My friend and colleague Patty DeDominic serves on the board of the Jane Goodall Institute. She called me last week from Los Angeles, and said: “I’ve got you an interview. Buy a plane ticket and come out here.”
Sounded like a good idea to me.
Everyone I told about the interview was very envious:
“One of my heroes,” a professor at Columbia School of Journalism wrote to me in an email.
“Wow! Very cool,” my oldest son – who is very stingy with his “wows” — said.
My husband told his friends, one of whom confessed: “When I was a teenager, I wanted to be Jane Goodall!”
The face-to-face meeting took place at the home of Len Hill and Dr. Patricia Gordon in Los Angeles. With Jane was Mary Lewis, Vice President of The Jane Goodall Institute who travels the world with her, and Bill Johnston, who Jane introduced as our “new president for the digital age and beyond.”
Bill’s introduction of Jane was simple:
“She’s an inspiration to millions and also tremendous fun to be with.”
In my experience, those two qualities don’t always go hand in hand.
Jane had been speaking all day to groups in Los Angeles, and had in fact been speaking for days… speaking about her mission and her hope for our world and for us.
I call her Jane because that is how she refers to herself and how everyone talks about her. She is centered, kind, and unassuming. She is Jane. It is easy to see how she gained the trust and acceptance of the chimps at Gombe.
She stood behind a high backed upholstered chair in the living room and told us how it all began.
“From the time I was a year old, I loved animals. I had an amazing mother who always supported me and my sister in our dreams. At 10, I fell in love with Tarzan, and became terribly jealous that he married that other Jane! That was when I decided I wanted to go to Africa, which at that time was a very unlikely thing for a young English girl to do.”
She didn’t have the money to go to university so she took a job as a waitress to save enough money for a round-trip ticket to Africa. She met the great anthropologist Louis Leakey at the Natural History Museum. He gave her a job as his secretary.
“He was a true visionary,” she said of Leakey. “Now all these years later, we see that the thinking in 1960 was wrong and Louis Leakey was right. At that time, he was looking for someone to go to Africa to study chimpanzees. He thought that if he could find out more about chimpanzees, he would learn more about early humans.”
He didn’t tell her that he had selected her because she did not have a degree and had not gone to university. He wanted someone without a lot of preconceived theories.
The English Government said she could go only if she had someone to go with her.
“Who went with me?” she asked laughing. “My same amazing mother.”
Her mother helped her in two important ways: she boosted her morale, and also set up a clinic for the local fishermen.
“In the early days in Africa, the chimps were running away from this strange white ape,” she said. “Two things I had going for me were the courage of my convictions and an open mind and a willingness to listen.”
Her patience paid off when she saw chimps making tools. That was a huge breakthrough in terms of the thinking of the day.
She gave the chimps names like “David Greybeard.” The professors and the academics told her she was wrong to give them names. Instead, they told her, she should give them numbers.
She saw that the chimps each had distinct personalities, and that the bonds between family members grew over time.
“Chimpanzees are vanishing today,” she said. “It’s tragic. About13 years ago, I flew over Gombe and saw the devastation of the deforestation. I realized that the people were suffering horribly. In order to survive, they are cultivating more and more marginal areas.”
She realized that if she wanted to help the chimps, she would have to help the people.
She began to leave Gombe to travel the world to talk about the plight of Africa and to sow seeds of global peace.
“Every day we are breaking down barriers between people. Every day we are making an impact on the world.”
“Roots and Shoots” is The Jane Goodall Institute Program she says that she feels most passionate about. It was begun in Tanzania, and is now in 97 countries.
“Roots and Shoots is based on hope,” she said. “The hope that we human beings will use our big brains, and the resilience of our human spirit to solve the world’s problems. Political leaders and people in ordinary life are so inspirational.”
One part of the “Roots and Shoots” philosophy is that if you educate women you have smaller family size. In Africa, Jane discovered that girls were dropping out of school because of the lack of private latrines. Something as simple as building latrines can have a huge impact on the future of individuals as well as countries and continents.
“I have more energy now than I did when I was thirty. I get energy from the people I meet and my sense of mission.”
