The Monkey Business

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Hey everybody,

It's been a while. I have been volunteering at the Vervet Monkey Foundation in South Africa for the last month. It has been quite an experience. The foundation is located in the bush about a half hour away from the nearest town, Tzaneen. Tzaneen is about a 7 hour bus ride from Johannesburg. I lived in a tented village. The tents were the cheapest you can find though and they were constantly getting flooded and infested with frogs. The weather was really strange there. It would be cold and rainy for 4 days straight, and my tent would constantly be flooded during this time. Then for the next four days it would be incredibly hot and sunny. There are over 700 vervet monkeys on the foundation. They are brought in generally because their mother's were shot by farmers. Some of them were kept as pets and got to big for the owners and others were used in labs. Most of them are put into large enclosures surrounded by electric fences. The big goal of the foundation is to get the monkeys integrated into troups of 30-50 monkeys within an enclosure and then eventually release them into the wild. They have also done a lot of work in order to prevent people from shooting the monkeys. Until about 10 years ago, the monkeys were classified as vermin and were allowed to be shot on sight. The foundation has worked to change that law though. The volunteer work here mostly consists of taking care of the baby monkeys and helping to integrate troups in the enclusures.

The baby monkeys are my favorite! I spent between 3 and 6 hours a day with them. I fed them (usually fruit and cereal) and made them formula. Sometimes I would give them baths and they'd splash around and have a great time. Mostly, I'd just hang out with them and give them the love and care that they need. It's awesome. You get into the baby cage and they immediately jump all over you. They climb around and lick you and groom your hair. Their favorite thing to do with me is to jump inside the top of my shirt and start grooming my chest hair. Sometimes it hurts, but it mostly just tickles. After a while they get tired and I'll have six little monkeys asleep in my arms. It's not all fun and games though. After a shift with the babies you will with out a doubt be covered in monkey piss and shit. Besides that it is really amazing. I have become quite attached to these little ankle biters, and they have become attached to me as well. Now when they see me they make their little calling noise to me and run up onto my stomach to give me a hug. Ugh, it's really incredible.

There is one monkey in one of the large enclosures, Baboo, who is about three years old but he still sucks his thumb. He doesn't want any of the other monkeys to know that he is doing this. So what he'll do is jump up onto your lap and pull your hand over his mouth while he sucks his thumb. If you try to move your hand away he will grab for it and pull it back. It's adorable.

If I'm not playing with the monkeys then I'm usually constructing electric fences for new enclosures or putting up tents for new volunteers. When you're not working here, there is pretty much nothing to do except read. It gets incredibly boring. However, there is a house nearby that one of the foundation founders lives in, and he usually buys a bunch of beer for all of us volunteers to get drunk off of at night.

Most of the people at this place are very nice and the atmosphere is real laid back. However, a lot of the volunteers, especially the full time ones, are also really weird. They would have to be to live in such an isolated place all year round and live with monkeys. I'm convinced that anybody who stays here for more than 6 months is a crazy person.

The guy who started the foundation, Arthur Hunt, is certainly a bit crazy. He knows probably more than anybody else about the vervet monkeys because he's lived with them for the last 20 years, and has devoted his life to them. I think this has also taken a slight toll on his mind though. He has all these crazy theories. For one he doesn't see how it is possible that there isn't a civilization of green people who live underground. I couldn't quite follow his reasoning there. Also, he doesn't believe in evolution, which I find to be very strange. But he's a really nice guy and knows an enormous amount about the indigenous wild life and plants in the area. Interesting guy to talk to. It does get pretty frustrating to argue with him for 3 hours about evolution, however. Then again, since there is absolutely nothing to do here when you're not working, it was a nice way to eat up time.

Despite the abundance of crazy people here, I did become pretty good friends with 3 guys here. We are allowed 4 days per month to go touring around the area, so the four of us spent our 4 days on a road trip to Kruger National Park. We rented a car and set out through the beautiful landscape of northern South Africa. The scenery here is amazing. It is filled with gorgeous, rich, green mountains and deep valleys with rivers set against bright reddish brown dirt and remains of rainforest (apparently Tzaneen used to be a tropical rainforest, but Europeans chopped it down, built the city, and planted a lot of nonindigenous plants). On the way to Kruger we stopped at this place called the Big Swing. It is this place where you can swing on a rope off of a cliff over a huge canyon. The drop from the cliff is a 68 meter free fall. It was an incredible rush. I swung back and forth a few times and then they let you down by this beautiful waterfall that you can go swimming in. It was the highlight of the trip.

Kruger itself was a little disappointing. The park is beautiful and huge (I think it's area is larger than all of England), but there is just a paved road that you are allowed to drive on to see the scenery and animals. So basically, you can't see very many animals, and it's very difficult to see any up close. Also, there are no budget places to stay. So I ended up paying a bunch of money for something that wasn't that cool. If anybody ever plans to go on a safari, I recommend Kenya over Kruger.

Besides the touring days, we also get one day off per week. Usually, I would go into Tzaneen and eat lunch. That's pretty much all there is to do there. I walked around for 3 hours and found absolutely nothing besides the crappy Tzaneen Mall. I did see about 10 different tombstone stores though. A lot of them offer all these crazy sales with 2 tombstones for 1 deals and stuff like that. At first I thought this was really strange, but then I was told that 4500 people die everyday in the Tzaneen area from AIDS. Crazy!

Sometimes on the weekends we would go to "bush bars" in the area. These were frequented by white South Africans. The white people here are mostly farmers and remind me a lot of people from rural midwestern towns in the U.S. What I mean to say is that they are all huge hicks. Most of them are incredibly racist as well. The racism is incredibly shocking here because it is so out in the open. The people I met at these bush bars would talk to me about their hatred for black people in South Africa, and they just assumed that I agreed with them. It was very uncomfortable.

Really the only contact I had with any black people was with the people who worked at the Monkey Foundation. I hung out with them a lot when I was doing construction there. They were all really cool. They get paid practically nothing and most of them live in these little shacks in the middle of nowhere. It looked like some of them had AIDS. One of them told me he was born with AIDS. It's shocking how out of control the epidemic is here. I guess I had already read about it before, but it never really hit me like this until I got here. Two of the women workers were spiritual healers or something like that. For 50 rand you could go to their house and they would read your bones. I didn't have it done because, frankly, I don't want to know what my future is. But a lot of the girls who volunteered there had it done and said it was really amazing. I don't know about that though.

I would have liked to have visited one of the tribal villages in the area, but I never got a chance to. The monkey place is really isolated, so the only cultural experience I had was talking to a bunch of British people for a month. Most of the people there are Bri'ish, so I picked up a few Bri'ish phrases. A few examples are "bollux", "wanker", "I do fancy a spot of tea and a fag", "innit?", "quite", and of course, "apples and pairs, stairs".


What else can I tell you about this odd month? There are a lot of good stories but I'm having trouble thinking of all of them and it would take a while to put a month worth of stories into this entry. I guess I will just finish with what happened the last night I was there. There were 4 different volunteers leaving so we all decided to get a little drunk. People started flicking bottle caps at each other. Since my brother, Michael, taught me this little trick about 10 years ago, I have mastered the technique of flicking bottle caps with incredible speed and acuracy. I hit this one kid, Ryan, directly in the forhead. He returned the favor by throwing a beer bottle at my head. So now I have a little gash on my nose. I'm okay though. These things happen when one drinks. Especially if one drinks with a drunken spaz who throws bottles at people.

So yesterday morning I said goodbye to the monkeys, which was difficult. I really am going to miss those little guys. I spent the day taking a 7 hour bus ride back to Johannesburg and then I hopped on a plane to Cape Town. I'm excited to be on the move again, see some new stuff, and meet some new people. I will let you know how it goes. Talk to you later.

-Jonathan
-Jonathan

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Photos

Baby Monkeys
That's Jesse on my shoulder, she was one of my favorites.

More babies 2
That's me with some babies

The Big Swing
That's me, Sam, Aaron and Ryan ready to do the big swing. Sam was a Bri'ish metrosexual who owned his own construction company. Aaron was a pothead from Brentwood, California. Ryan, is half Irish, half South African. He is a full timer at the monkey foundation. I can rarely understand what he is saying because he talks like Brad Pitt's character in that movie Snatch.

Big Swing Water Fall
This was the waterfall at the big swing that fell from about 68 meters into the bottom of the canyon.

Freddy and I
That's me with Freddy, one of the workers at the Foundation

Steven
That's Steven, one of the workers that I hung out with a lot.

Tent path
This is the path that leads to our tents. It was a beautiful day!

Comments

[El Duderino]

you wanker
You bloody wanker! Bullox to you and your tea innit? I do quite fancy a fag though.

[Jax]

We are not all weird!
Watch your mouth sonny boy! Lucky I was at home for a while before Igo back! Glad my Baboo is ok though! Just for the record not all us Brits like Tea, some of us would rather have a pint of Jaxacoolie!

[Helen Parsons]

Cool, i've been there too!
Great review thouht it explained the VMF very well! I also spent a month there is march last year. I enjoyed it so much I plan to go back v. soon! How about you any plans to return? Did you get to go to Kruger. Helen

[lost in scotland]

Thanks Jonathan!
I'm so glad i found your page, i wasn't sure if this was the right project for me but now I'm!. I'm planning to go for 1 month to do some voluntary work with animals and now i know where I'm going!