Today, we received a hand written letter from a neighboring village, Kouroussa, located on the north boundary of the national park. It indicated a chimp was in their village, injured, and had its hands tied with metal wire. It was a request for help to come deal with the problem (people living in villages surrounding the park are afraid of wild chimps and will try to kill them unless the authorities or our project team come quickly to intervene). They said it's an adult female but we are unsure if it's one of our released chimps or a wild one. We assembled a team with equipment: a cage, a dose of anesthesia, fruits (to entice her closer), etc. Our camp manager, our staff vet, and a lead keeper Kenda would set off first thing in the morning to investigate. We don't know how much of the information is accurate but it smells like disaster.
Kenda is a Guinean who is our most experienced keeper. He began working here on the project when he was 15 years old. He is now 31. Last year, he decided he needed a break to try and do something else so he quit. One year later, he pleaded for his old job back. The attachments he developed with the chimps were far stronger than he imagined and he simply missed them too much. He has seen most of them from birth and has been privileged to watch their development and release. He has an easy manner, reticient, and is very gentle with the animals. The manager wants him to come along to Kouroussa tomorrow because in all likelihood, the villagers will not speak French. Kenda is fluent in both Malinke and Peul.
I am settling into the pace of life here and am closer to feeling in time with the rhythm. I have nearly shed my delicate western skin and am growing into a new primal suit. Here, one must learn to live without a comfort zone. Once you accept this fact, you can get on with life here without the internal whining, which is the initial reflexive thought pattern. But the transitional time it takes to reach this point can be sobering. Finding physical comfort has been very tough. When I'm not working, I am often sitting on a splintered wood bench or on the dirt ground. There are very few chairs around and no couches. Beds here are made of straw and plastic sacks (the kind used to carry 100 lb. sacks of rice) are sewn over them. The lack of furniture combined with the ceaseless annoyance of biting insects, heat, constant itching, humidity, flies, no electricity (and of course no refrigeration), being perpetually on alert for snakes, croc's, & hippo's makes for an intense crash course in tolerance adjustment and patience expansion. At this point, I'd gladly pay for the privilege of lounging on an overstuffed micro-suede sofa littered with velvet throw pillows. It has been a much more difficult transition here than previously in Botswana. Life in Guinea serves up more challenges but, in the end, has potentially more rewards. I have already questioned my ability to cope with the hardships here but if I can endure this, I will have taken a giraffe's step toward meeting a personal goal of "going native".
At lunch today, sitting with some of our French staff, I attempted to ask if we have jam (in my crippled French). I said, "Est-que nous avons des preservatifs?" (not knowing the word for jam or jelly). They all fell silent, looked at each other, then broke into laughter. Camille leaned over to me and said, "Michael, 'preservatifs', in French, are condoms."
This project I'm working at was started back in 1994 by a French woman named Estelle Raballand, who is the director. Her courage and ambition to take on a project of this sort is admirable. She also serves on the board of PASA (Pan African Sanctuary Alliance), which is a consortium of accredited primate sanctuaries that establish protocols and initiatives to guide the direction of and to define and implement the vision for future primate conservation. She is well-known in the primate circles of the wildlife conservation community. She typically takes on about 10 western staff to run the project, in addition to the 9 local keepers that are based here. Most people here are on a 6 month tour of duty, as that's about the maximum time one can tolerate life in the bush before the first signs of insanity appear. She schedules people on a rotational basis so there are always staff coming or going. At the moment, there are 9 of us. 7 Frenchies, 1 Belgian, and myself. French is the spoken language but a few of them know a little English so, along with my 3rd grade French skills, we somehow manage.
We are split between two camps, a base camp and a release site, both located on the Niger river. Our base camp, located at the site of the deserted village of Somoria*, houses 7 of us. Here, we have 3 enclosures for chimps: our largest one for the adult group (12 chimps) aged 8-13. Its an electrified fence (powered by solar panel) with a perimeter of about a mile. For our safety, there is no contact with the adult group, other than handing them food through the fence to feed them; the "petit" group (15 chimps) aged 5-8 are the naughty teenagers and are housed in a large iron cage; the nursery group (8 chimps) aged 2-5 are the adorable babies and are also housed in an iron cage.
There are a few built structures here in Somoria camp: the kitchen hut, where we prepare and eat meals communally; the food prep room for chimps, where we prepare bottles for the two young groups (milk formula and nutritional supplement) and where we store all their fruit in 3 large bins and stacked shelves; the vet room, which is used for clinical procedures and where we prepare their meds; a small toilet hut (two bricks to set your feet, squat style, above a hole in the ground); a small bathing hut for bucket showers; the rest of the huts are sleeping quarters for staff and keepers. There is a network of narrow pathways that connect all of these places which cut through the dense bush.
Our second camp is about 17 miles away near the village of Bakaria. It's our release site and the place where ultimately all of our chimps will be set free. It's a much smaller camp, extremely remote, and only can accomodate two of us, plus about 4 African keepers. The goal of the project is to release all of them chimps once they have reached sexual maturity (10-12 yrs) although they are typically not released until they are about 13-15 yrs old. The mission of the CCC is to serve as a release project, returning orphaned chimps to their rightful home in the wild. We are not a sanctuary, and all 36 of our chimps, with the exception of Coco, will ultimately be released. Eventually, I will be rotated to Bakaria and hopefully it will coincide with the next scheduled release (late June). To witness the cage doors open and the first steps into the wild is to witness a re-birth, of liberty not religion.
* Two months after this entry, I learned that Somoria village had been decimated by disease. It no longer exists because 25 years ago, half the villagers became blind. Many died. The survivors became convinced that a terrible curse had befallen the village and promptly left. Subsequently, it was discovered that Onchocercosis (River Blindness) was responsible for the tragedy. Inquiries into the risk levels that we are taking by occupying this same stretch of river have been met with assurances that it takes several years of exposure before the accumulation of toxins become potentially fatal.
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