In the rainforest between the cities of Balikpapan and Samarinda in Borneo, a 14-month-old orangutan is beginning to learn how to find food and climb trees. Its teachers are human caregivers who themselves are learning how to act like orangutans. The Four Paws Forest School, run by two nonprofits in cooperation with the Indonesian government, was created to help orphaned orangutans prepare to eventually live in the forest on their own.

“They’re learning all of the basic things that they need to do in order to survive,” says Robert Ware, the director of the U.S. division of Four Paws, an international animal rights nonprofit that funded the new sanctuary. Jejak Pulang, a local organization, is running the “school” in a 590-acre section of rainforest provided by the Indonesian government.

The youngest orangutans, who would normally cling to their mothers until they’re two years old, get care 24 hours a day, and attend what the school calls kindergarten to learn some of the basics of orangutan life. At the age of two, as the animals become a little more independent, they learn more about skills like what to eat, how to travel through trees, and how to build a nest to sleep in at night. By the age of six or eight, the animals are ready for “orangutan academy,” the final stage, when the caregivers pull back on any human contact before the orangutans can be reintroduced into the wild.

All of this is expensive to run: The school, which began construction in 2017 and is still under development, is led by a primatologist, and currently has a staff of 15 caretakers, two vets, and a biologist. (The school is now building “night houses” where the baby orangutans can safely stay without caretakers while they sleep.) The teaching methods are based in part on the experience of the primatologist, Signe Preuschoft, who has rehabilitated apes for more than 20 years. At the moment, there are eight young orangutans in residence. Though the school is scaling up, it will eventually care for a maximum of 30 animals. “With the level of care they need, and the more or less 24-hour supervision that the younger animals need, we don’t want to stretch ourselves too thin and not be providing the highest level of care and training to the animals,” says Ware.

This level of effort is necessary, arguably, because the Bornean orangutan is critically endangered. Between 1999 and 2015, more than 100,000 of the animals were lost. Only around 50,000 are left, many living in isolated patches of forest in groups that are too small to maintain the local population. Huge swaths of the local rainforest have been converted into plantations to produce palm oil, used in everything from lipstick and shampoo to pizza dough and instant noodles. As the orangutan’s habitat shrinks, the animals have also increasingly come in conflict with humans. Farmers sometimes kill adults that eat crops, leaving babies to be sold into the illegal pet trade or abandoned.

When orphaned animals arrive at the new sanctuary, they often need intensive care. One one-year-old orangutan was starving, hairless, and had a bullet embedded in his shoulder. The sanctuary has to address basic health needs before it can teach skills. The work is challenging. The animals normally would learn motor skills from their mothers, and when they’ve lacked proper nutrition, their cognitive skills are also delayed. Caretakers have to provide emotional support to baby orangutans that saw their own mothers die, while teaching the orangutans not to bond with other humans by limiting contact with other people (unlike some sanctuaries that allow visitors, this one does not).

The caretakers also have to learn new skills, like how to find fruit in the forest. A tree-climbing specialist, who trains firefighters and others how to climb trees, visited the sanctuary to give caretakers lessons in how to safely climb high into the canopy.