Kindred Beings

by Sheri Speede

  A week later, I was in Yaoundé for meetings in the Ministry of the Environment and Forestry. This ministry was about to be divided into two, bringing the total number of government ministries in Cameroon to sixty-two. After the division, we would fall under the domain of the new Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife. It would take eight years and many meetings to propel our formal Protocol Agreement, the important document that would define the parameters of our working relationship with the government, through the labyrinthine bureaucracy of the ministry and finally receive the signature of the minister. I attended many meetings in the ministry offices, trying to move it forward.

  Although cell-phone service wouldn’t reach Bélabo for another two years, it had just arrived in Cameroon’s cities and some of its towns. Using Estelle’s new cell phone, I called my one friend from Cameroon on his. Since I had met him, George Muna had provided me with contacts, logistical assistance, financial support, and advice on cultural issues. Since we had moved the chimpanzees from his hotel, he and I had met several times. Whether by landline or cell phone I usually called to say hi and let him know when I was in Yaoundé, and most times he managed to make the trip to see me. He also liked to visit his brother who was living in the city, so he never lacked a comfortable place to stay, and this gave him a second reason for making the effort. Once he came to Sanaga-Yong Rescue Center to see what we had built for the chimpanzees. However, the camp accommodations to which I had grown so accustomed were more challenging for him. He seemed particularly averse to our pit latrine, and since he was older and not very athletic, I imagined he might lack the flexibility to meet its particular physical requirements. Why else would one hate it? A volunteer suggested that the flies and bees flying from it and the big spiders along its walls might be dissuading factors for some people. In any case, George only stayed in camp one night. Although I didn’t see him often, I considered him a true friend, and it was his comfort I now sought.

  When I told him on the phone about the bandit attack, his concern for me was palpable through the line. He insisted on driving the six hours from Limbe to Yaoundé to see me, even though I would be going back to Sanaga-Yong Center the next day. In George’s arms, I felt safe to cry, and for the first time, I realized that I had feelings of love for this sweet man whose world was so different from mine.

  Thirteen

  Pregnancy and Motherhood

  Volunteer Claudine Erlandson, a French national who had married an American and lived in the United States for thirty years, was exactly my mother’s age—born the same month and the same year. In October of 2000, she and I chatted as we drove to Bélabo for a shopping trip. The subject of children came up—she had two who were grown—and I confessed to her my twinge of regret about not having children.

  “It’s not too late for you, Sheri,” she encouraged.

  “Oh yes, it is too late,” I assured her. “I made a different choice.”

  A few weeks later, at the age of forty-one, I discovered I was pregnant. George Muna, who was ten years older than I with two grown children and a teenage daughter from previous relationships, was the father of my baby. I hadn’t been on birth control in Cameroon because I hadn’t needed it in the forest. When I became involved with George, I thought it was very unlikely that I could get pregnant at my age. I wouldn’t have made a conscious choice to do it, living as I was in the Mbargue Forest, with my irreversible commitments to the chimpanzees I had brought there, but on some level I really wanted a child.

  Up until this point, I had successfully compartmentalized the different aspects of my personal life. Edmund was still raising all the money for the work we were doing in Cameroon, and I had recently convinced IDA to contribute a part-time salary for him to continue fund-raising. But with the communication challenges in Cameroon, he and I could go weeks without speaking. We had spent eight months of 1999 and all of 2000 living on different continents with little communication. We exchanged e-mails when possible, but those opportunities were limited. When I last had seen Edmund late in 1999, we didn’t speak of fidelity. He was a gregarious, social person—much more so than I—and I assumed he was dating other people. I had made my choices and would live with them, but I still loved Edmund and cherished the idea of having him in my life, of knowing he worried about me, of knowing he would be there in the United States, at least on some level, when I went home. At the same time, I had come to rely on George’s friendship in Cameroon and to love him too. On opposite sides of the planet, the two lives hadn’t conflicted. I felt like a different person depending on which continent I inhabited. My pregnancy would bring my two worlds crashing together and change my relationships with Edmund and with George forever.

  At Sanaga-Yong Chimpanzee Rescue Center, where I would spend the largest part of my pregnancy, I had to contend with Kenneth. “So you’re the only one around here who gets to have a baby!” was Kenneth’s response to the news of my pregnancy. It was the last thing he expected, and not only because of my age. When he had questioned my decision to use birth control in our chimpanzees, I had patiently explained my reasons with unwavering certainty. First, we needed to reserve our space and very limited resources for orphans in need of rescue. Second, I didn’t think chimpanzees should be born to lives of captivity, no matter how special the form of captivity. Kenneth had been skeptical. With similar fortitude I had performed a spay (ovariohysterectomy) and a castration on our female and male camp cats over Kenneth’s objections. To his thinking, there was a certain hypocrisy in my having a baby after I had denied that right to others.

  While I was excitedly adjusting to the idea of motherhood and trying to work out how I could fit a child into my unconventional life, I was called back to the United States when my own mother was critically injured in a fall. The last couple of years I hadn’t been able to speak with my mother very frequently, and I knew she had worried about me a lot. She didn’t really understand enough about what I was doing and why to feel proud of me for it. For her, there was just the worry. Now it was my turn to worry during the two months I stayed with her in Mississippi, often sleeping in her hospital room.

  During those weeks at the hospital, I was disturbed by my strolls through the maternity ward. While a baby chimpanzee, or even a baby kitten, could fill my heart with tenderness, these helpless and somewhat unattractive—to my fearful eyes—human infants left me completely cold. I began to seriously question whether I really wanted one. My doubt persisted until an ob-gyn at that hospital in Mississippi performed an ultrasound to confirm my pregnancy. Seeing my own tiny fetus’s heart beating, like the fluttering wings of a fragile butterfly, settled the issue once and for all. Through an amniocentesis I learned that my little butterfly was a girl, whom I named Annarose long before she was born. With all my heart, I wanted her to thrive.

  I didn’t discuss my pregnancy with my mother. I knew that she wasn’t overly conservative, and I knew she ultimately would be delighted about the baby, but I worried that she might experience some slight hesitation about my unwedded state, which I had no intention of changing. When my mother was conscious, I sometimes grappled with whether or not to tell her, and her strange hallucinations of babies in the hospital room with us was slightly unnerving.

  “Sheri, put some clothes on that baby!” she ordered me on one occasion in her strong Southern accent.

  “What baby, Mama?” I replied softly.

  “That baby over there needs some clothes on it like the other baby has on!” she insisted, pointing to a dim corner of the room.

  I turned on the light to convince her. “Look, Mama, there are no babies.”

  Another time, she told me to pick up the baby. When I again convinced her that the room we occupied was babyless, she laughed softly at herself. “I guess I need to get this baby stuff out of my mind.”

  I intended to tell her later, when she was stronger, that she would have a granddaughter. I thought the time would come for us to wonder and laugh about her “psychic” baby hallucinations in the
hospital. However, her injuries and other health issues proved overwhelming. She died without knowing I would have a child. Losing my mother so early in her life—she was only sixty-two—was the deepest and saddest loss I had experienced in mine.

  Immediately after her funeral, I flew from Mississippi to Oregon and stayed for three days in my house with Edmund, who was still living there and running our small IDA-Africa office out of it. For him my pregnancy marked a sort of sad milestone in our relationship, and the strain of it was between us. Nevertheless, he did his best to be supportive and comforting to me in my grief. He tried to make sure I ate well, at least, during those few days before I took my grief back with me to Cameroon.

  Back at Sanaga-Yong Center, another source of sadness for me was my estrangement from Pepe. His problem with me started just after I returned from the United States, and it continued throughout my pregnancy. Whenever he saw me, he displayed aggressively toward me, so that I couldn’t even approach his cage. If I was with other people, he met my eyes during his angry display, making sure I knew his problem was with me specifically. With my deeply hurt feelings, I wondered whether his hostility had to do with me leaving for so long when my mother was injured, or whether he could smell the hormones of my pregnancy. It started before he could see any signs of my pregnancy.

  George visited me in camp from time to time. His visits were brief but I was always happy to see him. Initially he was excited about the baby, then he grew concerned about whether I could be a good mother with all my other responsibilities, and eventually, he was excited again. When he visited, he brought me pastries and pizza and olives, and we talked about issues concerning my staff or the villagers that confused me. Our discussions were enlightening and his advice always useful. Once he told me, “Sheri, you’re too direct for our culture. You need to beat around the bush more.” He loved to use American clichés—he had gone to university in the United States for six years. Once George traveled with me to Yaoundé for an ultrasound. I suffered from motion sickness on the train, which I had never done in my nonpregnant state. The bathroom was filthy, and George stood over me and held my hair while I vomited over and over on the rocking train. The quality of the ultrasound performed in Yaoundé wasn’t good, but we could see Annarose’s face and her tiny fingers. It was thrilling to share that with George. However, to a large extent, his business kept him occupied in Limbe, fourteen hours away from me, and there was no phone service anywhere around Sanaga-Yong Center. I had brought back a satellite phone from the United States, but it was much too expensive to use casually. Mostly, I was on my own.

  All in all, the months of my pregnancy proceeded pretty much the way the months before it had. Problems and crises showed no deference to my maternity. Late one afternoon about six and a half months into my pregnancy, I realized that Becky was seriously sick. It was already four o’clock when caregiver Assou informed me that Becky hadn’t eaten since morning and had returned to her cage from the forest. I found her resting on her tire, which was situated on a platform high above my head in the center of the cage. A year and a half earlier, I had positioned the tire on the platform and secured it there with chain, thinking it would make a comfortable nesting spot for someone. Becky had chosen it as hers, exclusively. She often carried in leaves and vines from the forest to make a nest on it, but today, she rested on her side on the bare tire. Her back was toward me so I couldn’t see her face, but I could just barely discern the much too rapid rise and fall of her abdomen as she breathed. I called to her for over ten minutes, and finally, as I was failing in the fight against my escalating sense of panic, she descended and came to me. Normally, her intelligent, questioning brown eyes would have found mine during her approach, but today, under deeply furrowed brows, they looked past me. I knew immediately that she was in terrible pain.

  “What’s wrong, Beck?” I reached in to place my hand on her forehead. Her skin was warm. When my hand moved downward to briefly cradle the side of her face and then skim gently over the front of her chest, she seemed to hardly notice, but when I touched her abdomen, she grunted and pushed my hand away. The problem was in her belly. She turned her back to me and allowed me to stroke and groom her back for a few moments, but it was more comfort to me than to her. As she left me and climbed slowly back up to her tire, I noticed a slow dribble of urine that continued after she was lying on her side again. Deeply dreading the prospect of performing surgery on Becky, I began considering it. Whatever was obstructing Becky’s urine and causing her such awful pain was not likely to repair itself or to be fixed by medicine.

  I used the satellite phone to call veterinarian Jim Mahoney in the United States. After working with chimpanzees and monkeys in biomedical laboratories for years, Jim had been the driving force for placing many of them in North American sanctuaries a few years earlier. I knew he had gained a lot of medical experience that I lacked, and I appreciated that he had always been generous with his advice. Jim answered his phone and listened attentively while I explained Becky’s symptoms. On the basis of what I told him, he suspected that Becky had twisted her large intestine, and that the twisted bowel was blocking the flow of her urine. He said he had seen it before in chimpanzees. If he was right, the blood supply to Becky’s intestine was being cut off, and she probably couldn’t survive until morning without surgery. Jim warned me that I might have a fatal outcome even with surgery. If he had known the difficult conditions under which I would operate, I suspect his pessimism would have been much greater.

  I had received funding for a small veterinary clinic from the Michigan-based Arcus Foundation, but I had not built it yet. Our kitchen table would serve as my makeshift surgery table, where I had already performed a few minor surgeries like wound suturing. It was a round slab of wood, sliced from the end of a big log and situated under the raffia roof we called our kitchen. I had no gas anesthesia or skilled technicians to assist me. Flashlights charged on our solar system would be my surgery lights.

  By the time I had sterilized my surgical instruments in our pressure cooker and converted the open-air kitchen area to a surgery suite, as much as possible, it was dark. Getting Becky out of her cage would be the first challenge. She was a big girl, weighing about 130 pounds, and I was hoping she would descend from her tire-bed to the ground when I blew the dart of anesthesia into her thigh. Unfortunately, she was so sick she hardly moved. Kenneth climbed a ladder up to her platform and somehow managed, from his precarious perch on the ladder, to pull Becky off the tire and hand her down to the night watchman and me. We were careful to stay out of reach of Pepe and Jacky, who barked and screamed at us from the adjacent cage chamber where I had locked them. Not understanding how we could, or why we would, be taking Becky from the cage, they were frightened for her and wanted to protect her. Hanging on the cage wall, Pepe applied the full force of his fury to loudly vibrate the metal mesh in a threatening display that succeeded in terrifying the night watchman, and in scaring Kenneth and me as well. I knew we had built the cage well—I was there when all the pieces were welded together—but I breathed a sigh of relief when we managed to get outside the cage with Becky and lock the door behind us, putting another wall of metal between Pepe and us. We placed Becky on a bamboo bench that served as our stretcher, and through the swath of light radiating from my head torch, we carried her along the dark forest trail to the surgery table.

  She was too big to fit on the log table, so Claudine sat on a stool at one end, cradling her head. Using a vein in Becky’s back leg, I started an intravenous fluid line to improve her blood pressure and start potent antibiotics. Through the IV line, I would administer anesthesia injections as necessary throughout the surgery. Nicholas Bachand, a Canadian volunteer who years later would become a veterinarian himself, and Kenneth assisted me during the operation—holding the flashlight on my surgery field and handing me items as I needed them.

  When I cut into Becky’s abdomen, I found that all the organs in her abdomen were glued together by fibrous adhesions; I h
ad never seen anything like it before. I couldn’t even identify the individual organs until I broke down the adhesions, which was a painstaking process that took hours. One wrong move and I could have caused bleeding that would have been impossible to control in the large mass of adhesions.

  With my advancing pregnancy, I had become prone to low back pain. Leaning over the low log table for hours on end, my back now hurt so badly I wanted to scream. Instead, I cursed and swatted at flying insects attracted by the flashlight held over Becky’s abdomen. The tone of my instructions to Nick and Kenneth reflected my agonizing discomfort and stress.

  “Tilt the flashlight more this way!”

  “Shine it where my hands are working! I need to see, dammit!”

  “Wipe the sweat off my face before it drips into Becky!”

  “Give that syringe of ketamine! Quick!” (Just before starting the surgery, I had taught them to give an injection through the IV fluid line.)

  Several times, I had to put down my surgical instruments to draw up doses of anesthesia or change to a new bag of intravenous fluids, leaving Becky’s blood on everything I touched. Each time, I tossed off contaminated gloves and put on a new pair before continuing the surgery. When I had finally separated out the intestines and other organs, I could see that Jim was exactly right. Becky’s large intestine was twisted and beginning to turn purple. After I untwisted it and tacked it down in its normal place so that blood circulation could improve, the pink color began to return, giving me more hope that Becky might survive if we could get her through the surgery.