Cindy

A baboon in Namibia and the small things that carry us through

Every day, for a long stretch of time, I watched videos of a baboon living on a farm in Namibia.

At lunch. In bed at night. In the quiet minutes between things.

Her name was Cindy.

People who knew her said she ran the place.

She had the personality of someone who believed the entire farm existed primarily to serve her snacks.

And in many ways, it was the center of her world — the place where her story began.

She lived her whole life on a farm in Namibia where the Lambrechts family care for rescued animals. In 1994, a neighbor found an orphaned baby baboon and asked Barista Lambrechts — a young newlyed at the time — if she would take her in. She did.

They named her Cindy, after Cindy Crawford. Barista would be her mother for the next thirty-one years.

A few years after her arrival, Barista welcomed twin sons who grew up alongside Cindy, a baboon sister woven into their childhood. One of them, Ruben, would eventually become the one who shared Cindy with the internet.

That’s how millions of us met her.

Including me, sitting thousands of miles away in New York.

The first time I ever saw Cindy, she was sitting on a rock eating.

A large bug scurried up near her food. Without even pausing, she picked it up and tossed it aside.

Then she did it again.

It was such a casual, efficient reaction that I immediately understood something important about Cindy: whatever else was happening on that farm, her snacks were non-negotiable.

I replayed the video, laughing. And then I clicked follow.

Soon enough, the videos became part of my daily routine. I watched them all, sometimes more than once.

Cindy in the bath, calmly eating toothpaste off her toothbrush. Cindy stuffing her cheeks full of food, frantic and fast. Cindy swatting at animals (and humans) when they forgot the rules. 

Later on, the videos looked a little different.

Cindy went blind from an infection in 2023, but blindness didn’t soften her personality in the slightest. If anything, it made her more impressive. She navigated the farm with total confidence, recognizing voices and footsteps, moving easily between the spaces she knew best, sleeping in her little princess tent or squeezing herself into her outdoor house.

And guarding her food like a professional bodyguard.

The best thing about Cindy was that she absolutely refused to share it.

She never had babies of her own, but every baby animal that arrived on the farm became hers. She would scoop them up, carry them around, sometimes drop them unceremoniously, and generally treat them like temporary children.

She was a natural mother: tender when it mattered, protective when it counted, strict when she needed to be. One minute she would be carrying a tiny animal around like it belonged to her, the next she would be firmly reminding everyone that her food was not communal property.

But once a baby was old enough to develop opinions about snacks, the relationship changed.

Near her food, Cindy had boundaries.

My favorite video shows a warthog wandering over, sniffing toward her banana. Cindy senses him immediately. Her eyes grow wide. In one swift movement, she grabs him by the folds of his neck and brings him straight down to the ground. Then she holds him there, thrashing him just enough to make her point.

It looks less like an animal scuffle and more like an elite wrestling move.

The warthog backs off immediately.

Lesson learned... for a little while, anyway.

There are dozens of videos like that. Maybe hundreds.

Sometimes she would just sit in the sun, her round little body settled comfortably, her knees propped up with one arm resting across them. Her hair would blow in the wind as she casually pulled up handfuls of grass to eat. Millions of people watched those quiet moments through a screen, smiling at the smallest things she did. 

She had no idea.

Over time, watching Cindy became a routine. I knew her habits, the sound of Ruben’s voice in the background, the way she tore open a banana with her hands, the little grunt she made whenever someone mentioned food. I started saving my favorite clips to my phone.

I left comments all the time.

Eventually, Facebook gave me a “Top Fan” badge next to my name: “Team Ruben,” it said.

I defended Cindy regularly in the comment sections. If someone called her ugly, I argued back. If someone questioned the family or didn’t understand her story, I explained it. I answered questions from strangers like I worked there.

How did they get her?

How did she lose her sight?

The internet does strange things to the boundaries between observer and participant.

You start by watching.

And then one day you realize you’ve been quietly defending a baboon from strangers on the internet like she’s a relative.

The first time Ruben liked one of my comments, I noticed it immediately. It felt ridiculous and exciting at the same time. The only time he replied to me directly felt even stranger.

To me, they were celebrities.

A few days before Christmas, someone who knew how much I loved Cindy ordered a gift that surprised me.

A personalized Cameo video from Ruben and Cindy.

Ruben said they had just woken up. He’d heard that I loved Cindy and that I was her "number one social media fan." He joked that it was a pity Cindy hadn’t invited me to her birthday, that it would have been "awesome."

A few weeks earlier she had turned thirty-one. They ordered a cake modeled after her. During the celebration, she ripped off the fondant tail and started eating it while they were still filming.

In the Cameo, Cindy sat beside Ruben, her little diagonal snout pointed toward the camera, her dainty pink eyelids blinking, tired but alert. At one point, she made a soft grunt.

For a minute and twenty-four seconds, the screen felt a little less like a screen.

Like the distance between us had briefly disappeared.

By then, the farm already felt strangely familiar to me.

At some point I realized I had done something slightly absurd.

I had looked up the farm.

They allow visitors to stay there and interact with the animals. I looked at the accommodations, the cost, the flight routes from New York to Namibia. I studied the travel time like it might someday become a real plan.

I imagined sitting in the grass next to Cindy.

Spending the afternoon beside her, watching her supervise the farm. 

Feeding her happies, the Afrikaans word for "snack."

I imagined it enough times that it started to feel like a future memory, even though I knew it probably wouldn’t happen. But I thought about it anyway.

Because in some small way, she saved me.

I discovered Cindy during one of the hardest periods of my life.

I was in the middle of divorce. Moving. Trying to figure out how to rebuild a life that suddenly looked nothing like the one I had expected.

Everything felt unstable.

But every day, there she was.

A blind baboon on a farm in Namibia, confidently running the place and body-slamming warthogs who didn’t respect her snacks.

For reasons I probably didn’t fully understand at the time, she made me laugh on days when not much else did.

Watching her became a small, reliable pocket of joy in the middle of a season that felt otherwise heavy. And sometimes, during hard stretches, small things carry more weight than you expect.

For a long time, I kept watching her the same way I always had: every day, on repeat. 

Then, in late December 2025, Cindy died, surrounded by the family who had raised her. She was thirty-one — a remarkable age for a baboon.

When the post appeared announcing Cindy’s death, I remember just staring at the screen for a while, trying to take in what it meant. I felt a wave of sadness that was hard to explain to anyone who hadn’t spent years watching her videos. I mourned her like she was family. 

For a while afterward, when old clips of Cindy showed up in my feed, I’d feel my throat tighten unexpectedly.

A friend of their family later made a music video in her memory. A slideshow of moments from her life on the farm accompanied by a beautiful song about her.

I cried. Tears streaming down my face, mourning Cindy… a creature I hadn’t really known, but somehow still knew.

When the family held a live memorial online, I stepped away from work for a few minutes just to watch it.

I thought about the Cameo video a lot after that, too. I wondered if it might have been one of the last they’d recorded. I felt lucky it had arrived when it did.

After Cindy’s death, Ruben and his family began raising funds for Cindy’s Sanctuary, a project to rescue orphaned baby baboons in her honor.

I donated ten dollars.

Ten dollars isn’t a lot of money. But I’m a single mother with one income, and I don’t usually feel compelled or called to donate to things online.

This felt different. 

So I sent the money and left a short note. It didn't feel like much at the time — small things rarely do until later — but for me, it was a thank you. To Cindy. To the Lambrechts. 

It felt like a small payment toward something intangible. Toward the hours and weeks and months of joy that Cindy (and Ruben) had quietly delivered through my phone without even knowing.

I think what fascinates me most about Cindy is not just her life on a farm in Namibia.

It’s the strange web of connection around her.

A baboon raised by a woman named Barista.

Filmed by a man who grew up calling her his sister.

Watched daily by millions of people scattered across continents.

People like me, sitting somewhere across the world, laughing at a warthog getting tackled out of a food bowl by a beloved baboon who was, frankly, a legend.

The internet often feels chaotic, loud, and exhausting.

But sometimes it does something small and remarkable.

It lets a baboon on another continent become part of someone’s ordinary day.

And Cindy was part of mine.

It’s strange how someone you’ve never met can leave a mark like that. And these days, the world feels a little less bright without her in it.

I still have dozens of her videos and photos saved on my phone. My favorites, the ones I go back to time and again.

Cindy chattering her teeth excitedly when Ruben came near, or when she was holding one of her babies. Cindy drinking tea from a mug like the queen she knew she was. Cindy sounding almost like she was laughing when someone tickled her.

Cindy feeling objects carefully in her hands before deciding what to do with them — a large plush banana, for instance, briefly inspected and then tossed aside. Cindy lying on a blanket after anesthesia, eyes closed, still chewing a banana like nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

And then there were the sneak attacks. An animal would walk past minding its own business and suddenly Cindy would grab it by the tail. Donald, a very large cow who towered over her, once tried to share her food. Cindy grabbed his tail aggressively and held on like she was correcting him.

And that was Cindy. Fearless. Completely unimpressed by size differences. Entirely committed to protecting her snacks.

Sometimes I scroll back through those clips and watch them again.

Cindy tearing open a banana. Cindy guarding her happies. Cindy correcting animals twice her size.

And every time I see her, I still can’t help but smile.