Jakarta

A ninety-year-old German woman lives in the Jakarta zoo. For more than four decades, Ulrike von Mengden has been taking care of the orangutans there.

When Ulrike von Mengden comes home in the afternoon from her second walk around the zoo, she is always greeted by an orangutan. The reddish-brown ape lifts his arms, slowly walks towards her and touches her carefully on the arm. He cheeps quietly as orangutans do when they are feeling very good. The ape tentatively shakes her hand as if he knows that he must treat the 90-year-old lady with care. She strokes the orangutan’s cheek; the orangutan strokes her in return. She says, as if to herself, “you always have to meet them at eye level; don’t behave dominantly.” Then, she quietly sings a made-up welcome song to the orangutan, “Liebeliebelei, Liebeliebelei.”

Baroness Ulrike von Mengden is the unofficial caretaker of the orangutans in Jakarta’s Ragunan Zoo. Unofficial because no one pays the native-born Prussian to do it. But she has lived rent-free in a house in the middle of the zoo for more than 40 years. Apart from domestic help and night watchmen, no one else is permitted to live within these walls. The widow of a German diplomat has spent half of her life caring for the “ancestors of humanity,” as she always calls the orangutans.

She has 38 children

At the zoo, Ulrike von Mengden is only called “Ibu Ulla.” Ibu means mother. She has 38 children: her orangutans. She feeds them at least twice daily, monitors the renovations of the outdoor enclosure, has the walls painted and cage doors mended. Her first patrol begins at nine in the morning. She greets each animal, strokes them, and gives them fruit and vegetables. “But no bananas; they’ve gotten to where they just throw them back.” First Ratna from Sumatra, who she recognizes from her somewhat lighter coloured fur. Then Saima, who likes to hide from visitors. She walks from cage to cage explaining that most of the names of the orangutans say something about their time of birth: Pascal was born on Easter, Imlek on the Chinese New Year and Vulkana while the news was dominated by the ash cloud in Europe.

When she reaches Budi’s cage she keeps her distance. “He’s a bit strange,” she says. The big ape shakes at the bars and spits. It must be because of the cage situation. She sighs. She’d rather see him in freedom in Borneo. Next-door is the cage of the largest and heaviest of her children. Douglas once broke out; he simply tore the door from its hinges in spite of its weighing many tonnes. “The next morning he was sitting in front of his cage, looking as if he wanted to say, ‘So, what now?’” Orangutans have seven times the strength of humans.

Enough reason for Ulrike von Mengden to be cautious. Ten years ago, one of the apes reached through the bars and pulled her by the legs. The result was a sprained foot and swollen shoulder. Shortly after that she broke her other leg during one of her patrols; the pathways are very slippery when it rains. Ibu Ulla has never been able to be angry at the animals. They’ve pulled all the books off her shelves and strewn them about the floor, eaten her face cream and spread toilet paper all over the house. She does not get upset.

She discovered that the apes love the taste of yakult, a probiotic Japanese drink from the supermarket. It is supposed to be good for human digestion, but Obama in particular, Ibu Ulla’s youngest primate child, will take the bottle and drink it down in one gulp. Obama was born on the day of the U.S. president’s inauguration.

She also found out that the metabolisms of orangutans and humans are very similar. A few years ago, Budi and Sukarna were infested by threadworms and both had diarrhoea. Ibu Ulla remembered an effective cure for such ailments from her childhood in eastern Prussia: sauerkraut. She ordered a crate-load of sauerkraut and tested it with almost scientific precision. She gave Budi the German dish, but not Sukarna. And the trained medical-technical assistant became a successful primatologist. The illness abated and didn’t return in the sauerkraut group. In the meantime other orangutan stations have adopted this “cure”.

She has received the first class Federal Cross of Merit, a number of environmental awards and a bronze statue of her stands at the entrance to the zoo. She is not pleased about it. She does not want to be revered; she wants the Indonesian people to finally acquire the love of animals that kept her in Jakarta sixty years ago. “Sadly, the Indonesians are not yet interested enough in their valuable ancestors,” she says.

She has been visited by many great thinkers and politicians. “Sukarno was a very charismatic man,” she says of the founder of the Indonesian state and first president after whom she named ape baby Sukarna. “When Sukarno spoke, everyone had to listen to him; it’s similar to Obama today.” The first president understood German, just as presidents Yusuf Habibie and Abdurrahman Wahid. She met them all. She once considered writing a book, but it would have to be a very thick book, about apes and humans.

The orangutan cheeped with pleasure

When she talks politics, she can become loud. Her diminutive body then bends forwards as if she wanted to bang her hand on the table. But, her arms no longer have the strength. “My anger keeps me healthy,” she says. She usually surrounds herself “only with friendly forest people, the orangutans.”

Ibu Ulla is still surprised by situations that reveal how closely related humans and apes are. As we are saying farewell, she tells a story of about a year ago when a German family came to visit. The parents had a child with Down syndrome. At the time, one of her fosterlings was an ape with the same genetic condition. When the child and the ape saw one another, they fell wordlessly into one another’s arms and laughed. The orangutan cheeped with pleasure, as orangutans do only when they are feeling very good.