Friday the 13th of January, 2012

I always suspected that thirteen was a lucky number for me (although I’m not superstitious, really) and today confirmed it.

Paul and I were standing at the paint counter at Jorcel’s, a hardware store in San Ramon, Costa Rica. I noticed the other customer at the counter because he had an interesting tattoo around his wrist. All black, sort of Art Deco, with what looked like silhouettes of monkeys hanging from a vine.

Me to Paul (in a whisper): “Look at that guy’s tattoo. I think those are monkeys.”

Paul: “Don’t ask him!”

Me: “Are those monkeys on your tattoo?”

Long story short, David Peiro told me that monkeys were his passion, and that he had given himself the tattoo as a 40th birthday present.

Nobody else had ever asked him about it.

David, an animal behaviorist who is originally from Spain, had recently moved to San Ramon after a divorce disrupted his plans to open a rehabilitation center on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.

Paul and I had recently moved to San Ramon from the United States, and had a permit from the government agency MINAET for a primate rehabilitation center…but no monkeys.

And David knew of a 1 1/2 year old male spider monkey in need of relocation and so, the journey begins.

My Tica neighbor, Alexa Sancho Castro, and I drove 4 hours to Siquirres to pick up the 1 1/2 year old male David Peiro had told me about. I had spoken on the phone with his owner, Hanzel, and with my limited Spanish believed I had agreed to take a one-year-old female, too.

Alexa and I met Hanzel in the small town of Squirres. It was lunchtime, and the three of us waited an hour for the boss at MINAET to see us at 1:00 PM. Taking the monkeys wasn’t an issue because we had our wildlife center permit and written permission from the MINAET office in San Ramon.

Taking the monkeys that day was apparently a problem because the “passport” that would allow us to travel with wildlife could take a week to prepare, in part because the boss in the Limon regional office was on vacation. We were told to return to San Ramon and wait for the paperwork.

By this time it was mid-afternoon and we knew we couldn’t make it home by dark. Alexa doesn’t drive, and the mountainous two-lane road through Braulio Carrillo National Park, and maze-like capitol city of San Jose, are not for the nightblind. We agreed that we’d stay at a hotel in Siquirres after going out to at least see the monkeys.

We followed Hanzel’s motorbike on a pot-holed dirt road, through banana plantations, for a half hour . A dusty sign indicated we were just 10 kilometers from the massive Tortuguera National Park on the Caribbean coast when we arrived at our first destination.

We were warmly welcomed by a campesino family… NOT with a one-year-old female monkey, but a three-month-old baby drinking milk from a bottle. Since she was wearing a cloth diaper held together with two pink safety pins, her sex couldn’t be visually confirmed.

In a perfect world she would really be a female, the male would really be a male, and they would produce the next generation of wild spider monkeys.

But in a perfect world I wouldn’t drive away without that darling creature. It required patience I don’t normally have, except when I’m conscious of being “an American.”

Sharing these facts will abruptly end small talk in mixed company.

Visually, spider monkey genitalia is very different than human genitalia. The penis is completely retracted in its flaccid condition, whereas the pendulous, hypertrophied clitoris of the female is present at birth and is always “hanging out there.” As a friend observed, human females have “privates” and spider monkey females have “publics.”

So was the male really going to be a male, or were his owners confused by a pendulous clitoris?

My question elicited the response that he had “eggs,” so I knew that he would, indeed, be a male.

Hanzel and his wife lived about two kilometers from the first family. Childless, they had raised Chiquito like a human. He ate with them, slept with them, drank from a sippy cup, and even used the toilet and flushed afterwards. But he had started to bite. And the wife, a diabetic, worried that she might get an infection from a monkey bite.

Distraught about giving him up, she had gone to stay with an aunt when we came.

Driving away from a second monkey pushed me past a tipping point. What if Hanzel’s wife changed her mind before we returned? A mile or two down the dirt road I pulled over and asked Alexa to call the San Ramon MINAET office.

I haven’t yet found a place in Costa Rica without cell phone coverage. (Paul and I spent a night in the jungle after a five hour hike and were stunned when the guide got a call on his cell phone; we’ve used our cell phones after hiking down to the waterfalls on our property; and Alexa and I had coverage somewhere between Siquirres and Tortuguera National Park.)

Long story shorter?

The head of the San Ramon office said he couldn’t believe it when Alexa told him the Siquirres office hadn’t provided us with paperwork for traveling with the monkeys. He said he’d call the appropriate people. He didn’t say we could take the monkeys, but he didn’t say we couldn’t.

Because we didn’t ask. We turned around and went back for them. First the male, then the female.

By now it was after 4:00 in the afternoon and Hanzel was getting onto his motorcycle to head off to his night job as a security guard. In a matter of five minutes, with instructions from Alexa to “be brave,” he had shoved Chiquito into my fiberglass dog crate, slammed the metal door closed, and loaded it into our car.

We made arrangements to meet at an attorney’s office in the morning so Hanzel could certify that he was donating Chiquito, not selling him. And then we headed in different directions.

In spite of having borrowed a GPS, it did us no good at that moment. Roads in Costa Rica have no names. And dirt roads in amongst banana plantations aren’t even on the map. Alexa, always blunt but sincere, asked a boy on a bicycle where the “gordita” (fat) woman with the baby spider monkey lived, and he gave us directions.

Emotions ran high. I unpinned the wet diaper and handed it back. (Yes! A pendulous clitoris!)

I paid $10 for the plastic bottle and remaining container of 2% milk, knowing it had been a financial sacrifice for a poor campesino family. The daughter who had been smiling in earlier photos dissolved in tears. We gave them our cell phone numbers, I invited them to visit, and we drove away with our precious cargo.

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It’s clear that Monkey Mom Michele and Monkey Dad Paul Gawenka are doing this for the love these incredible monkeys – it certainly is not for the money which they have been spending to try and provide an environment where they can rest and recover before they are released…

After we published our first article in this series, I and a few other VIP Members paid some money into Paul Gawenka’s PayPal account (pgawenka@yahoo.com) to help with the costs for a new enclosure…

Michele and Paul don’t have some fancy ‘charity’ that you can contribute to but they’ve given us their personal guarantee that every penny that you may give goes towards helping the animals – they don’t want a dime for themselves – so please log into your PayPal account and follow my lead and send them a US$100 to pgawenka@yahoo.com

Andrew Makarik

to@welovecostarica.com

Andrew Makarik is the main editor of WeLoveCostaRica, a fan of this sunny country. He is also a loving husband and a has a lovely daughter. By being a devoted family man and the biggest Costa Rica fan, he wants to make more people feel at home there. WeLoveCostaRica unites people and helps them find new home or a new travel destination. This website is a friendly community where everyone can find not only information, but also new friends and travel pals. Andrew is also passionate about IT and programming, so he himself maintains a friendly atmosphere in this cozy environment of WeLoveCostaRica.com.