Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  That Becky lived to the end of that long and complicated surgery under such ridiculously primitive circumstances was a testament to her amazing strength. To survive beyond it and recover her health would be another battle. It was dawn when we finally moved Becky to a chamber in the satellite cage that Dorothy and Nama had lived in during their early months at the center. I would need to keep her separated from the other chimpanzees until her surgical wound healed. Kenneth left me in the cage with Becky and returned shortly with the hot water bottles I had requested. As I strategically placed the hot water bottles and tucked the blanket around Becky’s cold body, I began to cry. Sitting with her in the cage, praying for her to wake up, feeling I had done all I could, I sobbed with abandon. I had never been too much of a crier, but pregnancy changed that for a while.

  “Ma’am, she may survive,” Kenneth said to comfort me.

  “I knooow,” I wailed at him.

  Later that morning, with Becky awake and stable, I thanked Kenneth and the exhausted volunteers for their stamina. I also apologized for the nastiness they had endured from me during the surgery and the hours leading up to it.

  “Don’t worry, dear Sheri,” Claudine assured me in her sweet French accent. “You didn’t yell at us too much.” I sincerely hoped I hadn’t.

  Three weeks passed before I was confident that Becky would survive the ordeal. Jim was always available to take my calls and consult with me during Becky’s recovery, as he had been the night of the surgery. He speculated that migrating parasites could have caused the adhesions in her abdomen, and that the adhesions predisposed her to the twisted intestine. I knew I had to get antibiotics into Becky at all costs, and twice, when she refused to take them orally, I darted her with them, knowing that it would hurt her feelings and infuriate her. Fortunately, she wasn’t prone to grudges against me.

  One afternoon, while I was still engaged in the life-or-death struggle to get antibiotics into Becky, the young woman I had hired to tend our garden informed me that Cathy, our cook, needed me down in the small guard shed by the entrance to the camp. I found Cathy lying on the dirt floor of the shed in her traditional green-and-orange African dress, about to give birth to her fourth child, an event she had expected to occur a month later. I could see that her water had already broken. I had helped mothers of various species deliver their broods—kittens, puppies, calves, and once a foal—but never a human. When Cathy saw my distress, she told me she wanted to go to her village, and I certainly wanted to deliver her into the more experienced hands of her mother and the other women of the village as soon as possible.

  While I collected a thin foam mattress from my cabin and spread it out in the back of the pickup truck, I sent the gardener to collect Stephanie DuSauccy, a pretty blond French volunteer in her early twenties, who would drive us to Cathy’s village of Meyene. Cathy was able to climb into the back of the truck with minimal assistance, and I followed her in. As we bumped along the dirt road, Cathy lay back on the mattress biting her lower lip, and I, sitting between her legs, could see that the baby’s head had crowned.

  “Ne pas puissez, Cathy!” I told her, stupidly. Don’t push! It was an impossible request.

  “Oh, Madame!” That exclamation of warning was the only sound Cathy made as she pulled her dress up to her chest and expelled her baby girl into my hands. The tiny gray baby began to cry almost immediately, which I knew was a good sign. As we continued to bump along, I struggled to hang on to the slippery, crying baby who was still attached to the placenta, which was still inside Cathy. I hadn’t thought to bring a towel.

  When we pulled into the village of Bikol a few minutes after the baby was born, several women were waiting for us in the road. None of the men of Bikol could be seen. The women must have received the news that Cathy was in labor and, hearing our approach, had assumed Cathy was in the truck. I frequently marveled at how news could travel so quickly in these villages without phone lines. It was only when Stephanie hopped out of the driver’s seat that she realized the baby had been born. She joined five women who surrounded the truck while two, including Cressance, the wife of Chief Antoine, crawled into the back with Cathy and me. After they gave Cathy a drink of water, they helped her to a squatting position so she could push out the placenta. While she pushed, one of the women outside the truck offered encouragement, or distraction, by tapping on the top of her head with a soft broom. I didn’t really understand the broom’s role, but I trusted that they knew what Cathy needed much better than I did. Soon I was holding a slippery placenta along with the slippery infant. When I asked for a string to tie the umbilical cord, Cressance smiled and told me to be patient. All the women, including Cathy, were more relaxed than I was.

  Cathy said we should continue to Meyene, and Stephanie climbed back into the driver’s seat to comply. I knew the wind was cold on the still wet baby, so I hugged her to my chest, thoroughly soaking my thin cotton shirt with blood, while I tried to keep the placenta, about as big as the baby, close to her little belly. As we approached the outskirts of Meyene, we saw Cathy’s mother walking hurriedly on the road toward us. She was wearing a clean dress, instead of her farming clothes, and she wasn’t carrying a machete or a basin as she would have been if she had been heading to her farm. I knew that she was on her way to Sanaga-Yong Center to help Cathy. We stopped so she could climb in the back of the truck with us, and seeing that both her daughter and new granddaughter were alive transformed her worried expression into a broad grin. She didn’t sit down in the truck, but instead broke into a joyful song; she accompanied her own melodic Bamvéle lyrics with a slow twirling dance, reaching for the sky in gratitude. Leaning against the corner of the truck bed, just behind the empty passenger seat, Cathy smiled contentedly as she looked up lovingly at her mother. In that moment, all was right with the world of women in the pickup truck, and I laughed out loud to be part of it.

  When we pulled into the village at last, a middle-aged woman I hadn’t seen before reached over the side of the truck to take the baby from me. With the baby in one hand and the placenta in the other, she lifted both over her head as she turned away from me to walk toward Cathy’s mother’s house, where I hoped they would have a clean tool for cutting the umbilical cord. Cathy’s mother and Cressance helped her out of the truck.

  “Merci, Madame,” she said, looking back at me.

  “De rien,” I replied just before climbing into the passenger seat of the pickup. It’s nothing. It was the customary response.

  Women in the village didn’t pamper themselves during pregnancies, and it was not rare for childbirth to catch them by surprise while they were farming their fields or carrying produce to the market. Although Cathy’s style of delivery wasn’t out of the ordinary in the village community, being part of it was bizarre for Stephanie and me. I looked into Stephanie’s blue eyes, and she stared back into mine. That we were mutually stunned was vividly conveyed by our silence and slack-jawed expressions.

  She broke the silence. “We better get back to camp,” she said, gesturing to my blood-soaked clothes.

  I simply nodded. There was really nothing much for Stephanie and me to say, but neither of us would ever forget the experience.

  A month later, I left Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center to give birth to my daughter in the United States. I knew I wouldn’t be as brave as Cathy had been, and I wasn’t. Whereas Cathy’s labor had come earlier than expected and lasted less than an hour, my painful ordeal came more than two weeks after my “due date” and lasted twenty-four and a half hours. George accompanied me as far as London, but because his father was critically ill, he wasn’t able to come all the way to the United States for the birth. Instead, Edmund was with me when Annarose was born, and he loved her from the beginning of her life. I truly loved him during that time, too. I didn’t know what I would have done without his friendship and support.

  Armed with several books on how to care for infants, I brought Annarose to Cameroon when she was seven weeks old. After a few d
ays introducing George to his daughter in Yaoundé, I returned with her to the Mbargue Forest. I was completely in love with my beautiful baby daughter and vulnerable in a way I never thought possible. She was the one person I knew I couldn’t bear to lose. I worried about bringing her to the forest, fearful that she might get sick, but I had committed myself to the chimpanzees before I even dreamed of her. People in the village raised children with far fewer resources and options than I would have. I belonged in the Mbargue Forest, and Annarose belonged with me. In my tiny one-room wooden cabin I built a baby-size extension on the side of my bed and slept with her close to me under my mosquito net. I learned later about the controversy in the United States and other developed countries surrounding mothers sleeping with babies, but I didn’t know anything about that then. For me, there in the Mbargue Forest, it was intuitive—the way primates naturally mothered.

  I allowed all the chimpanzees to see Annarose without getting close enough for them to touch her. The adults, even Pepe, were calm and quietly interested, while some of the juveniles, especially Bikol and Gabby, greeted us with little stomping displays. I thought they were jealous, and I was very concerned they might hurt Annarose. To keep her safe from injury and to prevent the exchange of diseases, I mostly kept her physically separated from all the chimpanzees.

  I hired a young woman named Helene from the village to babysit in the camp while I worked throughout the acreage of the sanctuary. Several more years would pass before I equipped our staff and myself with walkie-talkies. When baby Annarose cried, Helene sent another employee—usually the cook or the groundskeeper—running to collect me.

  “Madame, elle a faim!” She’s hungry!

  Many times a day, whenever Annarose needed to eat, I responded to the summons to breast-feed, and like the women of the villages, I never associated the slightest need for modesty with the function. It was as natural as me eating. Although we were in the forest with little electricity and no running water, I thought my experience of motherhood was easier, and possibly more rewarding, than that of many working mothers in the developed world—especially in the United States, where the three-month maternity leave was standard. I sympathized with mothers who had no choice but to leave their young infants to return to work. I was able to move forward with my work for the chimpanzees while keeping Annarose only a short jog away.

  Earlier in the year, during a two-week trip back to his village in Northwest Cameroon, Kenneth had married his childhood sweetheart in a traditional ceremony. Within a month of my return to Cameroon with Annarose, he left the Mbargue Forest to begin a life with his new wife. It came as no surprise to me. He had wanted to leave soon after he got married, but he had agreed to wait for me to have my baby and get back to Cameroon. It had been difficult to imagine life at the center without Kenneth, although I had been trying to adjust to the idea of managing with volunteers and my local staff. I certainly had no choice but to make it work.

  While I was grateful that Kenneth had stayed as long as he had, and I understood completely why he was leaving, I experienced an illogical sense of abandonment when it was time for him to go. He was going to a new, more normal life and leaving me alone to manage this strange one we had created together in the forest. The sanctuary had been my vision and he my employee, but I couldn’t have started it without him. And he was the only one who would ever understand the effort and sacrifice of those first two years in the Mbargue Forest. During our final conversation outside the train station, Kenneth tried to reassure me: “You’ll be okay, ma’am.”

  “Of course, I’ll be okay,” I told him in a forced casual tone, which I could see didn’t fool him. Finally, I didn’t try to hide my sadness. I avoided his eyes as I managed to say in a hoarse voice: “I definitely will be okay, but your leaving marks the end of something that was special.”

  “It marks the end of the beginning of your chimpanzee sanctuary,” he said. Now I met his eyes as we both smiled at his well-timed truism, and it was a good time to hug good-bye.

  Fourteen

  Dorothy Finds Her Strength

  In January 2002, I decided to introduce a first group of juvenile chimpanzees—ranging in age from two and a half to four years—into Jacky’s group of adults. Bikol, Gabby, Bouboule, Moabi, Njode, and Mado composed the group of six. Mado was the only girl. We always referred to this group of first juveniles at the sanctuary as “the babies,” but they were really more like very strong and agile toddlers, weighing from twenty to forty pounds.

  Free-living chimpanzees have been known to kill babies from different groups, and sometimes even from their own group, as have captive chimpanzees, but I knew that some adult chimpanzees at other sanctuaries had welcomed young orphans. We had introduced six-year-old Caroline, the chimpanzee who road in the cab of the truck with Estelle and Kenneth when we brought Dorothy and Nama from Luna Park, to the adults a year earlier. At one time Caroline had lived in the nursery with the other juveniles, but being a few years older, she had seemed bored with them and had become difficult to manage in the group. During our long daily excursions through the forest with the juveniles, Caroline sometimes opted to amuse herself by wreaking havoc in our camp instead. When we finally introduced her to the adult chimpanzees, they accepted her easily, so I was hopeful that our efforts to integrate the others would go well too.

  One morning, while Jacky and the other adult chimpanzees were in the forest, caregivers Ndele Chantal and Mvoku Samuel along with volunteers Karen Bachelder, Mirjam Schot, and Gabriela Shuster carried the six babies from the nursery, walking single file along the forest trail, with me following closely after them with my video camera. When we reached the big chimpanzees’ satellite cage, the loving porters entered a single chamber of the cage with the babies they carried.

  With the exception of Mado, who had been surrendered to us more recently by a virology laboratory, the babies had been living together at Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center for almost two years and had developed strong bonds between them. They had been coddled and protected by caregivers and volunteers, who took them on long walks in the forest every day. Now I hoped that the juveniles would support one another through this integration process and that the adult chimpanzees soon would become their new role models and protectors.

  Dorothy, who usually sat at the edge of the forest instead of going deep inside it like the other chimpanzees in the group, was the first to become aware of the commotion at the cage. Although the babies had been hearing the adults vocalize, they had not actually seen an adult chimpanzee since poachers took them from the forest. When Dorothy approached the cage from the forested enclosure, curious but not agitated in the slightest, all the babies climbed down from human arms to move a little closer to the cage wall and get a better look at the big chimpanzee on the other side of it. During this moment that the babies had turned their attention elsewhere, all the human carriers slipped out of the cage, and we closed and locked the door behind them. I worried that the babies would have tantrums when they realized their human surrogates were gone, but no tantrums were thrown. The babies’ attention was elsewhere. Within moments, Jacky, Nama, Pepe, Caroline, and Becky, who now seemed in perfect health, were on the scene, reaching their arms through the sizable holes in the metal mesh of the cage wall, trying to touch the frightened babies, who huddled, grimacing and fear barking, just out of reach in the chamber.

  They were relatively safe, isolated as they were, in the cage chamber, but the holes in the mesh of this older cage were much larger than those in the improved version I would build for future cages. Even the large adult chimpanzees could push their big arms in as far as their biceps. Grabbing a juvenile’s hand or foot, they could have pulled his or her whole arm or leg through the mesh. I was mostly worried about Pepe and Becky, whose reactions to newcomers were less predictable, and in those first hours, it was Pepe and Becky who solicited interaction with the babies most eagerly. To my great relief, while intensely interested, they were also calm and patient, without a
single aggressive display or bark. To a large degree Pepe and Becky hogged the area along the front of the cage, while Jacky and Nama split up to watch their interactions with the babies from either side. Dorothy found a comfortable observation spot on a rise in the dirt a few yards away, and Caroline receded to watch the action from a tree limb at the edge of the forest.

  The babies were fascinated enough that, within the first hour, four-year-old Bikol was breaking the huddle to make tentative movements toward Pepe and Becky, and soon the others were taking turns doing the same. It was a noisy affair. The babies obviously wanted contact with the adults, but when contact actually occurred, they screamed, slapped at the big arms, and ran back to the safety of the huddle. The nervous humans who had nurtured and loved the babies all stood by a few yards from the cage, ready to give moral support if ever it was solicited. Once, smallest baby Gabby broke away to extend his arms toward me through the cage, asking for a hug and reassurance. “It’s okay, little man,” I told him as I passed my arms through the cage mesh to embrace him tightly. Ten seconds in my arms was all he needed before scooting back to his friends. Mostly the attention of the babies rested on the adult chimpanzees, and not once did anyone reach for us crying as though he or she wanted to be taken out of the cage.

  Finally, during one of Bikol’s halting approaches to Pepe, he turned suddenly to back up all the way to him submissively. Seeing Bikol’s tiny frame juxtaposed with Pepe’s comparatively massive one, I realized again how vulnerable he and the others were. Pepe hugged him gently from the back, while brave little Bikol turned his sweet face toward us for reassurance. It was a breakthrough. Tentative overtures continued through the afternoon, but with slightly less noisy fanfare.

  For three weeks, I kept the six recently transported juveniles in this single chamber of the cage, adjacent to the two other chambers where the big chimps slept. Before we would let any of the adults into the babies’ chamber, I wanted to give them enough time to get to know one another through the cage wall. But how much time was enough? I had almost no experience integrating adult and juvenile chimpanzees. I would watch them as perceptively as I could, read their reactions, and let them tell me how to move forward. Even so, I knew there would always be a degree of unpredictability. If anything, I would err on the side of being too cautious.