Riverside is a wildlife rehabilitation and environmental education centre (www.primate-sa.org) run by Bob and Lynne Venters assisted by their son Matthew, a workforce of 7 and an everchanging band of volunteers. We worked with 4 other volunteers during our first week and 3 others during the following 2 weeks. While we were there, Matthew & Katie (another long-term volunteer) were away at Sun City running about the place with snakes draped over their shoulders, frightening baboons away from the golf courses & hotels of South Africa's Las Vegas.The wildlife in residence was ever-changing too as were the number of Vervet monkeys which were the main focus of the rehabilitation efforts.
We started work 6 days a week at 7am and on a Sunday at 8am and generally didn't get back to our hut( Kingfisher's Rest, with outdoor shower and toilets!) until about 8pm. They were long days in the heat of 30 degrees C in the shade .....
The usual routine in the morning was to clean out the baby monkey enclosure (latterly with 11 baby monkeys in it, but mostly on us!), various other monkey cages in the clinic & the quarantine area & then to prepare & distribute food for the monkeys, ostriches, owls, eagle, duikers, tortoises, snakes, rabbits (for later feeding to the snakes), mice (also for feeding to the snakes) & parrot. Sometimes we had to shift tons of either rotting mangoes & bananas to the compost heap (complete with maggots & flies!) or fresh mangoes, bananas & pumpkins into the food stores. We did pickups of waste food here too, from stores in Tzaneen 30 km away. We also had to bottle feed the baby monkeys twice a day & bath them every morning. There was an afternoon feed too. One-off jobs were to dig a duck pond, build an ostrich shelter & process 25 new monkey arrivals. This involved weighing, measuring, micro-chipping sedated monkeys (very necessary - they are incredibly strong with razor sharp teeth!) Occasionally we could assist with operations on injured monkeys.
We really enjoyed our time there despite the hard work, the heat, the muck & the difficult atmosphere engendered by Bob's occasional temper tantrums & general discourtesy to the humans around him (he even bit one of the volunteers!!!) but after 3 weeks we jumped at the chance to move on to a local community school - enough was enough!
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