Culture dictates

I was so confused I was crying. My 5 year old mind couldn't fathom the fact that this being, the same height as me, was holding and breastfeeding a baby.
Twenty years later, 6 months ago, the people who hovered over our land-rover, trying to sell us crafts and traditional harps with missing strings were a little over five feet and lived in small brick houses, not the forest like I remembered from the family trip decades before.
“When the government took them out of the forest, they settled here,” our guide relays. “They sell crafts to buy food since they can’t hunt anymore.”
In an effort to conserve the forest, the hot springs we'd seen earlier were the only places they were allowed to go only to perform rituals. A clinic was built so they wouldn’t rely on traditional herbal remedies from the forest. Intermarriage with the other tribes made them taller and not the 4 foot beings I remembered.
We met their king who demanded an exorbitant fee for us to be entertained by the Batwa cultural troupe. We paid hesitantly and were presented with 20 people, ages 2 to 80, shuffling around in a circle, singing without the slightest of enthusiasm. An eternity later, the group disbanded and went on with their day. The king had a curious mischievous look.
Tonight, the first day of the full moon, I witness the most energetic bunch of four to five footers leaping in the air and stomping the ground in glee, wearing the finest skins. We have lived with them for close to a month doing research on cultural preservation and human rights of minority groups. When the wildlife authorities took us through the forest to show us former Batwa habitats we didn't see this place. Tucked away at the edge of the forest, Batwa from both Uganda and The Congo converge here every night of the full moon for celebrations. There are bonfires and merry making and all the 150 Batwa left come out to celebrate.
Because we don't perceive them as mere tourist attractions facing extinction, we are trusted. Their most sacred places of worship, hidden from the authorities who had relocated them without their free and informed consent, we are shown. Each secret area in the forest has a special name related to historic mythical events from hundreds of years living the hunter-gatherer life in harmony with nature. We are not deceived like the religious people and NGOs that come to help them cope with “modern” life.
Who better to preserve the forest than those with centuries of special spiritual ties to it?