Wednesday 4 May

Last night, my kill joy co-volunteers buddies and I were tucked up in bed by 20.30 last night, an impossibly early time.  True, it had been dark for three hours by then, and only the sounds to reach us through the velvety night were those of the cicadas, our resident owl, and one of the lions.  I lay down and began to wonder if I would be able to get to sleep so early, but apparently didn’t have time to decide.  I woke at 7.30 this morning, and had to run for a banana for breakfast before our 8 o’clock morning meeting.  Obviously my buddies knew something I didn’t last night.

I joined my other, and disappointingly glamorous, buddies for the meeting.  I had assumed – I have no idea why – possibly for the same reason I expected to be met by a herd of wildebeest at the airport – that the volunteers would be plain and shapeless, so that I wouldn’t need to worry about my appearance.   But the vast majority of the volunteers are teenagers or in their early twenties, and so naturally glamorous they would look sensational dressed in animal feed buckets.  I am the oldest worker here by about 100 years.  They have already worked out that I don’t have a functional memory as I have lost so many things in the 15 hours I’ve been here.  Pen, wallet, camera (I still had the case), shoes.  Everyone seems very friendly and helpful and easy going, and I’m hoping they will continue to regard my little foibles with amused tolerance.  I fear they will get fed up very quickly and start inserting lost things up my bottom to help me remember to remember.  Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

The first thing we learnt at today’s morning meeting was that Cesar is not settling well.  He is rejecting Target, his foster mother, who is clearly very stressed by the situation.  Target is a very capable foster mother who has taken on many of the orphans handed in to the sanctuary.  But as Cesar has lived with humans for some months before being handed in to the sanctuary (he arrived last week and is about 3 months old) he does not know how to behave like a monkey.  He is distraught by the situation and keeps calling for his human carers.   Target is pacing up and down the cage, showing deep distress.  As a result, Cesar is removed and placed with human carers again for comfort and feeding, and Target is being cared for by Alma, the Sanctuary’s animal therapist.  Alma is trained in holistic animal care and uses natural methods to help the animals as much as possible.  In this situation she is helping Target by giving her plants with oils and properties that help her relax.

Cesar is now receiving appropriate human support, which is far less than most of us want to give him, but is aimed at making sure he does not become so ‘humanised’ he is unable to return to living with other monkeys.  For instance, the human carer wears a prescribed set of blue overalls, with matching head cover and face mask.  In this way Cesar will not form a bond with one particular person.  Also, the human carer does not speak to Cesar, but only smacks their lips when feeding or grooming him.  Grooming can be frequent/continual as monkeys find this very soothing.  It consists of plucking gently at the hair, occasionally also catching a small fold of flesh, all over the body, arms and legs.  The monkey usually becomes very still, showing they are happy, as they would quickly leave the carers lap if they didn’t like it.   Like the other carers, I yearn to coo and chatter with the monkeys, but am assured I will be booted out of the sanctuary if I do.  This is not a zoo, it’s a sanctuary! Is a mantra we volunteers often hear.  All effort is placed at returning the animals to the wild if possible.

After the morning meeting I head back to the main volunteer building to discover I will be working with orphan care today (joy!).  I was shown the facilities, and was able to observe Cesar sitting on the lap of his carer and being groomed.  The tour of the facilities had just finished when I was informed there was to be a change in the rota.  Due to illness amongst the volunteers – two of Cesar’s carers had developed a bug – I was being asked to step in and sit with Cesar this morning.  Much, much joy!  I hurried back to the volunteer facilities and read the full protocol on primate care, and returned 40 minutes later to take on my shift.  I had just donned full overalls, head cover and facemask when the manager who was about to introduce me to Cesar was asked to attend a quick urgent meeting.  And unhappily for me, it turned out to be concern amongst staff that the 2 sick volunteers were sick because of contact with Cesar.  Unwilling, therefore, to put another volunteer at risk, Alma the rehab manager cleared her diary and took over Cesar completely.  I disappeared into the back room to take off my overalls, head cover and mask, and returned look wistfully at Cesar who was being reintroduced to Target by Alma, before heading off to wash the animals towels and other clothes.  Sigh.  Patience woman, patience.

We went on a tour of the town in the afternoon as part of our induction.  Our group consisted of yours truly, Natasha (also from England, arrived a few hours after I did yesterday), and two other volunteers whose names I have not been able to remember and I suspect never will.  Our guide was Jenny, one of the Malawi staff, an extraordinarily beautiful, tiny woman in brightly coloured Malawi dress.  She lead us out to the roadside where a long line of battered cars, vans and tut-tuts was progressing very slowly on their way to town.  An overfull white transit van immediately veered off the road and bumped dangerously over the dirt path towards us.  Alarmed, the other volunteers and I jumped back, but Jenny showed no sign of surprise.  Rather, she nodded towards us and we came forward just as a boy jumped out of the van and began to shout at the people inside who started huddling up on the seats. The van looked as if it was originally designed to seat 9, but despite the fact that there were already 15 people squeezed in there Jenny assured us there was ‘plenty of room’.  As people climbed obediently into ridiculously tiny places, odd little bits of wood were flipped up from all sorts of unlikely places to form additional seats.  The van took off again a few minutes later with 20 of use squeezed inside like orange segments, barely able to breath.  I began to grow alarmed when, a few minutes later, we veered wildly off the road again towards another group of people, the bottom of the van scrapping repeatedly and loudly on the rough dirt tracks.  Happily, this time it was because people wanted to get out, something I was anxious to facilitate, but shortly afterwards another group took their place.  After 20 minutes of being driven by a one eyed lunatic with an apparently suicidal indifference to other vehicles, people walking alongside the road, uneven roadway and maniacal tut-tut drivers, we arrived at a crowded market place and gratefully all rose up as one and fell out the van in a heap. 

The shopping market itself was not very different in its basic form to your average UK supermarket.  Brick built shops with large windows and lots of gaudy posters advertising longer lasting hair dyes and banks that care passionately for you.  We passed through this to the market, and found dozens of stalls selling standard Malawi wooden carvings.  I loved these, and fell instantly in love with a Noah’s Ark with lots of tiny carvings of animals.  I remember reading that virtually all cultures through the world have a flood story, although I am sure that the ark I was one of the remnants of British colonialism.  The animal’s carvings were very humorous and finely done.  The owner of the stool was desperate to persuade me to buy this and insisted I would never find another, and that it would be gone by tomorrow.  The price was a mere 85,000 kwacha (about £85).  I left him (with some difficulty) to peruse other stalls and discovered all of them had Noah’s Arks, and each subsequent stall offered me a lower price, until the final one was 10,000 kwacha (about £10).  Ho hum.

We saw a number of bare feet children around the market, and these are some of Malawi’s many homeless children.  One child, who looked about 12-14, came towards us on crutches with a very bizarre gait.  He had a normal left leg, but the tibia/fibula of his right leg was very severely deformed so that half way down the bone went back up at a 60 degree angle, with his foot bent so as to form the last part of an equilateral triangle.  The boy’s face lit up at the site of 4 screamingly obvious tourists, and he asked politely for money, which one of our number gave him.  It is rumoured that a law is being passed so that anyone seen giving money to beggars can be punished with imprisonment.  What a prison cell would be like in Malawi is something I hope I never find out.   How these children will continue to live once begging is outlawed is hard to see.

We returned to the animal sanctuary somewhat demoralised and low.  Many Malawian’s cannot see the point of our work in an animal sanctuary when there are so many feral children living on the streets.  The monkeys we care for are vermin here – the equivalent of stray cats, dogs or rats.  Because of the poverty of this country, mud and grass shacks are being put up all over the place to house families, forcing the monkeys and other wildlife to retreat from the area.  Not surprisingly the monkeys become aggressive towards the new residents and steal things from their homes.  Not surprisingly, the people stone and kill the monkeys.  Staff here are taught to tell their relatives and friends who are angry with them for working here that the monkeys were on the land first, and are only aggressive because humans have taken their homes from them.  Also, they point out, if all the monkeys are killed there will be nothing left to eat.  If we feed and help the monkeys, they in turn will feed and support our communities.  This message is slow to spread, not surprisingly, so signs of displeasure and rejection by members of the local community are to be expected.

Another early night. The sun starts going down about 5, and the darkness falls with alarming speed, so that one can set out to walk to a building in light and arrive there 10 minutes later in darkness.  No one seems to want to stay up late though – the work can be demanding, and some of our little residents are disturbed and in need of a lot of support.  Some get up early to start feeds; other to job (utter madness), some to plan their day.  Me?  I get up about 10 minutes after I should have been somewhere for my first job of the day. Nothing new there then, I hear you say.