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Friday the 13th!

1/13/2012

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      Friday the 13th of January, 2012 
      I always suspected that thirteen was a lucky number for me (although I'm not superstitious, really) and today confirmed it.
     Paul and I were standing at the paint counter at Jorcel's, a hardware store in San Ramon, Costa Rica.  I noticed the other customer at the counter because he had an interesting tattoo around his wrist.  All black, sort of Art Deco, with what looked like silhouettes of monkeys hanging from a vine. 
     Me to Paul (in a whisper):  "Look at that guy's tattoo.  I think those are monkeys."
     Paul:  "Don't ask him."
     Me:  "Are those monkeys on your tattoo?"
Picture
     Long story short, David Peiro told me that monkeys were his passion, and that he had given himself the tattoo as a 40th birthday present.  Nobody else had ever asked him about it.
     David, an animal behaviorist who is originally from Spain, had recently moved to San Ramon after a divorce disrupted his plans to open a rehabilitation center on the Caribbean coast of Costa Rica.      
     Paul and I had recently moved to San Ramon from the United States, and had a permit from the government agency MINAET for a primate rehabilitation center...but no monkeys.
     And David knew of a 1 1/2 year old male spider monkey in need of relocation.

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    Picture
    In the jungle with the monkeys.

    Michele Gawenka 

       Jane Goodall has always been my hero, and working with primates an aspiration.  Africa wasn't in the cards the summer I turned 16, when my parents offered to send me to volunteer,  and there was only one class (in physical anthro-pology) when I wanted to study primatology in college.  
         Decades later my husband and I retired in Costa Rica, and this is our journey with spider (and howler) monkeys. 

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