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PETER CRANFIELD AND IBU ACE ROBIN
A PIONEERING COUPLE Peter Cranfield and Ibu Ace Robin, founders of Nusa Alam International School and Medana Bay Marina, are two long-term residents of Lombok, who have truly given back to the island that they have chosen to call home. Peter was destined for life as an expat long before he came to Lombok. A British national, born and brought up in Pakistan until the age of eight, he was educated in England while his parents ran a cattle ranch in the Nigerian highlands bordering Cameroun. He later qualified as a mining engineer and worked in Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Australia, before returning to Indonesia to Central Kalimantan. Ibu Ace, from Bandung, Java, was also employed in the mining and mineral exploration industry, and the couple met through mutual friends in Jakarta in 1987. Two years later, they got married in Bandung and moved directly to Thailand where Peter was running an exploration unit of an Australian company with forays into Burma and Vietnam. They returned to Indonesia in 1990 and settled in Lombok, where Ace opened Global
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Export Services with Gil Carroll from NZ, whilst Peter commuted to Vietnam on a mining job in the north near Halong Bay. Gil returned home in mid-1992 after a severe car accident and Peter joined in the business, packing and exporting Lombok pottery for the Lombok Pottery Centre — an NZ aid project. This grew quickly into sourcing and exporting all manner of handicrafts from Lombok in container loads through Surabaya to clients around the world. In 2006, Global Export Services was awarded the ‘Primaniyarta’ Indonesia Export Award for small and medium exporters, which Ibu Ace proudly received from President SBY at a ceremony in Jakarta. Meanwhile, in the late 90s, the couple’s two children, Adam born in 1992 and Soraya born in 1994, were attending local schools in Lombok. Peter takes up the story, “We soon saw the need for a better standard of education and while other expats on the island also saw the need, no one was prepared to invest time and money to make it happen. Through our friends, Jane and Peter King (Headmaster of the Newmont