- Monday: town trip
- Tuesday: fruit run
- Wensday: laundry day, going out with Zach`s group
- Thursday: town trip
- Friday: fruit run, going out with Baati`s group
- Saturday: theoretically nothing!
- Sunday: laundry day, sterilizing day
And then the duties, which are the same every day:
- night feeding
- early duties
- big cages morning
- big cages evening
- camp morning
- camp evening
And then the schedule, you have to follow: 5:30 prepare the bottles for the carantine babies, 6:00 give the milk to the new baby, 6:10 give the bottles for the nursery babies, 6:15 cut the fruits, 6:30 check the solar panel, etc, etc never ending story...
But then yeah, there is always sg unexpected that turns up, like Tic`s face at the morning feeding with a part of your mosquito nethanging from his ears and the other part in his hands, trying to hide it from you so that you won`t take away his tresure. And the best are the big question marks that never leave his eyes. You just adjust them to the current situation: "Is there anything wrong?", "Where is my milk?"Why did you close the door before I could get out?" So yes, the nursery babies decided to have weekly parties in our nursery bedroom barking into it and taking whatever they can find: coversheets, matrice, mosquito net. This starts to be annoying as these all are unexpected expenses. And Yunin and Jen are however rather unhappy with the idea of sleeping with the rats and snakes so they are lobbying to erease this duty from the list:) But for the moment to they misfortune they have to bear it even more often as Katie has left, and it made the rotation faster than it was before.
Before she has left, she had a goodbye party in Bikol 1, the closest village to the project. It was quite exciting to see all these people we work with in different context, having fun and just relaxing. They all gathered under the hangar of the chief of the village, drunk and danced to cameroonian music. As the cameroonian pop music is not so elaborated and diversified (which pop music is?) the only way you can dance to it is to shake your as along with your partner. The villegers are very proud of thier way of dancing and they keep asking whether people in Europe dance the same way or whether we can do like that. The thing what I liked about this party is that everybody was there: babies, children, young and elderly, which is none of big thing as the party was held in the middle of the village, under the blue sky, so nobody could sleep anyway. I filmed a lot the children. I loved the way they danced, much more than the adults. Maybe because when I arrived they were all drunk from the one bottle of beer that everyone could have and the enormous amount of palm wine (matango) that was already gone when I asked for it. I didn`t really mind, as it`s not my favourite taste. The oonly good thing about it is that it can be completely free if you find the right palm. The life of the cameroonians is very comfortable if you take into cnsideration that all the best food (fruits, vegetables and even alcohol) grows right next to them, it is around them everywhere. The palm wine, according to its name can be obtained from the palm tree by cutting it at the top and collecting the white fluid that pours out from it. If you have a chance you can obtain as much as 10 l of pure alcohol by a simple machete cut. The only problem ( is it a real problem?) is that you have to drink it within a day otherwise it goes wrong. Maybe that is why they dring so much here. You can`t really predict the taste of the wine, as the consistency depends on the tree itself, so it`s always a mistery what will you drink. Before it`s gone you can make quimbey from it, which is a kind of a whiskey, and I am not very keen on it. At Katie`s party all the quimbey I got I distributed between all the drunk people who were very happy to being offered a drink. As everybody got quickly into a good mood, despite I kept telling them we should go home because we would have to work the day after, I had to go back to the project alone through the forest. (Almost alone as Charlie come with me as long as finally he realised that there is no way I am going to become his girlfriend.) So first I thaught it would be sacaring to walk through the forest in the middle of the african night, but as there are no artificial lights around the area the moon and the stars enlightened the road enough so that most of the time I even didn`t have to use my headtorche.
So the social life is much better here, then I felt it was at the begining. Since Katie has left we play cards almost every evening, and when we do that we need somesnack, of caurse, thus there is a kind of competition who can prepare the best candies for the game. For the moment I think Yunin is the winner with her potato chips (can not compare with lays or chio or anything else), sweetened peanuts or ballos of coconut and sweetened milk. The second is Jen with her (apparently tipical american) fog, which can perfectly replace nutella, and Agnes, with her (apparently tipical french) sweet crepes. As for me I am only profiting from this competition, I can not prepare anything special. (But pls, if you have any recipie of cookies that don`t require baking, send it to me, so that I can also take part in the competition... we cannot bake here as the only oven we have is a mud one built by volunteers years ago and we don`t know how to use it)
Agnes is also more and more open, and we spend some nights together chatting about past and the chimps. I really admire her for the way she can handle and manage everything here, especially after hearing the stories she can tell us. Like i.e. there were quite a few robberies in the camp that she knows were done by some of the employees (the person who has been sent into prison had named them as complices) , but some of them have such unusual skills as darting an adult chimp, so Agnes can`t get rid of them, and she take the risk of keeping them, rather than having nobody to help in case a chimp escapes. The only thing we can do, as she says, is to reduce the temptation. And that is why we, the volunteers are here, to check if the amount of the rice for the employees` lunch is the same that was decided by Sheri, if all the screwdrivers, machettes, hammers, saws etc. go back to their places in the evening, when employees finish workinig with them, and if they use as much of kerosine and gas as it is needid for the generator or chainsaw. And so the employees hate that, and i.e. a few days ago they went on a strike, arriving 30 minutes late, so we had to feed all the chimps by our own, being four for the work that needs at least 9 persons. And they didn`t say a word why they did that, like 3 yrs old children who don`t want top explain why are they upset. later during the day they told Raymond, the chief of the personel that they problem was that we changet the monday menu from pistache sauce (which is a quite expensive dish) to makabo ( which is a common dish here). Agnes is afraid it might be about sg else, and she got scared Jen to death talkink about the possibility of an armed robbery. We had some "visitors" coming from Douala, and Agnes said they might came to inspect the area.
As for me I am much more concerned about the ant army, that visited us the other day. There are hundreds and hundreds of them, they can cover everything in a few minutes, and they can eat you alive. The only way to csare them away is to pour kerosene in their way. So we make cicles around the cages and our cabines. And that is why the new baby always has to sleep with one of us, because she can not escaope in case of ant attack. Anyway the new baby has changed a lot since she has been here. She is still unconfident comparing to other chimps in her age, but she already allows us to hold her, and even she screams sometimes when we leave her. I think I spend a lot of time with her and we strated to have a kind of boundary, so she started to come and sit on my knees, to groom me (it hurts!), and she discovers the world holding me. We started to integrate her with Baati`s group, but it turbned out that only Sambe is willing to play with her, which was a weard kind of game pulling her by her leg as Christopher Robin did it with Winnie:) The new baby was nonethless very happy to have a new friend.
Coffe is doing well with Ballas1s grp, she asks Ballas for reconciliation, which he gives her through the bars. Finally we got her second chamber ready, so she could move there and we could clean her cage, after a month. We had some problems doing that before, tehre was always something more precious things to do, like repairing Kiki`s and Ballas`s enclosure because there was a huge tree that fell over the fences.
Fortunately it didn`t happen to Jacky`s grp, I can`t really imagine 25 chimps kept for days in cages, it is a disaster. And they will be 26 soon as Mado`s belly grows fast, Agnes thinks she will give bitrth in July ( hehe, she hopes so, as she is leaving in August to France and she doesn`t want to miss it). I can`t wait to see the baby and the way Mado takes care of it, especially cause this kind of social behaviour is learned by young females by observing their mothers and other elder females, and Mado didn`t have this chance in her life. Hopefyully everything will go well.
Meanwhile we got news about 5 more chimps being kept in Bertoua. As far as we3 know one is a baby, so Agnes hopes she will be our new baby`s age so that they could form a group. As for the 4 older ones we have to find a place for them somewhere else, because there is no more room here at SYCRC.
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