A couple months ago I had lunch with my friend Kelly, a fellow American who is also married to a Tanzanian and lives here in Arusha. Kelly blogs over at Mzungu Maasai about her life in Tanzania, and I was telling her that over time it’s gotten harder to keep up with my blog because nowadays everything happening here seems so normal to me and not necessarily worthy of a blog post.

But having a monkey in your living room is probably worth a post.

I got my first glimpse of the monkey early last year when I saw a figure moving across our gate from the corner of my eye while I was sitting at my desk. I thought it was a cat at first. But when he crossed the gate again I realized it was this guy and he had been in our banana grove stealing our bananas.

Over time he started showing up again, usually in the trees of our front yard as he passed through to steal a few more bananas from our grove.

But apparently the bananas outside our house got boring and he caught a whiff of the sweet tasty bananas inside our house. So he snuck in through the window and helped himself to the bananas I had left on the kitchen counter. Then he made a fast getaway back outside to enjoy his loot.

After his heist on Friday, the kids went down to the market and bought me a new bunch of bananas. And, wouldn’t you know it, the monkey came back for those, too! And this time he just made himself at home in our living room to eat them.

We chased him out of the house, but our new puppy was not the slightest bit intimidating to the monkey.

(As a side note, our new puppy is not the slightest bit intimidating to our cat either so I’m not sure what kind of watch dog he’s going to be.)

So, for now, we keep all our windows and doors closed while we try to find a secure way to store our bananas!