Matola, who opened a zoo in the jungle of Belize, dies
Sharon Matola’s life changed in the summer of 1981, when she got a call from a British filmmaker named Richard Foster. She had recently quit her job as a lion tamer in a Mexican circus and was back home in Florida, where she was poking her way through a master’s degree in mycology, or the study of mushrooms.
Foster had heard of her skills with wild animals, and he wanted her to work with him on a nature documentary in Belize, the small, newly independent country on the Caribbean side of Central America, where he lived on a compound about 30 miles inland.
She arrived in the fall of 1981, but the money for Foster’s film soon ran out. He moved on to another project, in Borneo, leaving Matola in charge of a jaguar, two macaws, a 10-foot boa constrictor and 17 other half-tamed animals.
“I was at a crossroads,” she told The Washington Post in 1995. “I either had to shoot the animals or take care of them, because they couldn’t take care of themselves in the wild.”
Desperate, she painted “Belize Zoo” on a wooden board and stuck it by the side of the road. She built rudimentary enclosures for the animals and began advertising around the country, including at a nearby bar, where she asked the owners to send any bored tourists her way.
Nearly four decades later, the Belize Zoo is the most popular attraction in Belize, drawing locals, foreign tourists and tens of thousands of schoolchildren each year, to see Pete the jaguar, Saddam the peccary and the rest of Matola’s menagerie of native animals.
Matola died at 66 on March 21 in Belmopan, Belize. Her sister, Marlene Garay, said the cause was a heart attack. There is a good chance that Matola met every child in Belize: Not only did schools include a visit to the zoo on their annual agenda, but she made a habit of popping into classrooms with a boa constrictor in her backpack, often uninvited but always welcome. Along the way she became a fixture in Belizean society, at once an adviser to the government and its Jeremiah, challenging development projects she deemed to be a threat to her adopted country’s natural endowment. Her activism influenced a generation of Belizeans, many of whom went on to become leaders in the government and nonprofit sector.
Sharon Rose Matola was born on June 3, 1954, in Baltimore to Edward and Janice (Schatoff) Matola. Her father was a sales manager for National Brewing, her mother an administrative assistant at Loyola University Maryland.
She did not grow up dreaming of running a zoo in a tropical country, but much of her life prepared her for precisely that role. As a girl she scraped her knees and dirtied her fingernails in pursuit of worms, frogs and butterflies (though because she was highly allergic to cats, her future love for jaguars was less of a given).
After high school she signed up to be a survival instructor in the Air Force, which sent her to Panama for jungle training. She fell in love with the tropics, and with an Air Force dentist named Jack Schreier. They married in 1976 and moved to his family’s farm in Iowa.