by Sheri Speede
At six o’clock on the morning of the meeting, when Estelle and I came out of our tent to meet the day’s new light, we found the men of Bikol already congregated on their benches around a small fire, which was serving to chase away the slight chill of the early morning. They were joined by some of the younger children gnawing on cassava tubers that had been roasted on the fire. Meanwhile, the women were already at work. Using wood they had collected from the forest the previous day, they had already built two open fires in front of adjacent houses across the road from our tent. They were organizing various food items around the fires. They spoke to one another and gave commands to older, helping children in the Bamvéle dialect, or maybe it was Bobilis, which had been brought to the village by some of the wives. They sounded exactly the same to my ear. All the women worked, but no one rushed about. It was a calm but serious atmosphere in this important women’s sphere of Bikol.
The women generally did a disproportionate share of the work in the villages. They cooked, washed clothes, cared for children, and farmed. The men hunted and worked beside their wives on the farms, but it was clear they had much more leisure time.
Estelle, Kenneth, and I left early for the town of Minta to pick up the divisional officer, Mr. Ndang Ndang Albert. His presiding over the meeting would legitimize it for the village people and make it legal for the government. Because we wanted to meet with the D.O. before the community meeting, Estelle and I both accompanied Kenneth on the four-hour drive to Minta. We wanted to make sure he understood that we were a very small nongovernmental organization (NGO), and our primary mission was conservation, not community development. I was very concerned about leaving people in the village with the impression that we would provide more for them than we could actually deliver. I would be the one answering to people in years to come.
Soon after Estelle and I had found the D.O. in Minta six weeks earlier, we had sent Kenneth by public transport to deliver a letter requesting his attendance at our community meeting. In his reply letter, which Kenneth had carried back to us, Mr. Ndang had selected this day to fit his schedule. When we arrived at his office, we found him waiting. He wore the short-sleeved, smartly pressed, khaki-colored uniform provided by the government to officials of his level. During a quick meeting in his office, Estelle reiterated the limitations of what we would be able to provide the community, and he assured us he understood the importance of not overstating our case during the community meeting. As we all headed for the Pajero where Kenneth waited, I had my first introduction to a Cameroon cultural requirement I hadn’t considered before.
The D.O., like any self-respecting government official, would be obliged to go to Bikol with an entourage, the members of which were already waiting with Kenneth. As was the tradition, the uniformed captain of the military police, who was based in Minta, would go along to provide security. Mr. Ndang’s assistant, in a starched white shirt and dress pants, would be necessary to record minutes of the meeting. Minta’s “chief of post” for the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry (MINEF), a younger man in the hunter-green coveralls provided by the ministry, would come because the issue of a wildlife sanctuary was in his domain. The mayor of Minta, in suit and tie, would complete the D.O.’s entourage (for prestige, I supposed).
No one but Estelle and I seemed the least bit concerned that we would be packed like sardines in our smallish SUV for the long, bumpy ride back to Bikol, and other than glances of dread at each other, we didn’t express our mutual annoyance over it. I directed the D.O. to the front seat, the place of honor, which left six of us in the back half of the car. Estelle opened the rear door to the small compartment behind the backseat, revealing our store of drinks still hoarded there. She shifted them around to maximize space for sitting and explained that someone would have to sit on a crate of beer. No one from the D.O.’s entourage spoke, but all heads turned toward the slim, young MINEF man. To show concern for his comfort and to emphasize Estelle’s point, I slid out a flattened cardboard carton wedged against the side of the compartment, placed it on top of the beer crate, and smiled at him. He shrugged good-naturedly and crawled in. The remaining five of us tried to crawl onto the backseat, but it wasn’t going to work. The D.O. called his assistant to squeeze into the front with him, which I worried would interfere with Kenneth’s driving, but I couldn’t see another alternative. Estelle and I hugged each of the back doors with the two men sandwiched between us. Ours was an unpleasant ride on the very bumpy road, wedged tightly against the unforgiving plastic of the doors, but we arrived back in Bikol just before three o’clock to greet a delighted population. A few people from the neighboring villages of Bikol 2 (Mr. Ngong Bipan Antoine was a relative of Chief Gaspard who had at one point joined him to settle in Bikol, but some disputes arose that caused the current chief, Chief Antoine, to found his own village of Bikol 2 a mile and a half down the road) and Meyene also came for the meeting. The attendees totaled about fifty, not including children.
For all the time and trouble it took to prepare, the community meeting was surprisingly short and simple. We met in Chief Gaspard’s small house, where the five guests from Minta, Estelle, Kenneth, Chief Gaspard, Pa Michel, and I sat on bamboo benches arranged along three walls, with the D.O. sitting opposite the open wall. People squeezed into the room to stand facing the D.O., or they listened from just outside the house. Mr. Ndang spoke in French, and Pa Michel’s son Samuel translated what he said into Bamvéle for people who didn’t speak French—primarily older people—while Kenneth translated for me. During the meeting, it was decided that we would work with the Bikol community to delineate the sanctuary boundaries. Villagers would abandon any farms located inside the boundaries, and we would give individual farmers “symbolic” compensation, which meant that they would accept whatever we offered to relocate their farms. There would be no hunting with guns or traps inside the sanctuary boundaries. We, in turn, would provide jobs and buy fruits and vegetables from village farmers to feed the chimpanzees, thereby benefiting the community. Mr. Ndang explained that we were a small NGO, which could not solve all the problems of poverty in the community, but he added that our presence might bring tourists and other NGOs—which could, in time, bring more benefit. Several of the villagers gave speeches expressing the hope and belief that they would be better off with us in the community than they had been without us. Chief Gaspard thanked us for choosing Bikol over any other village. In conclusion, Samuel, the translator, thanked God for bringing us to them. And that was it!
After the meeting, the women delivered food on metal plates to the guests from Minta and the others of us seated inside. Kenneth acted as our drinks waiter—fulfilling the requests for wine, beer, or Coke from the special guests first, then staying outside to oversee the distribution of drinks to the population. The free flow of alcohol helped guarantee everyone’s patience while they waited for food. It was Cameroon tradition that the important people should eat first, but I knew there would be enough food for everyone.
Around six P.M., Estelle and Kenneth left to return the D.O. and his entourage to Minta, where they would pass the night in the small hotel where Estelle and I had stopped for a bucket bath weeks earlier. The next day, Kenneth would drive Estelle back to Yaoundé. That night with the village population, I drank boxed wine and danced barefooted in the mud to an African beat pounded on cowhide drums by two young men from a neighboring village. Still unable to have even the simplest conversation with the people of Bikol, I nodded and smiled when anyone spoke to me. A burst of laughter often followed, and I wondered to what in the world I was agreeing. I didn’t remember many names at that point, but people seemed genuinely happy to have me there. A group of several women joined forces to coach me on how to properly pulsate my hips to the drumbeat. My lighthearted but sincere efforts, emboldened by the wine, fell woefully short until I concluded that one had to be born to the special talent. However, in years to come, I would get a lot closer to this pulse of Africa and feel flattered when anyone said I d
anced like an African. When I realized I was quite drunk, I bade farewell with a wave to my strange fellow merrymakers, crossed the couple dozen yards to my tent, and zipped myself inside. The drumming soon stopped, and I drifted off to the sound of conversation and laughter.
Forty-eight hours after he left, Kenneth returned to Bikol. He and I camped in the village for the rest of June. Kenneth may have been a “city boy” as I teased him, but somewhere along the way he became committed to our cause, or to me, or to both—I was never sure what really inspired him most, but whatever it was, he worked beside me in the forest like the project was his. Few drivers or translators in Cameroon, or anywhere else in the world, would have done the same. With Kenneth by my side, we explored many acres of forest behind Bikol. I tucked my pants in my socks, just above my ankle-high hiking boots, as some protection against ants, and Kenneth wore a pair of green rubber boots I had bought him in Yaoundé. There were several species of poisonous snakes in the forest, and I tried to watch where I put my feet so I didn’t step on one. We saw the molted skin of a snake that I recognized from books as belonging to a deadly Gaboon viper. We both wore long sleeves as protection against mosquitoes and the ubiquitous small black biting flies, which swooped silently and relentlessly around our faces and sometimes got into our eyes. Once when I put my hand against a tree for balance, a piercing pain in my palm caused me to pull it back quickly. I never saw what stung me, but I watched where I put my hands after that. I had hiked a lot in the temperate rain forests of Oregon, but this African forest, while incredibly beautiful for its diversity of plants and animals, was a more hostile environment for humans. But we frequently saw small monkeys in the trees above us, and it punctuated the tedium of tiny annoyances with an exciting sense of exoticism. Through it all, I tried to envision the future chimpanzee sanctuary and plan its layout while Kenneth wielded a machete, cutting just enough to clear our access to various vantage points. Our goal was to choose our future campsite and the exact location of our first chimpanzee enclosure.
My résumé in no way qualified me for the job. My training was in veterinary medicine. The most complicated structure I had designed and built was a rabbit cage for my backyard in Beaverton, Oregon. Somewhere I had grabbed on to the audacious conviction that I could and would construct a chimpanzee sanctuary from the ground up in this remote part of one of Africa’s most difficult countries. I hid a fear of failure that lurked just beneath my façade of self-assurance. From my fear, and from my constant awareness of the intolerable consequences of failure, grew a single-minded determination. The chimpanzees I had grown to love would not end their lives where they were. I would give them a different story if it killed me.
At the end of each day in the forest, Kenneth and I dragged our sagging, dirty selves back to Bikol. Madame Beatrice, one of the older women in the village, usually carried water from the river for me to use for my bucket bath and even heated it over her fire. We couldn’t speak to each other, but her simple act of kindness to me in those early days spawned affection between us that lasted until she left the village years later to go back to the village of her childhood. Each afternoon, Kenneth disappeared for half an hour and came back looking clean. I wondered if he had a woman who was helping with his bath, but as far as I knew he always slept in the Pajero alone.
I hired Colbert, who had been Estelle’s and my guide during our first trip into the forest, to make a bamboo bench. I placed it a yard away and perpendicular to the vertical zippered entrance to my tent, a psychological blockade of sorts. On the other side of the bench, I arranged rocks, recently unearthed when the bulldozer made the road through Bikol, in a circle to create a small hearth. Each night Kenneth and I quickly built our fire using borrowed wood embers from one of the other village fires. With three larger rocks, we made a triangular shelf over the fire on which to set our cooking pot. We cooked instant Ramen noodles or boiled yams with eggs. Dessert was an avocado or a banana. We were both too exhausted to be creative in the realm of campfire cooking. We usually ate silently, gazing at the crackling fire.
I was comfortable enough on the foam mattress in my tent, until one night about ten days after we arrived I woke to the sound of heavy rain and noticed water accumulating in the corners of my little domed room. As the downpour continued, water kept seeping in, occupying more and more space around the edges of my tent floor, pushing me to a smaller and smaller island in the center. I was desperate to the point of tears for sleep and could no longer lie down because my mattress was soaked on both ends. My raincoat was in the Pajero, but finally I made a run through the still pouring rain to cover the seven or eight yards from tent to car. I yanked at the front, passenger-side door handle, only to find that the door was locked, and had to pound and shout at the window through the noise of the rain to awaken a soundly sleeping Kenneth. Soaked to the skin, I entered the car and finally slept in wet clothes on the folded-down passenger seat beside him.
The next day, while I worked to dry out the tent—over and over soaking up water with a towel inside and wringing the water from it outside—Kenneth and some of the men from the village organized themselves to erect a roof of palm fronds over it. Others dug a trench around the tent, which would drain water away from me during future rains.
One of the village latrines was located about twenty yards behind my tent. It was a hole about seven feet square, crossed by a number of sticks on which a person could stand. It was among the trees at the edge of the forest, but there were no walls, or even dense foliage, around it. Early one morning I rushed out of my tent and headed to the latrine, preoccupied as I often was, and somehow neglected to actually look at the latrine until I was within ten feet of it. A young man from the village was squatting over it. His smile and casual wave were spontaneous and relaxed.
“Bonjour,” he said.
“Bonjour,” I parroted, as I jerked my head away. In my one-sided embarrassment, I made a hasty retreat to wait behind a tree until he had finished his business and gone. My concept of privacy and my need for it were out of place in the village.
When all the items in my forest wardrobe became as dirty as I could stand, I accompanied a young woman called Emilienne, who was the wife of Samuel and daughter-in-law of Pa Michel, and her eight-year-old son, Mesmin, down the steep slope of a ravine to the small Ndian River. The people of the village washed their clothes and bathed in the Ndian. They also collected water from it for drinking and cooking. Grasping the thin metal wire handle looped across the top of my black bucket, I carried down my dirty clothes and square of brown soap, just like Emilienne did. When I saw her dipping a dirty item of clothing directly into the stream, I did the same with a pair of pants. This is where our aptitude diverged sharply. With clumps of cloth in each fist, I rubbed sections together, trying to remove the considerable amount of visible dirt, spot treating the fabric with my block of soap as I deemed necessary. Aware that it was polluting the stream, I was trying to minimize my use of soap. Meanwhile, I saw that Emilienne was vigorously pummeling her clumped-up, soapy article of clothing on the smooth top of a large gray rock, which protruded from the shallow water near the edge of the stream. She had stripped down to a thin tank top, and though she was a tiny woman, I could see the well-developed muscles of her back and arms ripple and shimmer under her chocolate-brown skin. Her fitness came not from a gym, but from hard work, and her competence from years of uncomplaining repetition. I thought she was beautiful, and I couldn’t help watching her. She rotated and pounded sections of cloth, splattering thick white lather all over the rock and into the stream.
When her glance met mine, she smiled and gestured to another big rock in the stream, near where I sat. Okay, I nodded; I would try it her way. My necessity for clean clothes was trumping my conscience on the use of soap. However, when my futile effort soon ended with two of my knuckles scraped and bleeding, I went back to my method, the way I had very successfully washed bras in the sink all my adult life without injury. When Emilienne had finished her load
of clothes, twice as many as I had brought, she gathered my remaining two dirty items, and, seemingly without judgment, she washed them for me.
When all the clothes washing was accomplished, she and Mesmin stripped and she used her block of soap to thoroughly lather both of their bodies from head to toe. My bath in the cold stream was less thorough. When the three of us had dressed, Emilienne filled with water a big aluminum basin Mesmin had carried down from the village—first dipping it in the shallow stream to scoop up as much water as possible, then splashing in water with her cupped hand to fill it almost to the top. She squatted down, and Mesmin helped her heft the basin onto her head without spilling a drop. She struggled only slightly to straighten her knees and stand under the heavy weight of water. As she stood balancing the water-filled basin with one raised hand, Mesmin placed a bucket of clean clothes in her other hand. He filled one of the much smaller black buckets with water to place on his own head, then carefully bent to pick up their remaining bucket of clean clothes. They worked in perfect, practiced collaboration without speaking a word. With their loads of water and clothes equitably and practically distributed, they started up the steep incline. I followed with my bucket of relatively clean clothes, embarrassed that I hadn’t brought an extra bucket to even try to carry water. Even without the weight of water, my legs ached from the exertion of the ascent.
After that first trip to the Ndian, I hired Emilienne to wash my clothes when they were dirty, an arrangement with which we were both delighted.
To Kenneth’s relief, and mine, too, I finally selected a mostly abandoned cassava farm about a mile into the forest behind Bikol as our campsite. Madame (“Ma”) Clementine, an elderly woman from Bikol, had managed to slash and burn away the trees from the site many years before, but she was no longer able to work the farm. It was mostly overgrown with weeds and small trees, but I would give her compensation for it anyway.