Feeding Time

The main task each morning is to prepare the chimps' lunch. They eat one big meal per day at 11:30 a.m.

Two or three times per week, a big truck from town delivers food for the chimps. On those days, you have to unload it, sort it, and place it in a storage room next to each chimp enclosure.
When the food is properly stored, we prepare the day's meal. We cut sugar cane and cabbage with a machete. When available, the chimps get sweet potatoes, oranges, "bush oranges," apples, energy drinks, limes, whatever else is laying around, and (of course) bananas. The food is mostly donated by Shop-Rite, a grocery store 60 km away in Chingola.

We also cook shima (a dough-like food that's basically the same as bukari) on an open fire, lay it on some cloth, and roll it into balls for the chimps. They won't eat warm shima, so you have to give it time to cool off.
At feeding time, the handlers call the chimps by name, and they go into their designated rooms. Most rooms look just like this. Sometimes, there are as many as 8 chimps in a room. They come in at feeding time and eat for an hour or more.
Here are some chimps going into the feeding house. They go through that hole there on the bottom right and proceed to their designated rooms. Usually, families are kept together.
After lunch, the chimps take a nap. They are released back into the enclosure around 1:30.