BECA Travels: Monkeys!!!

Monkeys!!!

This morning, we went to the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary, a short (45 minute) drive from Kpando.  We were able to see the monkeys up close because the guide gave us each a banana and let us feed them.  The monkeys are attracted to the bananas, and they come sit on your shoulder and eat the bananas.

These are mona monkeys.  They live in families of one male, called the “commando,” and the rest female monkeys.  The male monkey ushers the male baby monkeys out of the family to start their own when the monkeys are quite young – about six months.  So what we see are families of one male and the rest female of varying ages.  The monkeys eat bananas, insects, and “selected” leaves.  Their gestation period is 6 months, and they give birth to one monkey at a time, so a female monkey can have two per year.

Apparently, in the area of the sanctuary, people were attempting to cut down the forest and farm the land, so a Peace Corps worker named John Mason – a Canadian (Note:  I didn’t know there were Canadian Peace Corps workers, but that is what the guide said.) – explained to the villagers that keeping the forest was important to keeping the monkeys.  At that point, the forest became protected and the sanctuary was created in the early 1990s. The local people named a trail for John Mason.

Earlier people needed a way to talk to the gods, and when they inhabited the area around the monkey sanctuary, they decided that the monkeys were their channel to talk to the gods, so the monkeys became sacred.

We went through two villages to get to the monkey sanctuary.  In those villages, homes are made from mud bricks and roofs are made of grass and bamboo.  Sometimes the walls are also made of bamboo, rather than mud. The homes resemble the stereotype we in the U.S. have of African “huts.”  It was interesting to drive back into Kpando to see how comparatively “wealthy” Kpando is, with its cinder block buildings and metal roofs.