She finds the city in chaos and decides she'll go north to find her mother. She plans to make her way to the nearby city of Kinshasa but has to drug the other youngster in the bonobo group in order to get away with only Otto. She has a close encounter with a soldier but manages to escape. She slips out but another youngster follows, followed by several of the adults. She hates leaving the other bonobos, knowing the soldiers will hunt them down and kill them, but doesn't know what else to do. When she discovers that the electric fence no longer works, she knows she'll have to take Otto and leave. Sophie spends weeks inside the enclosure, hiding and living among the bonobos. When the military arrives at the sanctuary, many of the workers are murdered. She hides in the large bonobo enclosure, locking herself in with the electric fence. She plans to go but changes her mind when Otto runs after the van. Sophie is cut off from news for awhile but then learns that she'll have a window of opportunity to leave the country. After her mother's departure, war breaks out. Her mother goes to a remote region of the country to release several bonobos just a few days before Sophie is due to leave for Miami. He bonds deeply with her and they spend all their time together. Sophie later discovers their bodies and realizes that she's at least partly to blame for their deaths.Īt the sanctuary, Sophie struggles to keep Otto alive. A few days later, the same man shows up with two more bonobo youngsters.

Sophie's motives in purchasing the bonobo are good but she has inadvertently promoted the bonobo black market. When she arrives at the sanctuary, her mother is furious.

Sophie rushes to the man and uses the money she has in her pocket to buy the bonobo, later named Otto. She sees a man with a young bonobo ape that is obviously malnourished and is being abused. When she's fourteen, Sophie arrives in the Congo to stay with her mother. Her parents divorce and Sophie leaves with her father to attend school in America, while her mother continues to work on the sanctuary. By then, her mother has devoted herself to creating a sanctuary for bonobos and refuses to leave the Congo. She spends her early years in the Congo until her father gets a job in Miami, Florida. Sophie is the child of a white man and a black woman. Endangered, written by Eliot Schrefer, is the story of Sophie Biyoya-Ciardulli and her life with her mother in the Congo.

Endangered by eliot schrefer