Wild Kingdom: The classroom edition

Back by popular demand, more stories of the simians in my life. The other day, I sent the strangest text I will probably ever send in my life:

Me [To M]: “Mary just bounced a cocoa mug off a monkey’s head”

The monkeys may look like they have tiny brains but obviously they are capable of assessing the weak link: me. At cocoa time last week, I was passing out bread and many of the kids were already washing their mugs when the monkeys launched a coordinated attack on Timo, one of our youngest children. Totally gratuitous picture of him below because he is literally the cutest child ever.



They surrounded him and jumped at him to try and get him to drop his bread. I was the closest teacher so I turned my back to the bread table and started towards him to shoo them away. Rookie mistake.

Turns out that the attack on Timo was just a diversion. You see the monkeys have figured out that if they put all their weight on the branches just above the bread table, they can bend the branches to within 4 feet of the table and drop directly onto it (the branches are normally about 15 feet off the ground). As soon as I turned, the monkeys launched their main attack on the bread table. Mary sprang into action and ran towards them shooing them away. One monkey stood his ground and Mary grabbed the nearest item handy: a half full cocoa mug on the table. She hurled it at him and it bounced off the top of his head. Dazed, he scampered off to fight another day while we laughed hysterically. She couldn’t have aimed it more perfectly if she’d had 1,000 shots.

On a more serious simian note (yes, I just wrote that), today a group (pride? pack?) of baboons moved through the school grounds. While monkeys are a laughing matter, baboons are not because they’re huge and could do serious damage to an adult, let alone a child. Luckily they moved through during a time when we were all in a classroom and I captured this shot of one male baboon lunging for another male across our sandpit.




They really riled the kids up since our classroom doesn’t have windows with panes. Our windows have flimsy wooden bars designed to let light and air in so the kids could hear them moving and were instantly out of their seats. You can hear them excitedly discussing it on a video I took as they passed within about 10 feet of our classroom. They were especially excited when a mother carried a baby past us on it's back (mtoto = baby in Swahili):



So that’s the latest and greatest on the monkey front but I’ll be sure to keep you updated on the animal exploits at kindergarten in Kenya.