Back into the world of internet!

Hey everyone,



Let me start by saying that me being able to get on the internet every few weeks was a total lie - in the past 2 months I've only been able to get online once! I left CARE (the baboon sanctuary) yesterday and via a drive the Kruger National Park I'm staying with family friends in South Africa for a few days.



My stay at CARE was a different experience to say the least, but definitely different in a good way. There were about 600 baboons in captivity and a wild troop of about 400 that enjoyed waking us all up around 5 in the AM by playing and and running around on the roof our house (the mountain lodge). There were about a dozen or so fellow volunteers and we dealt primarly with 2 troops of baby and infant baboons. Days started at around 630 AM everyday (!) and ended around 545 PM and days of the week hardly existed; the weekends were treated just like any other weekday. Coming in this all seemed pretty overwhelming to me and it took a while to become fully adjusted to the day to day workings of the center.



I had 3 or 4 shifts a day with the babies, which meant sitting in with either of the 2 troops for an hour at a time with 1 or 2 other volunteers. As soon as I walked into the hok (cage in afrikaans) I was greeted by the more boisterous males jumping on me and the more timid females coming up to me and presenting. It amazed me how I was able to develop friendships





An hour later I've found myself not having typed a word and instead spent some well earned sidetracking on facebook.. some things never change from high school apparently.



Anyways, what I was trying to say was that after a few weeks or so of being at CARE I had actually made friendships with the baboons. When all the volunteers went in to the hoks to take the babies into the sleeping room at the end of the day, there were a handful of baboons that would jump straight to me every day. When they were tired they would take naps on me and when they felt the need to go the bathroom it would be somewhere in my lap ("crotch pee" was the term lovingly given) or on my shoulder. The babies were given bottles and food four times a day and we the volunteers had to prepare the bottles and cut up mangos, watermelons, sweet potatoes etc into monkey friendly pieces. The milk bottles were composed of the ever delicious river water and a formula powder (which tasted delicious by the way). It was really cute/bizzare at first to see baby baboons drinking from a bottle just like humans and to see the baboons with foster moms wearing the same diapers as human babies.



In my stay there were only a few baboons with foster moms and they slept, showered and in general lived their lives with the foster moms. This meant that when I woke up in the morning it was an everday occurance to see a baby baboon running across the dining with their moms chasing after them.



When I say dining room I use it in the broadest of context. The lodge where we all stayed was in effect a building with in a really big cage (not too settling during a lightning storm). There were no walls to the main 'dining room' just a chain link fencing seperating us from a would be sea of wild baboons in our kitchen. Our lines for drying laundy were enclosed in the back of the house and evernow and then a wild one would reach his hand through the fence and steal an article or two from the line; I was waiting to see a baboon wearing boxers and a tshirt running around the center but unfortunately this never happened. There was a full grown tree slyly situated in the center of the lodge and it took me a while to comprehend that there was in fact a big tree growing through the house I was living in.

Most days passed without too much drama, but when there was drama it happened big time. I think my most exciting moment of the trip was when we found a black mamba living in the house. During dinner someone had gone upstairs and found it tucked away in the corner of the bathroom and unfortunately we have to kill all the snakes we find because they're too big a risk to the humans and the baboons alike and its not feasiable to relocate them. At this point everyone was freaking out and one of the staff went and grabbed the 'snake gun' but when he went upstairs to send the snake six feet under, it had dissapeared. This only added to the hysteria because everyone walks around at night when it would be hard to see the snake. A few minutes later he went back upstairs and it had reappeared. A few minutes later we heard a loud bang, and if I thought people were freaking out earlier, they had turned into hyperdrive now. I heard an ear splitting cry of "oh my god its next to the fridge!" followed by an undecipherable slew of obscenities: the snake had started falling through the floor boards. Inch by inch the deadliest snake in Africa was slowing emerging, and it showed no signs of slowing down. The thing was just under 9 feet long! The snake was still moving and no one was sure whether or not it was alive or not. This is because their muscles keep on spasming for 10 or so minutes after they die so it's hard to tell if a snake is dead instantly or not. The staffer with the gun came sprinting downstairs to a kitchen covered with snake blood and a questionably dead black mamba. He looked at it (much closer than any of us were willing to venture) and sure it enough it was dead. That night when I woke up and had to go the bathroom, but I figured I'd tough it out until morning.

I have to wrap up the post but I hope I was able to give everyone a glimpse into my stay at CARE. I was really sad to say bye and leave all the amazingly awesome babies with whom I'd made close friendships with, as weird as that may sound. Animal Planet did a show on the center and you can find most of it here: http://videos.howstuffworks.com/animal-planet/28870-growing-up-baboon-baboon-babies-personalities-video.htm. I may post up some pictures/videos soon.

Tomorrow I'm heading off to Kenya and I'm really excited about for it. I also have no idea what to expect; the place is only accessible by boat and the only electricity in the lodge is solar powered so it will definitely be a change from home. I've also never taught large groups of people, especially those who don't speak english natively so it should be really interesting. I'm not sure how the internet access will be in town but I'll post when I can.

I hope my rambling made sense and theres a lot more that I could say but I've been surfing the web all day (I gotta make up for lost time right?) and after not really having seen a computer screen for 2 months I don't have the web surfing stamina I used to.

I'll be posting next from Kenya!