Following Fifi

by John Crocker

  Every day at the clinic, I see parts of my patients’ natures that seem instinctive or predetermined, particularly the predisposition that some have to addiction or obsession that appears once amplified by life’s circumstances. No amount of my counseling is apt to solve some of these medical issues. They run far too deep for my machinations at the surface to reach.

  The chimps taught me, too, much of the biological basis of human behavior—our competitiveness, social hierarchies, compassion, need for reassurance and the touch of others, our love of laughter and playfulness. We share it all with chimpanzees and other intelligent animals. I hope I am somehow a more forgiving physician, knowing it is oh so difficult to overcome our most deep-seated selves despite our big human brains.

  Chuck de Sieyes, my medical school friend and now a family physician practicing in Maine, shared his appreciation for a mentor and some other notable moments from his Gombe experience:

  When I arrived in Gombe, I already thought of myself as something of a junior doctor. (Talk about being cocky!) While in Nairobi waiting to fly into Kigoma with Jane’s ex, Hugo, I ran into Dave Furnas, chief of plastic surgery from UC Irvine, who was doing a “Flying Doctor” stint. He was wonderful enough to take a real interest in me, so he invited me to come out into the bush to watch him operate. Since I was not yet a “real” MD, I couldn’t fly in the famous Flying Doctor airplane (although I have a favorite photo of skinny me standing proudly next to the plane), so I would take buses at 4:00 A.M. with all the locals and their livestock in order to don rubber garden boots and scrub in at tent hospitals out in the countryside. He performed miracles with those skilled hands of his: rebuilding a child’s face that had been mauled by a hyena; constructing eyelids for a baby born with no eyes and closed sockets, repairing cleft lips and palates. Talk about firing up my enthusiasm to get going with my own medical studies! I loved every minute of it!

  So, with my ego flying high, I arrived at Gombe laden with a bag full of antimalarial drugs in hopes of crusading preventive health among the trackers and their families. Every week I would knock on the door of each and every one of the guides’ quarters and hand out tablets to the entire household. Not only will I never know whether any of them actually took the pills (and if they did, it was more than likely to please this altruistic blond Wazungo [white person]), but I had a rude awakening about every six weeks when at certain doorsteps I would be met by a new wife—as is tribal/religious tradition for many of the trackers’ families! Needless to say, I learned a thing or two about superimposing my Yankee value system and good intentions upon a societal structure I really knew nothing about.

  Kathryn Morris, a family physician specializing in women’s health care in Santa Cruz, California, shared a poignant lesson learned from a baboon mother and how it influenced her practice and her personal life:

  I have always been fascinated by evolution and how similar we are to other animals; my experience at Gombe really brought this home to me. As a family physician, I chose to focus in the areas where my interest in and understanding of evolution and animal behavior served me well. Delivering babies was a good example of this as it is so clearly a time when humans do best when in a nonhuman-animal mode. My interest in obstetrics was perhaps also augmented by my own personal fears about giving birth.

  I used to tell pregnant patients a story about a baboon that went into labor while I was at Gombe. All was going well until a leopard passed by, whereupon her contractions appeared to completely stop for a few hours. The baboon troop moved to a new location up in the trees, and evidently the contractions resumed. All went well as she had a healthy newborn clinging to her the next day.

  I told my patients this story as a reminder that our bodies know not to give birth in dangerous situations. It was fear that stopped labor for the baboon, and fear does the same for us. “Failure to progress” is the medical term used for labor that is not making good headway, and it is the most common reason for doing cesarean sections. It made sense to me that reducing a woman’s fears could be key to her having a successful vaginal birth; clearly I was not the first to think of this, since midwives wrote whole books about it. Nonetheless, I did what I thought would build a woman’s confidence in her body and help her feel safe and relaxed about the upcoming labor and delivery. This usually included a good diet and lifestyle, birthing classes, and counseling if there were family issues. I often had women write a vision of how their labor and birth would go. During labor I felt it was important that all support people, particularly the medical staff and myself, remained calm and encouraging. I found that blood pressure checks and pelvic exams could be timed better so as not to be as disruptive, and monitoring equipment could safely be minimized. Allowing a woman more physical freedom, encouraging her to move around, go for walks, and take a shower all seemed to help labor progress.

  It appeared to me that the more relaxed the woman was, the more likely her labor would proceed normally. Whether women with more normal labor felt more relaxed or more relaxed women tended to experience less problematic labor is hard to say for certain. However, my patients experienced a 6 percent cesarean-section rate, which was much lower than that of any of the other twenty-five doctors in the hospital where I did deliveries. All of these babies were healthy, and I count my blessings for this, since bad outcomes can happen even with the best of doctors.

  When at the age of forty I was in labor at home with my one and only child, my moans and groans didn’t scare me, as they often do laboring women and their inexperienced attendants. Instead, they were reassuring because they sounded like a healthy labor should. I was fortunate to have slipped my husband into several deliveries as the photographer, so he too was familiar and comfortable with the sounds and the ambiance of a woman in labor. All went well for us, and I gave birth to a perfect seven-pound twelve-ounce girl. My midwives said that it was an unusual birth for them. At first they weren’t sure why, and pondered if it was because I was a doctor, but then they realized that it was because of my lack of fear. I felt much gratitude for the 650 women who wanted my assistance in the delivery of their babies, as it was through those experiences that I learned to get past my own fear of giving birth. And I thank the laboring baboon in Gombe who taught me that fear itself is the biggest hindrance.

  Reading these responses, I was struck by how each of us was affected in such different ways by our Gombe experiences. A common thread was our interest in analyzing why we humans do the things we do and how our behaviors relate to those of other primates. As our mentor in the field, Jane encouraged all of us to keep thinking about the Gombe chimps and baboons long after we left. We were all motivated to find purpose and passion in whatever we did—Jane’s way.

  Beyond Jane’s extraordinary talent as a mentor to scores of students, researchers, and others, her ability to keep up a marathon travel pace was another of her traits that astonished me. I know she became exhausted at times, traveling more than three hundred days a year. She spoke at schools and churches and for environmental groups, businesses, and dignitaries around the world. She used her time wisely and, at age eighty, had a memory and intellect that made for exceptional talks and discussions about endangered species, our planet Earth, and—always—the Gombe chimps.

  In 2000, United Nations president Kofi Annan appointed Jane as ambassador for peace, and she committed to the role with her renowned energy and enthusiasm. She devoted herself to organizing events throughout the world to promote peace. Despite my disdain for assembling anything with printed instructions, I went to her website with then-five-year-old Patrick, and together we constructed the featured twenty-foot white dove out of old sheets and recycled chicken wire. On a beautiful September day, which had been declared World Peace Day, Patrick and I and a small group paraded the bird high in the air around Green Lake Park in Seattle, singing peace songs from the sixties as people stared and smiled at us.

  Jane’s gift for engaging graciously with others always extended beyond her public life. I appreciate
d Jane’s interest in and interactions with our boys, so in keeping with her nurturing and caring nature. Watching her instigate a vigorous pillow fight and tickling game with Patrick when he was a toddler and talking interestedly to Tommy at different stages of his life meant the world to Wendy and me. Every time my family and I attend one of Jane’s talks in Seattle, she always introduced us to the audience—as she did her other friends in attendance—a way of acknowledging us all.

  It was never surprising to see prolonged standing ovations both before and after Jane spoke from the packed crowds who came to hear her presentations. Her impact is inspirational. The biggest hallmark of her style in this setting is her ability to draw on memorable examples to illustrate her points. During one appearance, she raised a clear glass of water to illustrate how fortunate we were to be among the one-third of the world’s population to have access to clean drinking water, something we took for granted. I still think of her holding that glass when I drink Seattle water from the tap. Whether asking a young child from a Roots & Shoots club to come up onstage, or holding up a huge condor feather given to her by a group who had succeeded in keeping the species from going extinct, Jane motivated her audience to go out and do something more to preserve wild species and the environment.

  Jane has a gift for empowering people around her. At one Seattle get-together on a beautiful spring evening a few years ago, thirty people gathered with her in a host’s home near the airport for casual conversation and a vegetarian dinner. After our meal, Jane quietly organized us into a large circle to begin a talk. Our group of naturalists, journalists, friends, and educators suddenly had a purpose beyond dinner conversation.

  Jane smiled as she made her way to a sturdy barstool. She looked to be in her twenties, not seventies, with perfect posture and her ponytail shining in the lamplight. “Why don’t we go around the room first and introduce ourselves and say what we do,” she began, engaging us individually and collectively in her mission.

  After the introductions, Jane wove chimp stories and tales of her travels over the past year into a magnificent overview of her life and that of the chimps. She included parts of her childhood, when she was so engrossed with watching a hen lay an egg that her mother thought she was lost, only to discover her later covered with hay. Old Flo and David Greybeard resurfaced as she spoke of early days at Gombe, and then she led on to her recent talks in China and Spain and how her youth education program, Roots & Shoots, is succeeding around the world. Afterward, we all felt reinvigorated about modeling good stewardship for Mother Earth. An author sitting next to me looked speechless, glancing over at me and saying simply, “Wow!”

  Jane’s life story has encouraged others to start new endeavors and realize their dreams. Though she worked hard and with great focus to fulfill her childhood wish to study animals, I’m sure she never imagined that some of the doors she opened would lead to worldwide fame and influence.

  Jane’s New Mission

  In fact, Jane’s original mission transformed and broadened in the early 1990s, when she flew over Gombe Stream National Park and saw the massive deforestation of the land surrounding it. Peering down, she could see the well-defined green Gombe forest surrounded by dry, eroded soil. She was alarmed at the changed landscape and at that moment made a difficult decision that would fundamentally change her life. As much as she hated leaving her family of chimps and people, she realized she must also work to protect the environment around Gombe. Only then would the chimpanzees have a chance of surviving the encroachment of desperate humans who also need to survive in the same region.

  On our trip, Tommy and I witnessed how Jane has tackled both crises with her grassroots organization, TACARE, which helps villagers convert traditional farms to farms that use sustainable methods. A German-born agriculturist, George Strunden, was instrumental in the design and organizing of the program. We visited the sites surrounding the national park and saw some of the successes with healthier crops and the beginnings of land restoration.

  Jane and Mary Lewis, her longtime assistant, suggested we visit the villages participating in the TACARE program. Had we not included this “field trip,” we would have missed a crucial part of the picture of Gombe’s future.

  A dedicated TACARE employee, Fadhili, met Tommy and me in Kigoma. Fadhili was very articulate and gracious as he drove us to some of the villages participating in the TACARE conservation efforts funded by the Jane Goodall Institute to address environmental issues as well as the prosperity of the Tanzanian people. Jane and Mary knew we’d be interested in seeing the environmental work being done around Gombe Stream National Park.

  Jane was promoting a grassroots effort led by villagers to restore local vegetation and prevent erosion, encouraging a return of the verdant landscape that was thriving when she first arrived in Tanzania in 1960. Although Gombe Stream National Park had been protected from destruction, the land around it had not been. Because of wars and political upheavals, the hills and valleys along Lake Tanganyika from Kigoma and far north to Burundi supported refugees from the Congo and Rwanda until the early 1990s. Local Tanzanians also found the habitat good for establishing small farms, which required the cutting of trees. The resulting erosion had taken its toll. The corridors for migrating chimps and other animals—who require these undisturbed natural passages to travel and mate with animals in other regions, widening the gene pool—were being destroyed. The future looked very grim for chimpanzees and other species.

  Several years before this, Jane studied the basic problem and designed an approach that would involve input from the local people. Each village near the park and farther north would choose a leader for the environment, a leader for education, and a leader for public health. Small villages might have one leader assume all three roles. They would communicate and work with one another and with workers from TACARE in Kigoma, and together begin to restore and maintain the land along the lake. As an incentive, a bicycle or piped-in water from fresh springs was supplied to each participating village. Tree farms were established so that firewood could be taken from those specific areas rather than by stripping the land everywhere. As a result, Lake Tanganyika is clear and erosion is receding for miles up and down the shores abutting Gombe National Park.

  Fadhili parked the car and walked with Tommy and me to a clearing, where we could see for miles. The tiny green dots on the distant hillside represented new trees that had been planted a few years earlier. I raised my eyebrows and smiled as I told Fadhili, “I noticed that Lake Tanganyika is clear and you can see lots of fish swimming. I was told by health officials that there is no bilharzia.”

  “Yes!” Fadhili exclaimed, “This is the work of TACARE. And the people out here in the villages benefit as much as the fishermen and people living along the lake. You can look out across those hills,” he said, pointing across the valley, “and see the small trees beginning to grow back. Clean water flows to many villages, and people seem empowered and happy with the results.”

  Jane also got involved in the coffee industry by supporting the local transition from traditional coffee growing to shade-grown coffee, which is more sustainable and better for the environment. Local Tanzanians run the coffee production in what is truly a success story—a win-win situation that provides work for local people while it benefits the land.

  Tommy and I were invited to sit in on a meeting involving the managers—all Tanzanians—of the various coffee farms. The managers looked serious enough to be the US Senate. Asked to introduce us to the group, I started in Swahili, which they seemed to appreciate, and briefly described our lives. I relied on Fadhili to translate the rest. The most interesting moment came when I mentioned that, because of my own interest in land preservation, I had campaigned for Barack Obama. As soon as they heard this in translation, they burst into applause and cheers. It was a real icebreaker.

  We then visited a coffee-growing farm and several of the small villages in TACARE’s program. We also toured the new tree farms planted nine years earlie
r, which were thriving. Finally, we learned more about Jane’s Roots & Shoots organizations at the local schools and villages. Roots & Shoots clubs have been successful at educating young people worldwide about the environment and inspiring children to participate in environmental preservation. The efforts of TACARE and Roots & Shoots are changing the lives of the people in this area while also sustaining and improving the local environment.

  When we returned to our hotel that evening, I felt like a diplomat who had just toured a new project, and I thanked Fadhili for his time and his commitment to the organization. I was awed by Jane’s resolve in tackling such a complex environmental challenge and working from the ground up to address it. After our return home, I sent a donation to TACARE in Fadhili’s name to help support their efforts.

  Recently, Wendy and I heard Jane speak to a large crowd in Southern California. Even though I was familiar with one of her key messages, it helped to hear it again. Jane quoted her mother, who told her when she was a young girl, “If you work hard, take advantage of opportunities, and never give up hope, you can accomplish your goals.” At the end of the talk, Jane answered a high school student’s question about career choice and suggested, “When the time is right, take the opportunity and go with it.” In her own life, Jane certainly did.

  To keep up with Jane would be impossible. Her pace and focus have always been like no one else’s. As I reflect again on her genetics—with her race-car-driving father and her patient and focused mother—I see how some of her success might have started, but I believe it also took a strong, consistent upbringing to maximize those genes—nature and nurture beautifully merged.