Lynn Clifford couldn't bear it when watching documentaries was the closest she could get to wildlife. So she saved up and set off for a chimp sanctuary in Africa, she tells Arminta Wallace
Eck, eck, eck, Lynn Clifford says. Come again? It's Thursday evening, and the Harbourmaster Bar, in Dublin's Financial Services Centre, is hopping. Around us conversations are going strong in at least three languages. Nobody is going to turn a hair at another one - even if it is fluent chimpanzee. The "eck" sound, Clifford explains, means: "Wow! It's you! Great to see you." A warning call is, as she demonstrates, completely different. "When you say that to a chimp it will stop, look around and run up a tree. Which is, usually, what you want them to do."
Clifford isn't your standard-issue Celtic Tiger young Dub. She's working in the International Financial Services Centre to get enough money together to return to southern Cameroon. There, on an island in the middle of the Sanaga River, live six baby chimps and nine older animals that have been rescued from poachers.
Chimps normally stay with their mothers until they are eight, so when 18-month-olds, rejected by the poachers because they're considered too small to bother with, arrive at this small local sanctuary they're usually traumatised and grief-stricken, and often physically injured as well.
"Chimps are a protected species in Cameroon," Clifford says, "and it's illegal to buy, sell or keep one." But chimpanzee meat is a highly prized delicacy, and there is now a lucrative trade in illegal bushmeat - accompanied, as often as not, by illegal logging, which in turn leads to devastating deforestation and the further destruction of the chimp's natural habitat. For every baby chimp that arrives at Pongo-Songo Rehabilitation Project in the Douala-Edea nature reserve, where Clifford is based, it's estimated that at least 10 other chimpanzees have died.
"When I first arrived I wanted to take the babies into the forest, to show them how to hunt and stuff," Clifford says. "But they'd just sit there and scream. So I'd have one on my back, one on my head and one on each arm - and I'd tramp through the forest, going: 'There's a tree. Go climb it.' And they'd be clinging on tight, going: 'A tree? No way.' "
Chimp parenting is, by all accounts, every bit as tricky as the human variety. "You have to play it their way," Clifford says with a rueful smile. "They're small but very strong. A fully-grown chimp is five times stronger than a fully-grown man, so there's no way you can control them. What I do with food is, if I find something good I taste it myself. And they're very nosy creatures, so they come and look. 'What are you doing? Let's have some of that.' Same if you want them to drop something. I just pick up something else, and then they want to take that, and so they drop whatever it was they had. There's no use trying to take it from them or you'll have a fight on your hands. They bite, too." She grins, every inch the proud mammy. But the project is a serious one: the aim is not just to keep the chimps alive but to return them, eventually, to the wild.
A trained veterinary nurse, Clifford first visited Africa in 1996 as a backpacker. She went to a chimp sanctuary in Uganda on a day trip - and signed up as a volunteer on the spot. There was a three-year waiting list, however, so she returned to Dublin and got a job with a manufacturing company. "It was a great job, too," she says. "I did all the planning and admin in the sales office - the whole works. But I wasn't happy."
In early 2005 she got a placement with a chimp sanctuary in Cameroon. It lasted for most of the year. Then the money ran out, and Clifford found herself back home in Swords, Co Dublin, watching the Animal Planet channel. "I tried to do the 'get a job, get a man, get a life' thing," she says. "But I couldn't get a grip. My heart just wasn't in it. So I saved like mad, paid off my debts from the first time and went back to Cameroon."
She spent another year at the Sanaga river, living with a local family. It's a life that she clearly relishes but that would, for most of us, be hell on earth. "There's no electricity in the village, no running water. You wash yourself and your clothes in the river. We're near the mouth of the river, so it's like - well, you can imagine. Think of the pictures you've seen of the Ganges. There are spiders and snakes and parasites."
She stays in one of the best houses in the village, made of bricks with a corrugated iron roof. "No windows, but shutters you can close. The walls don't actually reach the roof, so you have bats flying through at night - and rain if it's coming in a certain direction."
The owners of the house, a young family with a nine-month-old baby whom Clifford calls Princess, look after their guest in royal fashion. Nevertheless, the nearest town is a long day's journey by car, canoe and aching feet.
What does she eat? "Anything I can," she says with a merry laugh. "People catch shellfish in the river and flatten them and cook them skewered on branches, with almost a curry sauce, so I eat that. If the family catch fish they always give me one, so I cook that. But mainly I eat potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, manioc - whatever I can get in town. Spaghetti with tomato puree. But no bread. I miss bread, big time. I buy it in town, but by the time I get it back across the river it's damp. And then it gets mouldy, because of the humidity."
As for amusement, she says there's never a dull moment. "The chimps go to bed about 6pm, and it's dark by 6.30pm. I get home, go down to the river, have a wash and start preparing my meal. It takes maybe an hour to cook and eat it, so I finish at 8pm. Then I write up my diary and go to bed, because I'm up at 5am or 6am the next morning."
Clifford has a relaxed attitude to the cultural differences between herself and the villagers. She had no French when she arrived, but she has learned fast. Nor does she take it on herself to tell people that eating chimpanzees is wrong.
"Who am I, as a white person, to go in there and say that what they've been doing for years is wrong? You can't do that. People in Cameroon eat chimpanzees just like we eat cows. It's food.
"Years ago people did actually hunt in the forest to keep themselves alive. Now that there are laws against doing that, the real problem is this bushmeat trade, in which the meat is shipped to very expensive restaurants in the cities. It's a black-market business, and the villagers certainly don't benefit from it.
"When the subject comes up I always say to people: 'What do you think of chimpanzees?' They'll answer: 'Oh, they're a brilliant animal - and they taste very good as well.' Then I say: 'OK, but how would you feel if your grandchild would never see a chimp, because there won't be any left in the world?' And they go: 'That's not good.' Bush people are aware of the eco-balance in the forest - that every animal has a role to play and that, if one goes, the whole system starts to get out of kilter."
For the moment, though, Clifford's main problem is to get enough money to provide supplemental food for her chimps. "If I could just keep it together for a year until we can get some funds coming in, then we could move out of the village. It's not good for chimps to be too close to humans, because their DNA is so like ours that they catch all our diseases. But because of the slight differences in DNA, if they catch a cold it turns to pneumonia. Tuberculosis is another danger.
"In the longer term I'd like to make a permanent home in the forest for the babies. It would also be good to set up some small subsistence businesses with the village women."
She falls silent, and suddenly it's obvious how noisy the bar has become while we've been talking. To the naked eye this cheerful, unassuming young woman looks no different from all the other young people who are laughing, ordering drinks and exchanging the day's news and gossip. Except, of course, that she's trying to make a tiny difference in a very big world. In July, in fact, her work in Cameroon will itself feature on an Animal Planet documentary.
Is Clifford planning to stay in Cameroon? Is this what her life's work is going to be? "Yeah," she says. "Stupid, amn't I? But I think these little guys should be given a chance. It's humans who have put them in this situation, so we ought to look after them."
Pongo-Songo Rehabilitation Project is supported by the Pan African Sanctuary Alliance (www.panafrican primates.org), an organisation that links primate refuges across Africa. Lynn Clifford is at lynardc1@gmail.com
ON THE BRINK
Chimpanzees are humans' closest relatives, sharing more than 99.4 per cent of our DNA, which puts them closer to us than a horse is to a zebra. Yet they're being hunted and eaten every day in central and western Africa. Chimpanzees grow and mature at roughly the same rate as humans; baby chimps are not normally weaned until the age of four, and they stay with their mothers until they're about eight, learning all the skills they should need to survive in the forest. At the turn of the 20th century the wild population was estimated in the millions, but it is now thought to number less than 150,000. At the current decline, and without intervention, chimps could cease to exist in the wild by 2050.