Break-In Monkey

The title of this post is supposed to be a pun on the "Outbreak Monkey" featured in the movie as the one creature with antibodies to cure a disease that's wiping out the humans left and right. Unfortunately, this encounter was a little less pleasant. I've been holding onto this story because it's such a good one, so try to read slowly and imagine what it was like to be here.
I wake up last Tuesday, minding my own business getting ready for class when I hear these yells from outside. My hall is pretty noisy, so that's not terribly uncommon, but the nature of these screams seemed slightly different, more of a surprise. I open my door to find this:
Now, I'm certainly not accustomed to real live monkeys outside of my door in Berkeley or in San Francisco for that matter. But I thought, as I'm sure many of you are right now, that this is a fairly cute monkey, and so long as it doesn't do anything brash we can make it work. Ghanain students seems to be playing with it a little close for comfort if you ask me (it was climbing on them, making fake little snaps at their hands, etc). Still though, monkeys carry many diseases and I don't really want to get too buddy-buddy with this little guy. The other boys from my program tease it and it ends up running after them, causing them to dive back into their rooms in a frenzy. As I continue to get ready, the noise outside dies down, so I make my way to the bathroom and jump when I realized I've been followed, but remain clam and laugh when the monkey jumps up on the adjacent row of sinks and starts playing with the knobs. I go back into my room, read, slowly pack my things, and cautiously open the door. No sign of the monkey. As I'm closing my door I realize that the door to my balcony is unlocked. Ever vigilant, I walk across the room, lock and door and turn around, only to find that this monkey (roughly 2ft high and 30-40lbs) has walked in through my door. The room is not that big, mostly taken up with beds and desks, which leaves me closer to the monkey than I appreciate at the time. I'm completely freaked out at this point, and as I shout the most absurd things ("No! Bad Monkey! Go away! You're a bad monkey!"), my mind flashes through tactics of scaring animals away. I get big, try to be loud, and squirt water at it. The monkey consequently gets annoyed, jumps on my roommate's bed, gets tangled in his mosquito net, progresses from annoyed to aggresive, and jumps on a chair less than two feet from me. I make a last attempt to scare it by taking a flash photograph which turns out like this:
You cannot see the monkeys face in this photograph, but as it prepared to leap towards me from the chair, it made quite clear the inaccuracy of the statement camp councilors often make that the wildlife 'is more afraid of us than we are of it'. Out of ideas, I quickly slip out the door on the balcony and, trapped, I watch helplessly for a few minutes as the monkey makes its way over to my desk and starts rummaging through my things, mostly keepsakes from home that I really don't want destroyed by a monkey! He eventually is holding two pieces of metal shaped like small stones with the words 'journey' and 'friendship' carved into them- a gift long ago from my very good friend Susanna. He wasted no time picking at them and putting them in his mouth when we both heard a noise outside of the room. For some reason the monkey took that as his cue and, my keepsake still in his mouth, he bolted out of my room. I rush in and slam the front door, not eager to give any sign of invitation. Shortly after I catch my breath, I go outside and try to find him. Some other Ghanain students and the man who washes off our floors in the morning helped coax the monkey into returning my possessions. They still sit safely on my desk, germed up but mine. As I quickly gather my bag, double bolt my door and descend the stairs, I get a call from Alicia asking if I'm still coming to breakfast. I reply that I am on my way, and I have a really good reason for being late.

The update to this story is that the monkey has since been spotted harassing the residents of Volta Hall and the workers at R-Link, a small corner store on campus. Apparently, one of the professors kept it as a pet tied to a tree outside of his house, and it escaped some time in December. It has since been roaming Legon freely, and its past habituation to humans explains why it could not have cared less that I was screaming at it, throwing water or flashing lights. Hopefully it won't be around for a while.