Cultural Differences

We teach an early morning class three days a week, right on our front porch.  It's not a huge group but the students are eager and happy that we're willing to get up early to do this.  Hell, we're here to teach and we've shown the community that we'll hold a class if students will commit.  It's a fun group, all women.  We have a good time with this boisterous class!

Our initial survey said no one would come to a morning class...
All respondents were men.  We've learned a good lesson about sampling.

This morning, about halfway through the lesson, one of my students (Mayerly) pointed up over my head and her eyes got big.  Now, if you've read the blog you'll know we've had our share of encounters with creepy crawlie things.  So, yeah - I cringed a little.  Then Krisna said 'Congo!' which means 'mono' which means 'monkey'.  Sure enough, in a small scraggly tree near the porch, up about 15 feet off the ground on a thin wobbly branch, sat Zira and Milo.

We have howler monkeys in the trees around our place.  We hear them regularly and see them pretty often, too.  The three that visit the most often are a family - dad, mom and baby.  In honor of 'Planet of the Apes' (the original, not the crappy remake) we named them Cornelius, Zira and Milo.

Monkeys on the move.  (Not pictured: Cornelius.)

We've seen the family on the ground only twice before.  They usually move around branch to branch, through the huge trees that are all over the village.  There are too many predators on the ground, these being mostly packs of dogs, so the monkeys stay up as much as possible.  

Zira and Milo!  I was not this close!  This is a enlarged zoom of the previous picture.  Look at those adorable monkey faces.

A Cornelius Cameo.  (Again, an enlarged zoom to show his face.)

After class wrapped up and our students went home, we enjoyed our morning beverages on the porch, tea for Bex! and coffee for me.  We watched as Zira and Milo slowly got comfortable enough to come down lower .  The tree they were in is isolated and to get to the big trees nearby would require a dash across open ground to the tree where Cornelius was waiting for them.  It was very stressful for them and amazing for us to watch this family drama unfold.  How Zira and the little one ended up in this tree, we don't know.  She must have gone up in the night, then felt stuck there when the sun came up and humans started holding an English class not twenty feet away.

Come to think of it, maybe THIS is how 'Planet of the Apes' gets started, with monkeys eavesdropping on English classes!!  Holy crap!!  We apologize in advance for the downfall of mankind.  But I digress…

Zira made her way down to the lower branches, keeping a very close eye on us. Cute little Milo climbed down most of the way on his own, then hopped on mom's back.  Zira hit the ground, looked around to make sure it was safe and took off for the nearest tree that allowed her access to her waiting hubby.  Once they were reunited, you could hear them grunting and howling.  It was a wonderful sight, a wonderful sound to witness.

Monkey noises!  Go to the May 16th post and scroll to the bottom for audio of our very own monkeys recorded last month by Mike Sakarias, Bex's dad.

All's well that ends well, right?  Right.  

Not so fast, unfortunately.

Nicaragua has produced some fine baseball players many who have made it to the big leagues in the states.  We joke that the reason they are so good is because of mangos.  Not because of the nutritional attributes of this common fruit, although they are very good for you.  It's the harvest method that we believe makes a great ball player.  The locals throw rocks.  Lots of rocks.  The mango trees here have large trunks with no lower branches, so they are very difficult to climb.  So people huck rocks up into the branches and hope to knock some fruit loose.  Mangos are pretty tough and no worse for wear after hitting the ground, so it's all good.

A couple of hours after class, there was a group of two young men walking down the path along the lake in front of our house, throwing rocks and collecting mangos.  We heard the howlers making noise, which is normal.  They were giving a warning and we watched the mango hunters make their way down the trail.  Bex! went inside to do some work and I was out on the porch.

A little while later, though, I saw the two guys hurrying back toward their family members, who were harvesting coconuts nearby.  The kids were collecting coconuts and the women were splitting them open and scraping the meat out.  This was all maybe 40 meters away, within sight of our porch.

As the guys hustled by our place, I noticed they had something wrapped up in an orange t-shirt.

I had the monocular with me on the porch as I worked on lesson plans.  So I got it out, held it up and focused it.  They had Milo!!

Hence, the title of this blog post.

I told Bex! that they had monkeynapped the baby.  Unsure what to do or how to handle this but damn positive we weren't going to just sit there, we moved our stuff inside, locked up the screen door and walked over to chat with our neighbors.

Bex! speaks good Spanish but doesn't have the vocabulary like 'stressed' and 'kidnapped' and 'how would you like it if someone came and snatched your child away'.  The two guys were kinda laughing at us, like 'it's just a monkey, no big deal'.  One guy was petting it and tried to feed it a mango.  But Milo was scared to death, you could tell.  He was shaking and kept trying to get away and run to a tree, just like Mom and Dad had shown him.  He got loose one time but was just too unsure which way to go and the guy with the t-shirt soon had him covered and captured again.

We kept pleading our - and Milo's - case.  The guys were okay and seemed understanding.  But one of the women started in on us with "In our community, there are a lot of monkeys. We do this all the time.  They are pets.  Why are you so upset?"  She was a little pissy with us, of course.  And maybe she had a right to be.  We're outsiders here.  But we couldn't let them take Milo and break up this little family unit we've come to know and love.

The guys relented, and we walked back toward out house.  They took the path back toward where Cornelius and Zira were earlier and we went through the gate to our place.  Bex! went back inside, visibly upset.  I think she was vacillating between anger and frustration, between tears and getting in a fight!  This is why I love her.

The guys came back a couple of minutes later, called to me and told me it was all good.  They had let Milo go.  I thanked them and walked over to see if I could spot the little family.  Nope.  Of course, I wouldn't have stuck around, either!


A few thoughts from Bex!:

It was a whole mix of emotions this morning and throughout the day - fear, frustration, sadness, anger, adrenaline, uncertainty, worry, doubt, inadequacy, wistful(ness), selfishness.

Fear for this monkey family we feel we've gotten to know; that the toll of today's stress will shake their fragile survival balance.  We've taken to feeling protective of our monkeys (and our iguanas) and even just this morning shooed off a stray dog that was touring the yard as mom and baby were moving down the tree.

Frustration that we couldn't communicate with the locals today and that there is such a gap in our norms for human-wildlife interaction.  

Sadness for our monkey friends who had to go through the experience today, particularly in contrast to the quiet morning scenes of napping, eating, and reuniting that we had just observed.

Anger that someone would do this to these beautiful, peaceful monkeys.  And that someone would ruin my day in this way.   (Even though this is unfounded - in that I did not get the impression these people were trying to hurt the monkeys or upset us.)

Adrenaline because it's not every day you go confront six strangers, a machete, and a baby monkey while you're a gazillion miles from home.

Uncertainty because I don't know if these people are the angry sort, or are just shrugging about the crazy gringos who anthropomorphize monkeys.

Doubt over whether we made a mistake talking to them; over whether it would have been possible to avoid the incident if I'd been more suspicious when they were hooting at the monkeys.  (I was initially somewhat suspicious because I heard a dog barking, too.  But ultimately I reminded myself that we also have fun hooting with howler monkeys sometimes and went about my business.)

Worry about whether we have made enemies or permanently pissed off or alienated some neighbors.

Inadequacy because my mangled explanations of "it's bad for the monkey" are a pretty lousy version of the education that's needed to teach people about how to interact with wildlife without causing harm and about why they should want to do that.  

Wistful for our illusion of a wildlife sanctuary.  We've enjoyed a lot of iguana and monkey action in the yard over the last two weeks.  We've always been a bit aware of how vulnerable these creatures are - chasing off stray dogs, looking around when the monkeys howl to see if anything bad is happening, telling our friends "nos iguanas no son para comer," encouraging the iguana to stop munching grass out there in the open and get back to the tree where it's safe!  But I was also somewhat lulled into a sense of security and wonder with our porch-based daily wildlife sightings.

Selfishness in being bummed that we may never get to see "our" monkeys again - because if this happened to me I'd move on without looking back and would stay the f*&@ away from humans.  We'd like to see Milo's family again to know that they are all okay, but that may never happen.


Back to Dave:

Although we didn't see them reunited, I sincerely think they were.  And here's why:

When the guys were making their way down the path, Cornelius and Zira were making all kinds of noise.  Like I said, this is normal.  Thinking back as I'm writing about the whole episode today, I realize that the monkeys suddenly stopped howling.  Lots of noise; suddenly, no noise.  A minute later, the two guys came cruising by with Milo.  I think the parents were calling out their warning grunts and howls, then got quiet because their baby had just been taken.  

But very shortly after the guys let Milo go, I heard Dad and Mom again, howling and grunting.  So, yeah, together.  I think they got their little one back and were quite happy about it.

We hope we see Cornelius, Zira and Milo again but won't be surprised if we don't.  It was a little weird intervening in something like this.  We know we're just visiting and that this culture is incredibly different than ours.  We hope we did the right thing and that we didn't make any enemies. 

I think we did.  Time will tell.