Jane

Jane Goodall, the conservationist renowned for her groundbreaking chimpanzee field research and globe-spanning environmental advocacy, died this past week at the age of 91.

For those who have tracked this blog for a long time, you might be aware that I met Jane back in January of 2007 (I’m slowly taking down some of my older blog entries so that one is no longer accessible), at the dawn of a big transition in my life. I had just left the Harvard School of Public Health and was taking on a new role with the IRC. For my assignment, I needed to travel to a remote part of NW Tanzania where the IRC was supporting a massive refugee operation. I was to be the head of the field office and, going into it, I admittedly knew very little about running this type of operation. It would end up being one of the most significant and interesting professional moves I’ve ever made.

Jane in a photo taken a few months before I met her

 

To get there, I would need to take a three-hour flight from Dar es Salaam to the town of Kigoma, situated on Lake Tanganyika. From there, I would travel on bumpy dirt roads for over five hours to the small town of Kibondo located near the border with Burundi.

* * * 

I arrived at the Dar es Salaam airport mid-morning. I usually travel without check-in bags, but on this occasion I had a large duffel. I wasn’t just traveling, I was moving to my new home.

There were two airline staff working at the counter and an older couple was checking in to my left. Boarding pass in hand, I moved to the waiting area where I sat down and opened my laptop as I always do. The elderly couple walked past, and the woman sat a few seats away from me while the man went over to the gift shop. As I looked up, I noticed that the lady looked a bit like Jane Goodall. My immediate assumption is that it wasn’t her. Sub-Saharan Africa is teeming with gray-haired ladies that have a similar look and generally they are tough, weathered missionaries.

However, there was some indication that it was Goodall. Kigoma is the launching point for trips to Gombe National Park, the place where the chimps are located and where she became famous. However, I had recently read that in her later years she rarely visited Gombe (she would have been 73 at this point).

Her travel partner returned with a bottle of whisky and I tossed the idea of them being missionaries. Shortly thereafter, I decided to check to see what time we were supposed to board. As I fished for the boarding pass in my computer bag, I noticed that the luggage tags that were stuck on the back had the name “J Goodall”. It revealed two things: the airline staff had stuck the tags on the wrong boarding pass and the lady sitting across the way was indeed Jane Goodall.

As you might guess, it provided a wonderful excuse to at least make contact. I decided to go over to notify her of this error. I should say at this point that it was quite a trivial mistake. Upon arrival in Kigoma, luggage was delivered from the small airplane to the “terminal” (roughly the size of a modest house) in a dilapidated Datsun (later Nissan) pickup. The tags were more or less irrelevant, but it didn’t matter. I wanted to meet this impressive woman.

Kigoma baggage claim in 2007.

I introduced myself to Jane and mentioned the error. She smiled and thanked me as we exchanged our tags. Unfortunately, our conversation didn’t amount much given my ineptitude at small talk at the time. Fortunately for me, that would not be the end of it. 

As we boarded the plane, and as fate would have it, I ended up sitting next to her. I had a chance to make up for my earlier ineptitude. We proceeded to have a wonderful chat that would last the entire duration of the flight.

She began by asking what was taking me to Kigoma and I explained to her that I was embarking on a new job. She was very familiar with the large refugee operation in Kigoma Region and in fact launched into a lengthy discussion about her Roots and Shoots program and how she had been wanting to expand it to the refugees. We agreed to stay in touch and look into how this might happen (though we never did). Too bad we didn't have WhatsApp at the time.

She later asked if I had gone to see the chimps yet. I told her that my fiancé (at the time) and I had discussed it and it was on our list of things to do (we would indeed make our way to Gombe two years later).

Visiting the chimps in 2009.

It became clear to me that her whisky-drinking travel partner, who was sitting in the row behind us, was a colleague of some sort. I figure that when they confused the luggage tags, they must have accidentally given me his seat next to Jane. At one point she introduced me to him, but he took no interest in me, talking to Jane from time to time as if I wasn’t there. If I’m honest, I wasn’t interested in him either. She also didn't seem bothered that he didn't end up sitting with her.

Looking north from Kigoma. Gombe and the chimps are located in the hills on the horizon.

As we exited the plane and walked towards the terminal, we said our goodbyes. Her travel partner would pick up her bags while she went straight to an awaiting vehicle. It was a really nice chat (she did most of the talking) and I grew quite fond of her during those three hours. She was intelligent, articulate and very passionate about her work. It was wonderful to have had a chance to get to spend time with her.