I was thinking about one of the coolest things that happened to me in the village today, so I am going to write about it.

When people think of Africa, we think of the animals that live on the continent. In Sierra Leone, there are several types of bushmeat, but the ones everyone wants to see are the monkeys. In the bush surrounding Ngiehun, we have at least two chimps that are seen pretty regularly, and then there are a few types of smaller monkeys. I was lucky enough to see a chimp in the bush one day, but the most contact I had with a monkey was with my pet monkey, Carl. We were helping Mohamed Kanneh carry boards that had been cut in the bush back to the site where his family was building a new house, and on our last trip of the day, a hunter calls us over and he has a baby monkey with him. The hunter had caught the mother in a trap and the baby was with her, so he wanted to sell the baby. I was thrilled to buy him, for the a grand total of Le5,000 (which is $1.25), and then as a bonus, the hunter gave us some of the meat from the mother (yes, we do eat monkey in the village, it tastes like pork tenderloin, and is considered a delicacy). I named the monkey Carl, and began to try and figure out how to take care of a monkey. We tried to give him a section of the chicken coop, but Carl got out and was beaten up by my rooster, so we made him a house out of an old shipping barrel, and lined it with straw and a towel for him to sleep on. He ate a lot of bananas, palm nuts, a boiled egg once in a while, and drank water and milk. The first two weeks I had to handle him with gloves because he liked to bite, but as time went on, he began to get attatched to me. We think he thought of me as his "mother", and he really only let me handle him without a struggle. It got to the point where I would open the door to his house and put my hand down, and he would climb up my arm and sit on my shoulder and we could walk around. It was a really cool experience, and I loved having him as a pet. Unfortunately, Carl died about two months after I got him. We think he was sick, and we didn't know, and we also learned that baby monkeys rarely survive without their real mothers. I was pretty upset for a few days, but I was happy that I was able to give him a home for as long as I could. It is also a relief to not have to worry about him now that I am in the states, because if he had been alive when I left, somebody would have stolen him, and eaten him. But, for those two months, it was a lot of fun to have a pet that wouldn't have been possible to have here.