At the zoo

Jacob, Rose and I at the Yaounde zoological garden

We visited the Yaounde zoo. My best friend in village, Mariam, has a brother who works there so she arranged a rendez-vous. He took us on a personal tour and it was really great to meet him.

It was definitely a bit different than American zoos. For example, there was one empty cage with an open door. Outside, a monkey had his hand in through the neighboring cage and was stealing the food from there. But nobody seemed at all concerned about this situation.

Jacob used to be in charge of the lions. However, about a year and a half ago, he was in the lion cage and noticed something wrong with the lion’s ear. So he went to take a closer look and the lion bit his arm. This is as much as Mariam had told me… turns out the lion didn’t let go of his arm for about a half an hour and Jacob was stuck in the cage until someone finally heard him and was able to distract the lion with some meat. His arm is still all bandaged up and he’s got a rod inserted into it.

After the zoo Jacob took us back to his house to meet his family. It was so crazy to be in an actual home in Yaounde since usually everything is just so big and overwhelming. But, their house was in a nice neighborhood and seemed a world away from the busy streets that we’re used to. I got to meet Mariam’s nephews who were so cute and it was a lot of fun.