Baby Baboon on Board (Nov 4)

After the 50th Anniversary, Peace Corps Volunteers made a mass exodus from Lilongwe to Liwonde Wildlife Reserve in the South. Once a year the Reserve sets aside a highly coveted game count for PCVs. They have us come out for two days and help them take a survey of the game in the park. First Year volunteers take the south camp and Second Years take the luxurious north camp, complete with a swimming pool. Sign me up for next year! Liwonde is bloody hot! Luckily they had crazy rain storms the day before we arrived, so it wasn’t too hot until nighttime.

The south camp consists of a few youth hostels, an outdoor grill for cooking, an eating hall, and monkeys. The monkeys are completely unafraid of humans and have incredibly sticky fingers. Every meal time we were greeted by a hoard of vervets (little grey monkeys) surrounding the camp, waiting for an opportunity to move in on an unattended plate. They stole what they could, literally jumping up on the tables and the side of the grill to take people’s food, going into the hostels to take bananas and eggs, meant for the morning. Then the much larger baboons came in and the vervets scattered. The baboons strutted around camp like they were the highest order of species present. They stood patiently by the waste pile for us to throw things at them, they would have come into the eating hall and cleaned the tables of dropped food for us if we’d let them. We didn’t. We all became desensitized to them after awhile. They ceased being cool wildlife and became serious pests.

But the mommy baboons with babies clinging to their stomachs, that didn’t get old. Those babies were so cute! And when mommy wanted some mommy-time and tried to pry her little offspring from her, baby was like magnetized Velcro. Some mommies would get together in a circle to complain about their husbands and it was like baby gamboree. Baby baboons tumbling and playing and swinging from trees and falling over each other. I tried to lure them over with bananas, but those mommies trained them well, “don’t take bananas from strangers! And don’t trust those Homo sapiens, nothing good ever happened around that species.”