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As the holy month of Ramadan draws to a close, the sweet smell of sugar melting into butter wafts through the neighborhood villages of the Bunaken Marine Reserve, in North Sulawesi, as Muslim women bake rafts of crescent-shaped cookies for their friends.

For many of these women, giving glass jars heaped with cookies to Christian islanders is a way of saying thank you to them for the invitations to Christmas dinners and Easter lunches extended over the years.

The Bunaken Marine Reserve consists of five islands — Bunaken, Manado Tua, Siladen, Montehage and Nain — and currently there are more than 20,000 people living within its limits.

Aside from new migrants, the residents of Bunaken Island are overwhelmingly of the same ethnicity, although they are divided by faith: Muslims live in Kampung Islam (Muslim village), while Christians live in Kampung Kristen (Christian village), which is distinguished by Patmos church, with its gleaming white spires jutting up into the sky against a backdrop of blue.

A single road connects the two villages, and several minutes’ walk down this road from the church is a gated checkpoint. The checkpoint serves no function, as it is rarely manned, and people come and go as they like from one village to the other.

Although they live in different villages, Muslim and Christian islanders socialize often — during walks through the forest and fishing expeditions many kilometers out at sea, in the schoolyard and at the traditional market.

Livestock also roams freely around Bunaken Island. There are few complaints from the neighbors, even if escaped pigs — which are regarded as unclean in Islam — find their way into the garden of a Muslim family, or untended goats from the Muslim side of town end up nibbling on flowers or chewing the laundry hanging in the front yard of a Christian family.

The key to this island harmony is tolerance on both sides.

Bunaken is a place where on one fairly typical occasion I was awed to see 20-odd civil servants attending a meeting gathered in a prayer led by their only Muslim colleague, who was speaking in Arabic. And, at the end of the meeting, it was the turn of a Christian woman to lead the group of civil servants — including the Muslim woman — in prayer.

The islanders have also learned to face their hardships together. While the government has taken on some of the responsibility of managing the area’s abundant exploitable resources, like timber and fish, many problems continue to afflict the villagers

Western-standard services and facilities are available at the hotel bungalows and dive resorts dotting the island’s white-sand beaches, but it is a different story further inland, where the majority of villagers have settled.

Power generation is one problem that occupies the thoughts of Muslims and Christians alike.

As on many small islands in the archipelago, electricity remains a luxury. State power utility PLN has placed a number of generators on the island, but Bunaken people are accustomed to 12 hours off during the day, 12 hours on at night.

Children in Bunaken still study in classrooms with no electricity, and must read by the natural light that shines into the room.

Even the bungalows of the luxury dive resorts on Bunaken, which have their own big power generators, are not equipped with air-conditioning

All over the sickle-shaped island, people keep themselves cool with ceiling fans, which use just a fraction of the energy of even the smallest air-conditioner.

Waste is another issue the islanders have to deal with. Garbage can be blown around by the wind, or pulled along by ocean currents from Manado — the city at the tip of North Sulawesi — washing up on the shores of Bunaken as flotsam.

“Before the enactment of the ‘Clean Our Coasts, Save Our Seas’ program in Manado, prior to the World Ocean Conference [in May], it was uglier than this,” said Irsan, a security guard at a local dive center, indicating a clump of plastic bottles, yellow shoelaces and seaweed that had been uncovered on the shore at low tide.

Besides spoiling diving spots, garbage also affects the welfare of traditional fishermen, as many forms of garbage can kill fish. Bunaken’s road infrastructure is another problem. Many of the existing roads are obscured in places by bushes or trees, so people go from village to village by foot.

A few motorbike taxi drivers offer their services to fellow islanders in need of transport, and also to tourists, but usually just during the day. There are also small boats that make several stops picking up passengers from coastal villages.

“Centuries ago, the settlement along the coastline of that island was the one locals referred to as Manado,” said Ronny, a fisherman, pointing to a huge island-mountain. As he steered his boat away from the pier leading to his village in Bunaken, the veins in his hands and neck bulged prominently.

The city of Manado was originally called Wenang, the fisherman said. But then the volcano was renamed Manado Tua (Old Manado) and Wenang was renamed Manado.

“That village over there was where my ancestors came from,” Ronny said, his voice competing with the roar of the boat’s engine.

The surrounding region of five islands, covering about 75,000 hectares in total, is home to unique underwater biodiversity, and attracts a huge number of tourists and scuba divers from around the world.

Tourism provides additional opportunities for the islanders.

“When our catch is low, or we’re just too tired to fish, most of my friends and I just rent out our boats on the Manado Harbor to eager day-trippers. Sometimes I tell my teenage son to take the boat with him,” Ronny said.

“He can get hundreds of thousands of rupiah renting the boat to divers for a few hours. It’s easier than fishing and it puts more food on the table.”

Children often wait on the beach for their fathers to return from fishing.

Taking little notice of the vivid sunsets, they play around the jetty near the Bunaken Tourism Office, jumping into the water over and over again. In the twilight, their shadows blend with the shadows of trees, then disappear as night falls.

Back in the Christian and Muslim villages, during the humid evenings youngsters climb up lookout towers, crudely constructed from planks and bamboo. In the low light, they strum their guitars and bang plastic drums and kettles and pans with sticks like professional percussionists.

Some young men shake maracas and sing whatever songs are currently getting the most radio time.

If they are not entertaining the villagers — who’ll either cheer them or jeer at them — then at least they are entertaining themselves.

It seems that the people of Bunaken are accustomed to this way of life — and to living in harmony.