Truth is...

Truth is, I’m a really awkward dorky girl who just goes about life doing whatever seems like a good idea to me and my skewed ideas of the world and what it should be. I think sometimes I look cool on paper, but then you meet me and I open my mouth and it all goes away. It is no different here. 

My days consist of hours of cleaning poo and throwing food punctuated with hours of reading and data entry. That’s the reality of it. I am sweaty and dirty and I’m sure I smell terrible but I can’t tell anymore. I take cold showers when we have water, and use baby wipes when I don’t. That being said, I’m so glad I came. This suits me. As much as I miss people at home, miss my comfortable life and routines, I would do this all again given the choice-- even knowing my project would get canceled and I wouldn’t get into the field. 

I clean poo, but it’s the most exciting poo cleaning can get, I think. Its like an animal husbandry gauntlet every morning. I have to outsmart chimpanzees so they don’t take my broom or squeegee (by the way, brooms here have no handles, its like a witches broom on Halloween without the part she rides, it took a lot of getting used to). I have to watch where I step inside the satellite enclosures to make sure I don’t get close enough to the feed holes where bitchy gorillas can grab me and smash me into the bars ( fortunately there is a grate that runs the middle of the hall. In this case, splitting the middle is a very good thing). I have to avoid the holes they dig in their enclosures when I go hide their food in the morning, I feel like they set traps since the holes are never obvious (we hide the food so its like an Easter egg hunt every morning).  And then I get to play. Some of the guys don’t go outside every day, or in some cases any day, so I run around with them (outside the enclosure because I like my face where it is and I think my intestines should stay inside my body), groom them, let them groom me (chimpanzees don’t like clothes, they get in the way of grooming. My watch and my hat have to come off before I touch them or they will take them off and I will never get them back) and in some cases just hold their hand. Then there is the data entry.

There is so no way to romanticize what I do for that. The project that I accepted is something I had thought of early in my masters career and had put aside for several reasons. I wanted to do a field based project, wanted the cool sexy stories you get when you’re in the field, I wanted to test myself out there and prove myself as a field biologist—but it was not to come to pass. Instead I am going through 20 years of files, histories of every animal that has come through Limbe Wildlife Centre for treatment. I will put them into some sort of order after which I will do an analysis of the patterns that show up to help the sanctuary and the government decide where to direct education and enforcement efforts. In the end there will be a lot of math done, graphs and maps produced and I will hopefully have retained some of my faith in humanity. 

These cases have given me an insight into the behavior of some of the animals and an empathy that makes me almost happy to clean their cages in the morning. It makes sense to me now that Julie doesn’t want to go outside, if I were locked in a room for 12 years by myself, I’m sure I’d be afraid of big open spaces and large numbers of my species as well. Achou is our resident dancing baboon. I thought it was cute and funny until last week when I got to her file and realized its an idiosyncratic behavior that comes from being in a box so small she couldn’t turn around so the dance she does is the only movement she could do for many years. Some stories are better, some are much much worse. And for any of you that know the rules to my feeling(s) (most of which are reserved for little kids, the elderly and animals), you’ll know this is pretty hard for me. But I have the benefit of being able to leave my computer and touch or at least observe these guys. I get to play chase with Julie, watch Chella command his group, see Achou atop a pole or running around the enclosure, watch Suzanne be able to walk and interact with the group and see Tripod climbing and jumping through branches in his enclosure. Captivity is not the place for these animals, for any non-domesticated animal really, but this place is a haven for them. There is food, social interaction, clean and safe places to sleep. It is not perfect, sometimes animals can be terrible to each other, but it is orders of magnitude better than what they had. I am privileged to be a part of this and consider myself very lucky to be here. 

On a lighter note:

Fresh barracuda tastes pretty amazing.

Local people eat the head of the fish and I am still not sure how or what they get out of it.

There is a gecko that lives in my room that I call Dobby because he has a long nose and big eyes.

When a chimpanzee or gorilla wants something they make fart noises.

Multiple animals have happy food noises, the most of which being our cross river gorilla Yangu who has a cross between a moan and a wail when she eats elephant grass.

I really enjoy being called Madame.

When they say they speak French and English here, they meant the “and”. They speak it together in some weird pidgin hybrid language. So my French hasn’t made much progress, but I am starting to get some of the pidgin. “Wuna no chop this kind bush beef for dem go finish small time” or “Don’t eat bushmeat or they will soon be extinct”. The lack of any discernible grammar rules has made it difficult to learn, so anything I’ve learned is just based on hearing it or reading it enough times.

Hope all is going well where you are. I will see you soon.