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| Whiskers:
a Red-shanked Douc Langur. |
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Biologist
helps locals, monkeys live together
Bettina
soon realised that poverty in the area was a major obstruction to her
work.
by
Nguyen Thiem
Jane Goodall and
Dian Fossey may have met their match in the form of Bettina Martin, a
German national who has dedicated the last five years of her life to
working with snub-nosed monkeys in the remote jungles of north Viet Nam.
A former employee
of the Muenster Zoo in west Germany, Martin was first assigned to her
Viet Nam position when the consultant who had originally been given the
job pulled out at the last minute. Her posting was only intended to last
three months, but leaving Viet Nam was to prove harder than she
expected.
Her project is
based in Na Hang Forest, 300 km north of Ha Noi, where the monkeys live
in a few surviving packs.
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| Perched:
a langur holds tight. — VNS Photos |
Before she
arrived, Bettina had imagined her colleagues in Viet Nam would be
ill-informed amateurs; how wrong she was. Her prejudices were dispelled
as soon as she met the deputy director of the National Institute for
Ecological and Biological Resources, Le Xuan Canh.
Canh, a doctor of
biology, is a man of scruples. He made Bettina write out her work
schedule for him three times before he reluctantly accepted it.
Explaining his behaviour, he says, "it was the most feasible of the
three drafts she gave me, but it was by no means as professional as the
sort of thing you’d be given by a specialist."
Bettina survived
her first encounter with Canh, and her recollections of other Vietnamese
friends at the institute are more upbeat. She is unlikely to forget
those who offered her genuine help when she encountered difficulties and
who nursed her to health when she was sick.
"I often wept
as I was so lonely there at the institute but Mrs Thuy, the wife of one
of the security guards, helped me feel at home," she says,
recalling how Thuy would prepare meals of pho or rice gruel for her.
Rather than
staying at the institute though, Bettina asked for permission to be
permanently relocated to the Na Hang jungle.
At this point Na
Hang was only accessible by a narrow, winding road in heavy disrepair
that left the mountain district largely cut off from the outside world.
The monkeys remain
in this isolated spot because its rugged limestone rocks and ancient
jungle provide shelter from predators, and an abundance of food.
Their dependence
on a specific environment has so far made it impossible for them to be
successfully raised in zoos.
The monkeys used
to be a common sight in the mountainous jungles of north Viet Nam,
particularly in the provinces of Tuyen Quang, Bac Can, Ha Giang, Lang
Son and Quang Ninh.
In recent years
however, their populations have dwindled due to hunting and the
destruction of the forests where they made their homes.
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|
Reaching
out: Years of living in Na Hang National Park and a love for
its monkeys have turned Bettina Martin into an expert, not
only in preservation, but also rural development. — VNA/VNS
Photo Trung Dung
|
Today they can
only be seen in Na Hang and Chiem Hoa, a district 60km to the south-west
of where Bettina works.
There are
estimated to be 200 of them remaining in Na Hang.
According to the Red
Book’s list of endangered species, the Na Hang monkeys are among
the 25 most endangered species in the world.
Bettina was
initially delighted to arrive in the vast jungles of Na Hang, and she
thought all her job would require would be to advise the locals about
how to help preserve the monkeys’ habitat.
But not all the
locals she met were happy to co-operate; some were making a living from
illegally poaching the animals, and saw her as a threat to her trade.
On arrival, she
immediately began learning Vietnamese, and procured a Russian jeep so
she could reach the hamlets deep in the heart of the jungle. She
borrowed it from Tilo Nadler, the director of a Monkey Protection Centre
in Cuc Phuong Forest, 100km south of Ha Noi.
Bettina was
initially accompanied by an interpreter whose English turned out to be
as limited as her own Vietnamese, but she decided she would be better
off with a dictionary, so she dismissed him.
Lone
crusader
Her first
communications with the local people involved giving a group of children
a sheet of paper, and asking them to draw any animals they had seen in
the vicinity.
The children were
not forthcoming. When asked why they hadn’t drawn anything, they said
the paper was so white that they didn’t wanted to spoil it with their
drawings.
Bettina soon
realised that poverty in the area was a major obstruction to her work.
When she comforted a wounded baby monkey in her arms the local people
would look on baffled; to them, the animal represented another day when
they could put food on the table.
To try and amend
this situation, Bettina arranged with the local forest rangers to employ
50 extra staff to guard the forest. This deterred poachers as well as
providing locals with a source of income which meant they would not have
to poach animals themselves.
Following this
success, she was able to secure further funds to pay for courses where
the locals could learn to keep bees and raise animals that weren’t
endangered.
She also
encouraged local women to revive their traditional weaving skills, thus
creating another local industry.
She worked hard to
advertise the new handicrafts on offer to tourists who visited the
region.
She designed
T-shirts, cups and teapots with illustrations of the monkeys on them,
which she sold as souvenirs along with honey that she bought off the
bee-keepers and bottled herself.
Not only did this
generate more local funds, it also publicised the plight of the monkeys.
Today visitors to
Na Hang can see how Bettina’s efforts have paid off.
Secure in their
new careers, the former Na Hang poachers have turned in their weapons
and agreed to stop hunting and cutting down the jungle to build farms.
— VNS |
