Around these parts you hear a lot about it. Wild animals are naturally wary of humans and rightly so. Those that haven’t developed that sense are called dinner. The average Ugandan when asked what do you do when you see a chimp, monkey, baboon (select all that apply) says “kill it!” But animals that avoid potentially dangerous humans don’t distinguish between hunters and researchers making life difficult for the latter. Tourists who pay hundreds to see gorillas or chimpanzees feel they should have a fair chance of seeing same, so certain select groups of animals have been targeted for habituation which consists of following them around until the animals throw their hands up in despair and say “what the heck”.
The chimpanzees at Caniyo Pebidi are being habituated for eco-tourism as are all the mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Uganda. The researchers at SONSO have habituated their chimps as have the Japanese at Kalinzu and now SONSO researchers are habituation blue monkeys too. This doesn’t appear too difficult as our blue monkeys and red-tails too, have accepted us without any effort on our part. They regularly feed in the trees above us alternating between curiously staring at us and totally ignoring us. Baboons need no habituation; they will move in a take over the neighborhood.
One of the women researchers at SONSO is studying the effects of stress on the chimpanzees. While habitat encroachment and hunting are major contributors to stress, she fears that one of the greatest stressors may be the researchers themselves. Probably true if the study topics in Vernon Reynolds’s book “Chimpanzees of Budongo Forest” is the standard. They study everything from grooming techniques and bowel movements to frequency and duration of copulations!
We have our own habituation program going on with the local kids. At first they would run whenever they saw us, then come back and smile. Now they watch us work from a close, but safe, distance and their bravest member actually touched my hand. We call him, “belly button boy” or “triple b” because of his distended belly has the ugliest, biggest, umbilical scar imaginable. I recently learned that he is called “Opeeno” by his village, which in the local language means – you guessed it – belly button. He has no shirt to hide it and his shorts are tatters so when I retire my splattered but serviceable painting clothes, I will give them to him.
Passy’s boyfriend, James, told me stories about some of the schools in the new Bulisa district, specifically Butiyaba on Lake Albert. The people still believe in witchcraft and have actually tortured the teachers because they are from the wrong tribe, so James has been forced to close the school, not phasing the parents one bit. We are trying to bring the people into the 21st century and they cling to the 15th.
We met Richard and Kara at Kinyara and rode with them to Karajubu P.S. for the music festival. The kids were great all singing something about an owl and a pussycat but the teachers and (dis)organizers were able to mess things up and in the confusion we escaped to Masindi for lunch and our final visit to the paint store. We ate at the Masindi Hotel, a bit of elegance in old Masindi town. It’s the former (1923) Uganda Railway Hotel and R&K’s favorite spot for a curry fix. A nice treat and quite tasty. A quick check of the internet at their place and we rode home avoiding the rain clouds and cheating death once more.
A note about Kinyara: The management company Richard and Chris work for lost their bid to buy the Sugar Works and it appears their jobs will go away in about 90 days. So they are all scrambling – well not Chris who is on holiday and hasn’t heard the news.
