literally be smashed under our hands. 

In 1993, I was again a student in a foreign land.  This time, I was studying orangutans in Indonesian Borneo and I saw the forest disappearing around me.  I heard the stories about how the reason that they were logging was because they needed the money to pay for healthcare.  But I remembered my experience in Berlin, and I knew that change was possible if enough people wanted it and you attacked the problem from enough different directions. 

So I founded a nonprofit called Health In Harmony and, together with thousands of people, we have had the joy over the last ten years to watch the number of illegal loggers go from about 1,350 logging households down to just a hundred and eighty individuals now.  At the same time, health and wealth have dramatically improved.  We reached through and grabbed those loggers and discovered that they were the same as us, trapped in an impossible situation and wanting out. 

So it has been a joy to be part of that bright spot in the world, but in the bigger picture I often wonder whether or not we are going to survive as a human species.  Are we actually going to do something about the fact that a healthy planet is absolutely necessary for human life and for the life of all the amazing biodiversity we share this planet with?  Can we break down the barricades that divide us and find a way to create a sustainable future together?  I believe we can, and I want us all to dance and drink champagne on the crumbling edifice of that wall as well. 

Thank you.