Beruang Kutub

This is a special girl from Central Aceh, Sumatra. She’s seven, lively and intelligent. She’s also well-behaved and when I told her not to see the polar bear because it was going to rain, she didn’t make a fuss, but agreed to give it a miss, even though I knew she wanted to see it. (She’d said “beruang kutub” when we passed the polar bear sign.) It's not that she doesn't know how to insist on things; when she wants to, her voice is as loud as the loudest parrot she saw this afternoon, a fact that she herself acknowledged. But she’s special because she has a heart condition, some problem with the valves, and she can’t exert herself too much. She’s a good friend of my in-laws in Aceh, and they brought her to Malaysia for routine check-up and then came down to stay with us for the weekend.

So we went to the zoo today, but the Sunday was anything but. It was so dark, I had to set my film speed to ISO 800, and compensated +0.3 brightness, but it was still too slow to capture motion. (I ought to have used manual and set the shutter speed to high, but at that moment, I didn’t think of it. It’s always afterwards that it occurred to me to do that. As often happens…) But here are some shots anyway, of animals taking care of their kin.

The girl enjoyed herself, though the visit was cut short by rain at 3.45pm. She didn’t sleep afterwards. I just sent them to the station half an hour ago. She’ll be sleeping on the bus now, clutching her teddy bear, and perhaps thinking of its bigger, whiter cousin. When she wakes up, she'll be in Penang. And then she'll take a short flight back to Medan, and then onwards up to her hometown of Takengon, where she'll be with her kin again.

Chup