by Sheri Speede
Next we had to make the path that would become our driveway. With our compass and machete, Kenneth and I cut a mostly straight track from a point on the road about a quarter mile from Bikol through the forest to our future campsite. As I referred to the compass and pointed the way with my outstretched arm, Kenneth walked a few paces ahead of me, cutting the track with his machete. I struggled to watch for ants and snakes and to keep my footing on the uneven forest floor, while keeping my arm pointed in the right direction for Kenneth, who looked back every few seconds to see where my arm was pointing. It was exhausting work for both of us, undoubtedly more so for him. I frustrated him by shifting the line several times to minimize the number of trees that would come down when the bulldozer blasted through.
When I was satisfied, we spent a whole day marking trees along the route with a big red X using paint I had brought from Yaoundé. Again and again, with a deep sense of the wrongness of it, I marked for destruction beautiful trees of many species—some huge and ancient, others young and perfect. In the cool, oxygen-rich forest, I could feel the life in all these trees—so benevolent and giving.
“In the long run our presence will be good for the forest and the animals who live here,” I told Kenneth, justifying as best I could both to him and myself.
Kenneth began to tease me unsympathetically. “We may be ‘In Defense of Animals,’ but we’re ‘In Destruction of Trees,’ ” he said, making an unfunny joke.
I fought momentary compulsions to drive away from this place and leave these innocent trees as I was finding them. But of course, my empathy ran deeper for the chimpanzees, and I knew that even if we left, the forest would not remain exactly as we were finding it. Jean Liboz would be logging this area if we weren’t here.
While we were camped in Bikol, Liboz and his crew were working five miles away building a bridge across the Yong River, close to where the train tracks crossed. His bulldozer had cleared a dirt track wide enough for a vehicle to pass from Bikol to the bridge, and another ten-mile track on the other side of the river to the town of Bélabo. On sunny days when it had not rained the night before, our Pajero could cross the unfinished bridge and pass to Bélabo for supplies. When it did rain, even four-wheel-drive vehicles bogged down in the mud on the fresh raw track.
The small town of Bélabo hosted the only market within reasonable walking distance where the people from villages on our side of the Mbargue Forest could sell the produce they grew. Many years earlier, the government had built a wooden bridge across the Yong and a road from it to Bélabo. However, termites had destroyed the bridge, and foliage and trees had recaptured the road long ago. When Liboz arrived on the scene, only remnants of the old bridge and a well-worn human footpath remained. The women and older children walked from the villages all the way to Bélabo carrying plantains or basins of cassava, yams, or peanuts on their heads, traversing the river on the train tracks. Not surprisingly, the village community was happy about Liboz’s logging road and bridge, because it meant access to public transport—motorcycles and bush taxis—and maybe other kinds of development in the community.
One day around noon, Kenneth and I came into Bikol from the forest to have some lunch. He wandered away toward the opposite end of the village, probably seeking a few minutes of anyone’s company but mine. I was alone on my bamboo perch in front of my tent when I saw Chief Antoine, the leader of the village of Bikol 2, to whom I had been introduced at our official meeting with the divisional officer, limping rapidly down the center of the road. During our first meeting, the chief had shown me what remained of his left foot; about a third of it had been destroyed by a Gaboon viper bite ten years earlier. He said it was the reason he had requested a job at the sanctuary for his son-in-law and not himself. When Chief Antoine spotted me on the bench, he veered rapidly toward me. It seemed he had come to find me. I stood and shook his hand, trying to smile in a welcoming way, until I realized that he was extremely upset. He spoke rapid French, unintelligible to me, gesturing frantically to his crotch as he spoke. When I bent over to get a closer look at the problem with his blue polyester-clad crotch, he stepped back abruptly, stopped gesturing to his crotch, and increased the volume and emotional intensity of his indecipherable plea. He was on the verge of tears, and now he was waving his hands in the direction of his village, the direction from which he had walked. At this point in the futile exchange, I turned my head toward my last sighting of Kenneth, circled my mouth with my hands, and shouted his name as loudly as I could, not knowing if he was within earshot. He was not, but I heard a man’s voice several houses away echo “Kennet”—the village people never pronounced the h in his name—much louder than I was capable, and then another fainter voice shouted it again, farther away down the village communication grapevine. Within a few seconds, I was relieved to see Kenneth running our way, across the bare dirt that fronted the row of tiny houses. As he neared and saw that I was still standing and appeared well, his pace slowed and his face relaxed visibly.
“I need translation!” I sputtered at him before he had come to a complete stop. I briefly regretted alarming him, imagining him imagining me bitten by a snake or attacked by a wild animal. He told me later that, knowing I was clumsy, he only feared I had fallen in the latrine.
As Kenneth translated, Chief Antoine explained, obviously exerting great effort to stay calm, “My daughter walked to Bélabo to sell our coco yams six days ago. Five days ago on the way home, she gave birth to her baby daughter on the trail. My daughter was fine until this morning when she started bleeding.” Again he made large flowing gestures with both his hands in the vicinity of his crotch to show where his daughter was bleeding a lot.
I absorbed the fact that this girl, nine months pregnant, had walked from Bikol 2 to Bélabo (seventeen miles) carrying a heavy basin of produce on her head and had given birth on the ground on her way back to the village.
“Is the baby okay?” I asked incredulously.
Chief Antoine shouted in teary exasperation at my obtuseness, “The baby is fine! It’s my daughter who is dying!”
“Let’s go,” I said to Kenneth.
We bumped and slid through the mud from Bikol to Bikol 2, about a mile and a half, as fast as we could risk going. Fortunately, it hadn’t rained in more than twenty-four hours, and the sunny morning had helped to dry the roadway, but without caution we could have easily slid into the mud bog along the sides. When we reached his village, Chief Antoine led us into a house, past an expectant throng of village women gathered near the portal. Along one wall of the ten-by-ten-foot room of the little mud house, I saw a young woman lying on a thin foam mattress atop a narrow cot of bamboo. An older woman, obviously her mother, who was sitting on a small bamboo stool beside the cot, moved out of my way as I approached. Kenneth stood with Chief Antoine against the opposite wall. I sat on the stool vacated by the mother and looked at the girl, who was barely conscious. She looked like a teenager, or at most in her early twenties.
“Fait ça (Make this),” I said in bad French, and opened my own mouth wide to model what I wanted her to do. She slowly opened her mouth as wide as she could manage. Her tongue was white. I nodded, and she closed her mouth. I lifted her upper lip with my finger to see her gums, hoping for a comforting hint of pink. Instead, her white gums rattled my nerves. The girl really was dying.
“What is her name?” I asked Kenneth, buying time while I considered what to do.
“Vivian,” her mother answered.
I sighed and stood up slowly, willing myself to project a calm demeanor.
“We’ll try to get her to the hospital in Bélabo,” Kenneth began to translate, but they had already understood me say Bélabo.
“Merci Dieu! (Thank God),” the chief said, bowing his head in relief. Other than Liboz and his men, who were working five miles away, we had the only vehicle in the area.
There was a government hospital in Bélabo, and it sometimes had a doctor. The facility was poorly equipped and dirty, but it offered the best c
hance of survival for this young woman. A month earlier, before Liboz had opened the road to Bélabo and before we were there with a vehicle, Vivian would have died here in the village. Even now, I didn’t think there was much hope for her. First, she would have to survive long enough for us to get her to Bélabo, and the chances of that would be much better if we could avoid getting stuck in the mud on the way. If we got as far as Bélabo, there were a number of grim factors pertaining to the quality of care that would be available. That I was pessimistic didn’t matter. We had to try.
Kenneth carried Vivian and gently placed her on the backseat of the Pajero. Chief Antoine and his wife, whose name I learned later was Cressance, entered on either side of their daughter. Cressance carried a zippered plastic market bag, which she had evidently packed earlier in desperate hope that her husband would find transport to a doctor. Another middle-aged woman carrying an open-top plastic bag with plantains sticking out—they would need to eat at the hospital—entered the car beside Chief Antoine. I decided that Kenneth would drop me off in Bikol and proceed to Bélabo without me.
While Chief Antoine relocated to the front seat, I ran to the tent and brought 10,000 CFA, about $20, back to Kenneth in case he needed it. The subject of money had not come up with Chief Antoine, and I assumed, naively, that he had the money to pay for Vivian’s care. Our contribution would be the transport. Standing out on the dirt beside the car, my eyes locked on those of Cressance, who turned her head to continue meeting my gaze as the Pajero pulled away. She was amazingly stoic, and other than to tell me her daughter’s name, she had not spoken to me. It was through her eyes she showed me her pain. I was not religious, but as I watched the Pajero pass out of sight I said a silent prayer to God that this woman would not lose her child.
Kenneth returned to Bikol around eight o’clock that evening. They had found the doctor at the hospital, and Vivian was admitted for treatment. Chief Antoine ran out of money in their first hour at the hospital—all medications had to be purchased prior to treatment—leading Kenneth to donate my 10,000 CFA before he left. Kenneth had other bad news.
En route to Bélabo, he had seen Liboz. We had informed him a few days earlier that we had finished marking the path of our future driveway and were waiting in Bikol for the bulldozer. He had just informed Kenneth that the machine was broken, and it would take at least a week to get it repaired. This was distressing news for me. We needed to finish the first enclosure and bring Jacky, Pepe, and Becky before the heavy rains in September would make some of the roads impassable. I hoped to bring Dorothy and Nama soon afterward, although we still didn’t know what the proprietors of the hotel would decide. In our part of Cameroon, the rainy season extended from April to mid-November, but July and August usually saw less rain. This was our opportunity to move forward with construction, and I constantly felt the pressure of the ticking clock.
We could accomplish no more in the forest until we could transport building materials to a cleared campsite, so I decided that we would return to Yaoundé for a few days. Kenneth and I were both tired, and I dreamed of a warm shower. More important, I wanted to check on Dorothy and Nama, which I could do on the way to Yaoundé. With nothing urgent to accomplish in the forest, we were eager to go. We packed out at dawn, leaving the tent in place for when we returned.
Unfortunately, it had rained the night before. The truck slid precariously along the mud-slick road, the accumulated slime on the tires effectively obliterating the usefulness of the tread. I welcomed the frequent water puddles because they washed mud from the tires, but unfortunately gave us only short-lived advantage. About two miles from Bikol, Kenneth lost control going down a hill and the truck slid into the mud bog along the edge of the road. We had a shovel and a machete, with which the two of us worked for over an hour trying unsuccessfully to dig ourselves out.
Finally, a young man pushing a bicycle through the mud met us coming from the opposite direction. He introduced himself as Assou Francois, Vivian’s husband and Chief Antoine’s son-in-law. We were delighted to learn that Vivian was still alive in the hospital and doing better. Assou wholeheartedly joined our effort to liberate the Pajero, and soon two other men from the nearby village of Mbinang pitched in too. With another hour of digging and pushing, the five of us were able to free the car. During the meeting with the D.O. several weeks earlier, Chief Antoine had requested a job at the sanctuary for his son-in-law. This happy young father with the surviving wife must be the one of whom he had spoken. I hoped this spirit of collaboration between us was a sign of things to come.
Eight
Nothing Works, but It All Works Out
Rolling down the Luna Park Hotel driveway always brought on the same nauseating anxiety. Would Dorothy and Nama both be alive, no worse than I had left them? I sighed in relief to see Dorothy, and then a few moments later Nama, who was standing on two feet, using a rake to clean her dirt. She had apparently taken the rake from the groundskeeper. They recognized me passing in the Pajero, and both watched eagerly as we parked and got out.
I had returned several times since our first visit, sometimes with Estelle, sometimes, like today, with Kenneth only. It had been almost a month since I had seen them last on our way to Bikol.
As I crossed the fifty-yard stretch of grass toward the tree where Dorothy was chained, she met me with her now familiar hand-flopping, screeching hysteria. I had known that it was an expression of desperate need mingled with hope, but it was Estelle who had known intuitively what Dorothy needed most. On our second visit, Estelle had taken a leap of faith and slid in between Dorothy’s flopping hands to hug her. So on this day there was no mystery in it. More than anything, Dorothy craved contact; she wanted to be hugged. I squatted a couple of feet in front of her, and she quieted to welcome me as I duckwalked into her arms. I wrapped my arms around her and breathed in her distinctive musky body odor. As I patted her back soothingly, I felt her relax. After a few seconds, Dorothy pushed me out far enough to study my face and moved her mouth as though she would groom it. I felt her warm breath on my face, and happily anticipated her gentle grooming fingers, but she changed her mind and hugged me tight against her again. As much as I loved this intimacy with Dorothy, as much as I knew she needed it, I was aware of Nama watching and feeling left out. After another minute, I backed up to retrieve and hand to Dorothy the bag of bananas, papaya, mangoes, peanuts, and yogurt that I had packed at the market just for her. By now I knew she preferred to keep the bag and take her time exploring the contents.
I took an almost identical bag to Nama, who stood to take it eagerly and then sat down. After our first visit, I had diagnosed a heavy load of intestinal parasites and had given her two treatments already. She looked slightly more robust than when I had last seen her. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hope to rid her of the parasites as long as she lived on that contaminated patch of filthy dirt. Nama explored the contents of the bag for a few seconds and fished out the small papaya. As she savored her first bite, she looked me in the eyes and put per fingers to the chain around her neck—as though to remind me. “I could never forget it, Nama,” I assured her softly.
Kenneth and I were exhausted after our long trip from Bikol, and we hoped to get to Yaoundé before dark. After I fed the monkeys and gave water to everyone, we left, knowing I would visit again soon.
Dana and Estelle were on vacation in the United States, and I stayed in their detached guest room with access to their house and kitchen. While we waited in Yaoundé, I visited Dorothy and Nama twice more and rested in comfort while I worried about the delay we were facing.
Unfortunately, the same day we finally received a message from Liboz that the bulldozer was set to go, I got sick. A high fever, headache, and excruciating pain in my hands, feet, and knees rendered me useless for almost ten days. I sent Kenneth to guide Liboz’s bulldozer through the forest to our campsite and worried constantly about the time passing while I lay there doing nothing constructive for days on end, nothing but thinking and planning.<
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As soon as we could transport our building materials into our campsite, we would build a satellite cage for Jacky, Pepe, and Becky and soon afterward a second one for Dorothy and Nama. They would sit adjacent to a tract of forest we would eventually enclose with solar-powered electric fencing. I would take the chimpanzees back to the forest, not to live in cages, but to feel the earth beneath their feet and to view the horizon from the forest canopy. Electric fencing was the only way to give them their piece of natural habitat. I had seen electric fencing used for monkeys in Texas years earlier at Limbe Wildlife Center. I had studied the system at the Pandrillus sanctuary in Nigeria, which Edmund and I had visited on our way to Cameroon. Peter Jenkins, codirector of Pandrillus and Limbe Wildlife Center, had taken time to explain how their complicated (or so it seemed at the time) electric fencing system worked.
I would be using the same equipment, which Peter Jenkins himself had transported to Limbe, via Nigeria, from the United States. Peter, who was a charismatic personality of many and varied talents, had managed to get a big load of equipment transported for free from the United States to Nigeria, through Mexico, on a charter plane. We contributed to the costs of shipping to Mexico, which were minimal compared to the price of commercial transportation to Cameroon, and Peter included our equipment in the shipment to Nigeria. Afterward, he brought our equipment, along with supplies he had bought for Limbe Wildlife Center, by boat from Calabar, Nigeria, across the Bight of Benin to Cameroon. He got the equipment as far as Limbe, and the rest was up to me. A Limbe businessman, a friend of George Muna, had allowed us to use one of his trucks to move it to the big fenced yard of the Coron sawmill in Yaoundé, where it all had been stored for two months. The equipment would take its final journey to the Mbargue Forest on one of Coron’s logging trucks as soon as I was well enough to move with it.
