Jenny Botting, 33, and Arend Van Blerk, 31, both primatologists, met in the South African bush. They are living on separate continents due to the pandemic, but hope to reunite soon
Jenny Botting was working as a receptionist in 2012 while she applied for PhD programmes in animal cognition. “I realised I needed more field research, so I applied to be a volunteer at a monkey research station in the middle of the South African bush.” She left Aberdeen in January 2013, but it was three months before she met Arend Van Blerk, who was volunteering at the same station. “When I arrived, Jenny was away on a holiday,” he says. “She came back on a Saturday night and the volunteers all had a party together. There were about 15 of us living there.” She remembers that he was “handsome and smiled a lot”.
Over the course of the next week, the pair worked hard during the day, following the monkeys around the bush in KwaZulu-Natal and recording their behaviour for the research project. In the evenings, Jenny stayed up late to speak to him. “I was so tired from getting up at 4am for work, but I pretended I wasn’t so I could spend time with Arend,” she says. He felt the same way. “I thought she was really attractive but we also shared a lot of interests. She was silly in a cute way and I really enjoyed talking to her.”
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