Page 31 - Local Voices, Local Choices Excerpt

Local ambassadors: learning from and speaking for the chimps 29
has benefited the communities in the surrounding villages. Then he shares some precious memories of Jane Goodall.
“When Dr. Jane looked at me first, she looked at me and just loved me. Ask Dr. Jane even if we’re not together. She knows that old man Almas was a good researcher. And the book, she gave me a book. She wrote,
‘Thank you Almas for your research. You have been very helpful to many students and to many of your colleagues.’ And if it wasn’t all for all this chimpanzee stuff, I wouldn’t have been in the forest.” Nor, he adds, would he have climbed the mountains and learned all about the herbs and the plants that grow there. “That was taught to me by my mentors and by the chimps.”
Among those mentors, Mzee Yahaya mentions another key figure from Gombe, Dr. Shadrack Kamenya. “How do you start building a house?” he asks, rhetorically. “You cannot build a house without a foun- dation. Dr. Jane and Dr. Shadrack started teaching me. So, they were my foundation.” In fact, Dr. Shadrack Kamenya and his colleague, Dr. Deus Mjungu, not only helped provide a solid foundation for the work of JGI but are still there today, decades later, pillars of support, leading the new generation of field researchers from the nearby villages—researchers who continue the longest chimpanzee study in the world while also serv- ing as chimp ambassadors and a bridge between Gombe and neighboring communities.