I thought everyone might be interested to know what a typical day is like for me here. The days begin at 5:20am when I get up, get dressed, eat breakfast (toast and jam), feed the kitten (will explain later) and make lunch. At 6:45am Crista, Kelly and I head out the door knowing it will be about 12 hours before we will return again. It takes about an hour to get to work, traveling by 2 modes of transportation. We first walk down our hilly driveway, which is quite long and not shaded in any way. It is usually here that we begin to feel the horrendous heat of the day already taking over; however, there have been many mornings lately where you can already feel the immense pressure from the heat while you are sitting and eating breakfast before you have exerted any physical energy. Upon reaching the end of the driveway we begin looking for boda boda drivers which we take to get to our second mode of transportation. A boda boda is a bicycle with a padded seat on the back. The driver pedals you and himself kind of like those child seats that can be fastened to the back of bicycles, only not as secure, there are no backs to the padded seats we ride on. It can be tricky at times to get used to balancing yourself. Especially when your driver wants to race with his friends as cars are coming head on towards you at 90 mph and you have no control because you’re not the driver of the bike and you don’t know much Swahili, as most of the boda boda drivers do not know a lot of English. We take these boda bodas approximately 4-5 kilometers where we then get off and board a matatu, which is a van that acts as an above ground subway in a sense.
Riding a matatu is an experience in and of itself. There is a driver and a conductor. The conductor is responsible for flagging down people who want or need a ride, for collecting the payments from everyone for the rides and for helping people to load large or heavy items they may be traveling with. The conductor’s job appears quite difficult to me, as there are no official stops to board or debark the matatus. One can get on and off anywhere they like, and often there are many people that just stand on the sides of the roads talking or hanging out, so it can be difficult to decipher who needs a ride and who’s just mulling around. In addition there are different prices for the ride depending on where one boards and where one gets off, and they pack these matatus full of people. There are 14 seats on the matatu, but often they will cram 20+ people into these vans. You are basically sitting on top of one another at this point, and the conductor has to keep track of who’s paid, where they got on and where they are getting off so he charges them correctly. These conductors do this job with ease and even manage to haggle us almost every time, trying to charge us 10 shillings more than it actually costs for the ride, even though Crista has been going to the ruins where we work every day for 8 months and they know her, they still try to charge us the Mzungu rate because they think we don’t know any better like the tourists in the area. Let me say though that fighting with the matatu drivers for the correct change gets to be one of the things I dread the most each day because it takes so much out of you, especially at the end of the day. We take the matatu another 7 kilometers where we debark and then walk our last kilometer to work.
By the way, Mzungu means white person in Swahili. Mzungu is yelled at us almost anywhere we go, and it’s funny because we would never dream of yelling out the color of someone’s skin to them in America, but here it is not meant in a derogatory way, it is just meant more as a way to let us and everyone else know they notice us.
Once we arrive at work it is often another 20-30 minutes before we are even through the gates of the ruins. This is because there are usually 8-10 guys who work at the ruins lounging around the gates chatting and waiting to begin work. Let me explain, the field site we work at is actually a tourist site that is part of the National Museums of Kenya. Many tourists visit the site everyday to see the ancient Arab ruins that are preserved throughout the forest. A Muslim city used to inhabit the forest in 1399 AD, where they had constructed huge stone mosques and buildings, including a palace for the King and his family.
Getting through the gate takes so long because we must greet all of the guys and chat a bit. Now greeting here is not like in the states where you just say hi and then move on. Here greetings can take 5 minutes or more. You ask how the other is doing, how yesterday was, how today is so far, how the family is, ect… and they ask all the same of you. After we get past the greetings there is often some Swahili teaching, until finally Crista, Kelly and I have to say ok we will see you all later, breaking the conversation cycle so we might actually get some work done. Some days this is fun and I really enjoy it, as everyone that works at Gede ruins is very nice, but some days you just want to slip out because you are tired, aren’t feeling well or are just having a bad day, however just quietly slipping out is never an option. The same greetings have to be exchanged every time we pass through the gates. If we want to go out for lunch we know it will be at least a 2 hour lunch to account for the greetings on the way out, the time to walk there, eat and then the greetings on the way back in. And then of course when we leave at night these same greetings are exchanged again, even if they’ve already been done 3 times previously in the day. It is just part of their culture to greet in this manner and it is considered very rude if you pass someone you know and do not greet them.
After finally passing through the gates we walk to our office and settle in. We then rest for a few minutes outside the office because it is way too hot in the office, where we gear up for the long day ahead. Typically we will spend 4-5 hours in the field in the morning and then take an hour to 2 hour break for lunch. Most days we pack a lunch, which for me usually consists of a sandwich, some biscuits and a banana, however we occasionally go out for lunch. After lunch we return to the field for another 4 hours before packing up and going home. Our trip home is the same as in the morning, though in the reverse order. We have to say goodbye to everyone that works at the ruins on our way out, walk a kilometer to the matatu stage, take to matatu to the boda boda stage, take a boda boda to the end of our driveway and then walk up the driveway to Mwamba, the field house we live at. Usually we arrive back at home around 6:30pm.
After reaching home I shower, rinsing away all the sweat and dirt from the day that has piled on. My whole body feels like it is covered in layers of sweat, dirt and oil that can be peeled away. Dinner is served at the field house at 7:00pm, so usually right after cleaning up and straightening up my room I go for dinner, which is served family style. Dinner typically consists of either a rice dish or a potato dish, some kind of beans, a cooked vegetable dish and salad and for dessert is fresh fruit (papaya, mango, pineapple, oranges or watermelon), the best nights are when you get fruit salad which contains all these fruits. After dinner we clean up, everyone helps to wash, rinse and dry all the dishes and then we either watch a DVD, write emails, read or sleep. I have been exhausted ever since I got hear, and with the long, hard days of work, I often find myself going to bed around 9 or 10pm. And soon the day begins all over again.
I do get 2 days off a week, but they can never be 2 consecutive days. This is because there is only one research assistant working with each group right now, and Steffen, the principle investigator, feels that if we miss 2 days of work in a row we might miss something big, like a new birth, the disappearance of a monkey, the overthrow of the male in the group or an terrible fight that lead to a serious wound, etc… There are several things I do on my days off, and often many of them are chores or errands, so I never feel like a truly have a day of rest. I will do laundry, every day I have off. After that I will do a combination of trying to get to email, swim, go shopping for groceries or other items I need or go into the larger town, Malindi. I also will spend time reading, sleeping and watching DVDs. I have today off and am in Malindi doing email, shopping some, looking for kitten food and later I will be going to look at an apartment. I am trying to move out of the field house soon into a cheaper place and a place that will allow me to keep my new kitten…please see my next blog for this story.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
A New Kitten...
I’m sure no one will be surprised to know that I have found a sickly kitten who has made her way home with me. Last Thursday Kelly and I went to work as usual and as we walked in we noticed this large safari like SUV with a ton of large duffle bags sitting beside it. I figured that some people had probably camped in the ruins the night before and that probably the group was traveling all over the continent of Africa or at least all over Kenya. Kelly and I hadn’t seen the people yet, but we were very curious to know who the people were and what they were doing. Finally we see these older people loading things into the SUV. I would say that this group of people were in their mid to late 50’s. This peaked Kelly’s and my interest even more because we were expecting the people to be in their late 20’s to early 30’s. We eventually made our way over to them and asked them if they’d spent the night in the ruins, which they had. We began talking to them and discovered that they all were Canadian and that almost all of them were some type of field biologist. There was bird person, a mammal person, and several others. Kelly and I were fascinated with them and their story. They had been in Kenya for a month already and were traveling all over the country in their SUV. Anyway to make a long story short one of the women in the group finally says that there is a kitten in the bathrooms and that she looks very unhealthy. She wanted to know if we would go and look at it. So we talk some more with the people and then finally make our way over to the bathrooms to look for the kitten before heading out to find the monkeys. On our way over I hear the kitten meowing at the top of its lungs, so I begin running, thinking it was in danger. All of a sudden I see this tiny tiny black kitten at my feet completely terrified. I hesitated for a minute, not wanting to touch her as I wasn’t sure if she had mange or some other disease that I did not want to get. Finally I made the decision that she needed help and that she was probably too young to have any serious diseases yet, so I bend down to pick her up.
I had her in my hands for less than a minute when I suddenly realized that she was covered in safari ant heads. She had 50 to 100 safari ants stuck in her paws, all over her stomach, in her tail, whiskers and head. Safari ants are these vicious ants that eat small animals alive. They travel in groups of millions, when you see them on a path they have usually dug a trench with thousands of solider safari ants on either side of the trench guarding the females and their eggs that are passing through the trench, ready to attack anything that gets close to them. This poor kitten must have accidentally wandered into the trench and was too weak or paralyzed from fear to get out of the trench right away and so the ants had time to climb all over her. The soldiers just crawl on you at first until you make a move that scars them and then one bites. As soon as one bites then all the others bite and their heads stick in you. You have to pull each head and body out of your skin to stop the horrific pain. Two days before we had seen a dead kitten covered in safari ants; all you could see was white fur and its skeleton underneath a million or more ants. Most likely this poor kitten also traveled into the trench, but couldn’t get out and was eaten alive. I couldn’t let the same happen to this kitten, so Kelly and I sat down to pull out all the ant heads. The kitten had already chewed off all the bodies. I have no idea how long the heads had been in her, at least a day or two. It took us an hour to remove every head.
Once they were all removed I gave her a bath in the bathroom sink to try and disinfect some of the bites and to get her clean, she was absolutely filthy. As I was giving her a bath I noticed that she had flees. At this point I made the decision that she had to go to the vet and that she was coming home with me because I couldn’t live with myself if I just released her back to the forest. There is no way she was going to survive, and she obviously came to where there are people to get help, the feral cats that live in the forest never get close to people. While I finished washing her Kelly called the director of our field house to get the number for a vet, whom we called and made an appointment for an hour later. We had to go all the way into Malindi to see the vet. When we got there he looked at her for about 30 seconds and said she looks good. I explained to him that she had flees, and his response to this was “yea, animals here have flees.” I explained to him that I knew this but that I was taking her home to a place where there were 2 dogs who did not have flees so I couldn’t bring the flees home to them. He continued to resist giving her medication even though I was looking at a wall full of Frontline, flee repellent. I asked if he could give her a flee bath and he said that she was too small, that giving her a bath would make her too cold and possibly giver her the flu. I explained that I had already given her a bath that day and that she dried right away in the heat, asking again for him to give her a flee bath. He finally says he has some flee shampoo he can give me. At this point I beg him to give her the bath, as she has flees on her head and I don’t feel comfortable washing her with such harsh chemicals. He finally agreed to giver her a flee bath and basically said that she had a skin infection that came from her mother’s milk not having enough nutrition, but that it would clear up in a few days and that her rectum had been distended, but that it retracted back inside her and was still slightly distended, but that that too would be fine in a few days.
It is now 5 days later and she is currently living at the field house with us. She has put on some weight, though I would like her to put on a lot more. She was just skin and bones when we found her. Her skin rash has not gotten better and almost looks worse to me, but her rectum has retracted back completely and looks good. She has a lot more energy now and is running and playing which is a very good sign. However, her fecals are as black as she is, and from my experience, black feces are not a good sign and often indicate worms or parasites. The vet had given her a deworming medicine while we were there, so I’m not sure what’s wrong with her, if anything is at all. I am going to call the vet tomorrow and see if I need to bring her back in to get looked at.
I’m sure everyone is wondering what I am going to do with her. The plan was to bring her back for a week and have me look after her, but then a couple that people at the field house know is moving up country and are looking for a kitten, so the directors of the field house were hoping that they would take her. Now I was not thrilled with this idea as I have put a lot of time and money into caring for her and I have become attached and naturally want to keep her myself. My original plan was to keep her for the year I am here and then to get all the necessary paperwork and bring her back to the states when I return. This is still what I would like to do, however there is one minor problem. The directors of the field house will not allow her to stay once she is large enough to hunt birds. The great majority of the work that they do is bird conservation work and apparently domestic cats are responsible for killing millions of birds each year, so they feel having a cat live here would go against their work and what the organization stands for. I understand this but desperately want to keep her as well. As the practical side of me says it would be easier and maybe better for her to stay living with someone here in Kenya, so I am very torn on what to do. Most likely if I move out of the field house I can keep her and my original plan even before I came here was always to move out in order to save money. However, there are major advantages and disadvantages to staying in the field house and to moving out so I am also torn on that decision. I guess only time will tell what will happen, but I thought everyone might get a kick out of this story. I will post pictures of her soon, as well as of the place I am living and some of the monkeys. I have named the kitten Maisha, which means life in Swahili, since she rescued herself in away by finding humans to help her and fought the safari ants for her life. It may still be an uphill battle, but I am confident she will survive.
To come soon is a post on my trip to Mombassa and other fun and weird things that have happened since I arrived. Hope everyone is doing well. I miss you all!!!!
I had her in my hands for less than a minute when I suddenly realized that she was covered in safari ant heads. She had 50 to 100 safari ants stuck in her paws, all over her stomach, in her tail, whiskers and head. Safari ants are these vicious ants that eat small animals alive. They travel in groups of millions, when you see them on a path they have usually dug a trench with thousands of solider safari ants on either side of the trench guarding the females and their eggs that are passing through the trench, ready to attack anything that gets close to them. This poor kitten must have accidentally wandered into the trench and was too weak or paralyzed from fear to get out of the trench right away and so the ants had time to climb all over her. The soldiers just crawl on you at first until you make a move that scars them and then one bites. As soon as one bites then all the others bite and their heads stick in you. You have to pull each head and body out of your skin to stop the horrific pain. Two days before we had seen a dead kitten covered in safari ants; all you could see was white fur and its skeleton underneath a million or more ants. Most likely this poor kitten also traveled into the trench, but couldn’t get out and was eaten alive. I couldn’t let the same happen to this kitten, so Kelly and I sat down to pull out all the ant heads. The kitten had already chewed off all the bodies. I have no idea how long the heads had been in her, at least a day or two. It took us an hour to remove every head.
Once they were all removed I gave her a bath in the bathroom sink to try and disinfect some of the bites and to get her clean, she was absolutely filthy. As I was giving her a bath I noticed that she had flees. At this point I made the decision that she had to go to the vet and that she was coming home with me because I couldn’t live with myself if I just released her back to the forest. There is no way she was going to survive, and she obviously came to where there are people to get help, the feral cats that live in the forest never get close to people. While I finished washing her Kelly called the director of our field house to get the number for a vet, whom we called and made an appointment for an hour later. We had to go all the way into Malindi to see the vet. When we got there he looked at her for about 30 seconds and said she looks good. I explained to him that she had flees, and his response to this was “yea, animals here have flees.” I explained to him that I knew this but that I was taking her home to a place where there were 2 dogs who did not have flees so I couldn’t bring the flees home to them. He continued to resist giving her medication even though I was looking at a wall full of Frontline, flee repellent. I asked if he could give her a flee bath and he said that she was too small, that giving her a bath would make her too cold and possibly giver her the flu. I explained that I had already given her a bath that day and that she dried right away in the heat, asking again for him to give her a flee bath. He finally says he has some flee shampoo he can give me. At this point I beg him to give her the bath, as she has flees on her head and I don’t feel comfortable washing her with such harsh chemicals. He finally agreed to giver her a flee bath and basically said that she had a skin infection that came from her mother’s milk not having enough nutrition, but that it would clear up in a few days and that her rectum had been distended, but that it retracted back inside her and was still slightly distended, but that that too would be fine in a few days.
It is now 5 days later and she is currently living at the field house with us. She has put on some weight, though I would like her to put on a lot more. She was just skin and bones when we found her. Her skin rash has not gotten better and almost looks worse to me, but her rectum has retracted back completely and looks good. She has a lot more energy now and is running and playing which is a very good sign. However, her fecals are as black as she is, and from my experience, black feces are not a good sign and often indicate worms or parasites. The vet had given her a deworming medicine while we were there, so I’m not sure what’s wrong with her, if anything is at all. I am going to call the vet tomorrow and see if I need to bring her back in to get looked at.
I’m sure everyone is wondering what I am going to do with her. The plan was to bring her back for a week and have me look after her, but then a couple that people at the field house know is moving up country and are looking for a kitten, so the directors of the field house were hoping that they would take her. Now I was not thrilled with this idea as I have put a lot of time and money into caring for her and I have become attached and naturally want to keep her myself. My original plan was to keep her for the year I am here and then to get all the necessary paperwork and bring her back to the states when I return. This is still what I would like to do, however there is one minor problem. The directors of the field house will not allow her to stay once she is large enough to hunt birds. The great majority of the work that they do is bird conservation work and apparently domestic cats are responsible for killing millions of birds each year, so they feel having a cat live here would go against their work and what the organization stands for. I understand this but desperately want to keep her as well. As the practical side of me says it would be easier and maybe better for her to stay living with someone here in Kenya, so I am very torn on what to do. Most likely if I move out of the field house I can keep her and my original plan even before I came here was always to move out in order to save money. However, there are major advantages and disadvantages to staying in the field house and to moving out so I am also torn on that decision. I guess only time will tell what will happen, but I thought everyone might get a kick out of this story. I will post pictures of her soon, as well as of the place I am living and some of the monkeys. I have named the kitten Maisha, which means life in Swahili, since she rescued herself in away by finding humans to help her and fought the safari ants for her life. It may still be an uphill battle, but I am confident she will survive.
To come soon is a post on my trip to Mombassa and other fun and weird things that have happened since I arrived. Hope everyone is doing well. I miss you all!!!!
Saturday, March 3, 2007
My Frist Days
I had pre-written a whole thing on my travels to Kenya and my first 2 nights here, but forgot my flash drive at home, therefore I will have to catch everyone up on those adventures later, as I have a lot of other things to tell you all about today. I'm going to give you all a little background on what I'm doing so that future posts will make sense.
My first task for the project is to learn all the individuals by distinct features, such as face, ears, brows, tails, nipples, etc... There are 2 separate groups of monkeys I have to learn, and I am the first volunteer on this project that have to learn both groups. Usually each volunteer only learns one group, but since I will be here for several weeks by myself I have to learn both so that I can teach Kate, the other monkey volunteer coming in May, one of the groups. The 2 groups are K-Group which is comprised of about 50 individuals. The second group is S-Group which has approximately 20-25 individuals. I am learning the adult females first and then will learn the juveniles and infants. After I have learned to recognize each monkey then I will begin learning the data collection methods, though I have already started on this a little. Apparently I am learning the monkeys much faster than anyone thought or has before, which is very good for me, since the 2 volunteers here with me now will be leaving in mid-April. The other 2 volunteers are Crista who works with K-Group and Kelly who works with S-Group.
Now let me begin some of my stories. My first story is a rather disturbing one. I must begin by saying that my first few days in the field were going very well. I was spending half the day with one group and half with the other just trying to learn distinguishing characteristics of each monkey. Nothing too exciting happened my first several days here, other than meeting a lot of new people, taking care of errands, learning the monkeys and Swahili and of course swimming in the ocean after work! On Thursday things began to get more interesting. Thursday morning I spent with Crista and K-Group. Now let me preface with this, K-Group spends a good portion of their day out in the open, and only some of their day in the forest, but rarely deep in the forest. And when they are in the forest it is in the middle of it, not on the edges which border farms with crops like corn. S-Group on the other hand spends 95% of their day deep in the forest and the majority of their territory borders these local farms, where S-Group raids the crops of these farms frequently.
There is one other piece of information I must share before I begin the disturbing story. On my first night here Kelly was telling me how she used to follow S-Group into the farms when they went there, but doesn't anymore. I asked her why she no longer does. Her reply was because she found a scary note in the fields last time she went back there. The note was written in English, not Swahili, so it was purposely intended for her to read. The note said: "Private Property, Trespass again and one day XXXXXXXX." Kelly has found several of her monkeys in traps that have been set by the farmers for the monkeys to kill them so that they don't keep losing their crops. Kelly has freed the monkeys every time she has seen this. Freeing the monkeys is probably not something that she or any of us should be doing, but it is a major moral dilemma for us. It is very hard to walk away knowing that you could have saved the monkey but didn't. At the same time though you are interfering with these people's livelihoods by freeing them. Then again hunting/killing of any species is illegal in Kenya, so technically the farmers legally cannot set these traps.
Now for my story. So Thursday morning I was with K-Group and around 11:30am Crista gets a text message from Kelly saying: "Dead monkey in the forest, very bizarre, meet me at the office." Crista and I go running out of the forest to meet Kelly who was very shaken up. She tells us the monkey is not one of her's, it's one from another group that also lives in the forest we work in. We study 2 of 6 groups that live in the forest. Kelly proceeds to explain that the monkey is hanging in a tree upside down dead. She informs us she has never seen anything like this, and she thinks it may be tied up in the tree, which would mean a human came into the forest just to kill the monkey, which is very illegal and means they were the one's trespassing this time. Kelly wanted us to go back and look at the monkey with her. Crista and I did not want to go, but we did to provide support for her, and because we were slightly curious. When we arrive at the scene it was the oddest thing I have every seen. Animals do not die in the position we found the monkey in, and what I am about to describe cannot possibly do justice to how it actually looked.
Basically the monkey was dead in a handstand pose. It's right hand was fully gripped around a branch (which was the oddest part of all this), one leg was sticking straight up into the air, the other was sticking straight out to the side and the tail was not limp and hanging, but was also sticking straight up. It looked as if the monkey died and rigormortis took place immediately, which is not possible as far as I know. So we tried forever to figure out what happened, how she died, ect... We did not see any twine or rope holding the monkey up there, but it seemed too hard for the body to just be balancing on the branches. She had a large gash on the back of her right calf, a slash on her neck and a small wound on her tail. We determined she probably died from the gash on her leg that had cut a major ligament, causing death. We all went home that day trying to block the whole scene out and still utterly confused as to what happened.
On Friday (yesterday) I spent the entire day with S-Group and Kelly. Her group traveled past this dead monkey again, and it was still hanging in the tree upside down, however rigormortis seemed to have passed as all limbs were now limp, except for one leg that was still sticking straight up in the air. We decided that we had to bring the monkey to the ground in an effort to determine how the monkey was hanging there in the tree. If it was humans that tied her up it was clearly a message to us and we were not going to stay back there or go in this section of the forest again. Kelly found a large branch and cut it to use to shake the monkey out of the tree. She prodes and prodes and the monkeys sways but does not fall, so she keeps prodding, finally the monkey falls to to the ground with a loud thud of dead weight and on the way down huge chunks of skin and hair fall off everywhere. Decomposition had really taken force over the night and the face and body were badly mutilated by flies and other insects that had begun eating the flesh. The smell was putrid hanging heavy in the forest from the extreme heat of the day. From this we discovered that she had been hanging there by a branch was stuck straight through her calf, holding her firmly in place. Now it is possible that she fell and accidentally landed on this branch and was too weak from the wounds she had to free herself. However, monkeys fall through the trees all the time and never get stuck on branches like this. And the branch her leg was stuck on was sticking out to the side, not straight up, so for her leg to pierce the branch would be impossible from the angle she would have fallen at.
As I looked at the wound on the back of her leg I also began thinking that only a ponga (a machete type tool here) could have made this gash, not teeth from another monkey. We originally had thought she got in a bad fight with a monkey or was bitten by a snake and fell because she was so weak, grabbed the branch she was clutching and couldn't free herself because she was too weak and just died there. The gash on her leg was just to large and long to be made from a tooth, and if it was from a canine that dragged along her leg as she tried to run, there should have been a mark from the other canine as well somewhere, which there wasn't.
Honestly we don't know what happened, but more and more things are pointing to human intervention. Regardless, it was one of the creepiest things I've ever seen and now I'm completely terrified every time I go back into that part of the forest because we aren't sure how the monkey died, if this was a message to us, to the other monkeys or was just an accident. We'll have to see if more develops over the next week...
My first task for the project is to learn all the individuals by distinct features, such as face, ears, brows, tails, nipples, etc... There are 2 separate groups of monkeys I have to learn, and I am the first volunteer on this project that have to learn both groups. Usually each volunteer only learns one group, but since I will be here for several weeks by myself I have to learn both so that I can teach Kate, the other monkey volunteer coming in May, one of the groups. The 2 groups are K-Group which is comprised of about 50 individuals. The second group is S-Group which has approximately 20-25 individuals. I am learning the adult females first and then will learn the juveniles and infants. After I have learned to recognize each monkey then I will begin learning the data collection methods, though I have already started on this a little. Apparently I am learning the monkeys much faster than anyone thought or has before, which is very good for me, since the 2 volunteers here with me now will be leaving in mid-April. The other 2 volunteers are Crista who works with K-Group and Kelly who works with S-Group.
Now let me begin some of my stories. My first story is a rather disturbing one. I must begin by saying that my first few days in the field were going very well. I was spending half the day with one group and half with the other just trying to learn distinguishing characteristics of each monkey. Nothing too exciting happened my first several days here, other than meeting a lot of new people, taking care of errands, learning the monkeys and Swahili and of course swimming in the ocean after work! On Thursday things began to get more interesting. Thursday morning I spent with Crista and K-Group. Now let me preface with this, K-Group spends a good portion of their day out in the open, and only some of their day in the forest, but rarely deep in the forest. And when they are in the forest it is in the middle of it, not on the edges which border farms with crops like corn. S-Group on the other hand spends 95% of their day deep in the forest and the majority of their territory borders these local farms, where S-Group raids the crops of these farms frequently.
There is one other piece of information I must share before I begin the disturbing story. On my first night here Kelly was telling me how she used to follow S-Group into the farms when they went there, but doesn't anymore. I asked her why she no longer does. Her reply was because she found a scary note in the fields last time she went back there. The note was written in English, not Swahili, so it was purposely intended for her to read. The note said: "Private Property, Trespass again and one day XXXXXXXX." Kelly has found several of her monkeys in traps that have been set by the farmers for the monkeys to kill them so that they don't keep losing their crops. Kelly has freed the monkeys every time she has seen this. Freeing the monkeys is probably not something that she or any of us should be doing, but it is a major moral dilemma for us. It is very hard to walk away knowing that you could have saved the monkey but didn't. At the same time though you are interfering with these people's livelihoods by freeing them. Then again hunting/killing of any species is illegal in Kenya, so technically the farmers legally cannot set these traps.
Now for my story. So Thursday morning I was with K-Group and around 11:30am Crista gets a text message from Kelly saying: "Dead monkey in the forest, very bizarre, meet me at the office." Crista and I go running out of the forest to meet Kelly who was very shaken up. She tells us the monkey is not one of her's, it's one from another group that also lives in the forest we work in. We study 2 of 6 groups that live in the forest. Kelly proceeds to explain that the monkey is hanging in a tree upside down dead. She informs us she has never seen anything like this, and she thinks it may be tied up in the tree, which would mean a human came into the forest just to kill the monkey, which is very illegal and means they were the one's trespassing this time. Kelly wanted us to go back and look at the monkey with her. Crista and I did not want to go, but we did to provide support for her, and because we were slightly curious. When we arrive at the scene it was the oddest thing I have every seen. Animals do not die in the position we found the monkey in, and what I am about to describe cannot possibly do justice to how it actually looked.
Basically the monkey was dead in a handstand pose. It's right hand was fully gripped around a branch (which was the oddest part of all this), one leg was sticking straight up into the air, the other was sticking straight out to the side and the tail was not limp and hanging, but was also sticking straight up. It looked as if the monkey died and rigormortis took place immediately, which is not possible as far as I know. So we tried forever to figure out what happened, how she died, ect... We did not see any twine or rope holding the monkey up there, but it seemed too hard for the body to just be balancing on the branches. She had a large gash on the back of her right calf, a slash on her neck and a small wound on her tail. We determined she probably died from the gash on her leg that had cut a major ligament, causing death. We all went home that day trying to block the whole scene out and still utterly confused as to what happened.
On Friday (yesterday) I spent the entire day with S-Group and Kelly. Her group traveled past this dead monkey again, and it was still hanging in the tree upside down, however rigormortis seemed to have passed as all limbs were now limp, except for one leg that was still sticking straight up in the air. We decided that we had to bring the monkey to the ground in an effort to determine how the monkey was hanging there in the tree. If it was humans that tied her up it was clearly a message to us and we were not going to stay back there or go in this section of the forest again. Kelly found a large branch and cut it to use to shake the monkey out of the tree. She prodes and prodes and the monkeys sways but does not fall, so she keeps prodding, finally the monkey falls to to the ground with a loud thud of dead weight and on the way down huge chunks of skin and hair fall off everywhere. Decomposition had really taken force over the night and the face and body were badly mutilated by flies and other insects that had begun eating the flesh. The smell was putrid hanging heavy in the forest from the extreme heat of the day. From this we discovered that she had been hanging there by a branch was stuck straight through her calf, holding her firmly in place. Now it is possible that she fell and accidentally landed on this branch and was too weak from the wounds she had to free herself. However, monkeys fall through the trees all the time and never get stuck on branches like this. And the branch her leg was stuck on was sticking out to the side, not straight up, so for her leg to pierce the branch would be impossible from the angle she would have fallen at.
As I looked at the wound on the back of her leg I also began thinking that only a ponga (a machete type tool here) could have made this gash, not teeth from another monkey. We originally had thought she got in a bad fight with a monkey or was bitten by a snake and fell because she was so weak, grabbed the branch she was clutching and couldn't free herself because she was too weak and just died there. The gash on her leg was just to large and long to be made from a tooth, and if it was from a canine that dragged along her leg as she tried to run, there should have been a mark from the other canine as well somewhere, which there wasn't.
Honestly we don't know what happened, but more and more things are pointing to human intervention. Regardless, it was one of the creepiest things I've ever seen and now I'm completely terrified every time I go back into that part of the forest because we aren't sure how the monkey died, if this was a message to us, to the other monkeys or was just an accident. We'll have to see if more develops over the next week...
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