This May, I am leaving Amsterdam for four weeks with my youngest son Mick. We are going to Gili Trawangan, a small island off the coast of Lombok in Indonesia. Before sunrise, head torches on, we will walk 7 kilometres of beach in the dark looking for sea turtle nests.

It is hard work. And we cannot wait.

It started on our first trip to Gili T, when Mick fell completely in love with sea turtles. Not in a casual, souvenir-shop way. The kind of love that reorganises a kid's priorities entirely.

Before we left for that first trip, he decided to do something about it. He folded origami turtles — hundreds of them — and sold them at an event in our store on Elandsgracht. With that, and with donations from people who heard what he was doing, he raised €200 - 4 million rupiah - for Proyek Penyu, the turtle conservation organisation based on Gili T. Enough to build four new nest cages. Enough to protect 1,200 turtle eggs.

He had funded the alternative before he fully understood what it was the alternative to.

In Sanur, Bali, on that same trip, Mick fed baby sea turtles every day for four days. Tiny pieces of fish for the small ones, cabbage leaves for the larger ones. He was 7 years old and completely addicted to it. The joy on his face was the kind that makes you want to stop time.

On the last night in Bali, we sat together and I translated a leaflet from Proyek Penyu for him, sentence by sentence, into Dutch. It explained, quietly and clearly, why everything he had just fallen in love with was harming the animals he adored. Turtles raised in captivity before release never learn to deep dive. They cannot find food in the wild. What feels like rescue is often something else entirely.

I watched him understand this, word by word, in his own language.

Now we are going back.
This time for a month. Proyek Penyu runs a turtle track programme for residents of Gili T — people who live there for at least two months. They made an exception for us.
At 8 years old, Mick will be the youngest turtle warrior to join the programme.

Before sunrise, head torches on, we will walk the 7km stretch of beach with the team, documenting new nests, checking on existing ones, deciding together whether they need to be relocated. During the day we will swim around the island looking for turtles in the water. If we are lucky — and I know we will be — we will be there when eggs hatch and help the hatchlings find the ocean. There will also be beach cleanups, coral planting, and a lot of island life in between.

Mick is bringing his MD A6 dot grid notebook from the store to log every swim, every nest, every sighting. I am bringing mine too. Some things deserve to be written down properly.

We also have one small item in the store right now that is connected to all of this — a turtle piece I bought specifically because I wanted to sell it and donate the proceeds directly to Proyek Penyu.
I will share more about that separately. If you want to be part of what Mick and the team are protecting, that is one very direct way to do it.

We will share updates from the island while we are there — nests found, turtles spotted, early morning walks on an empty beach. Follow along.

Veel liefde van Mick — and from me.

Brigitta