My name is Ian Gilby and I study the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park.
I live in the United States, in Minnesota, but spend 3 to 4 months at Gombe each year.
The research camp is a small village inside the park.
There are roughly 20 mud or cement buildings housing a handful of researchers
from Tanzania and around the world. On a typical day in the forest,
I leave my house early in the morning and head out to find the chimps.
Chimpanzees can be hard to find and even harder to follow,
so I work with a Tanzanian field assistant. His name is Iddy.
Gombe National Park and the village that we live in are located on the shore
of Lake Tanganikya and our day often starts with a long walk down the beach.
Chimpanzees sleep in a different place each night, and from the previous day's
research we know roughly where to look for them.
When we get close to them, we leave the beach and turn into the forest.
There are a few trails to help us get close to the chimps.
The area is very steep, so just walking can be exhausting.
Chimpanzees can make a lot of noise. So when we hear them,
we leave the trail and crash through the bush to find them.
Many people don't know that in addition to fruit and leaves,
chimpanzees also eat meat. I study hunting and meat sharing,
and today we find the group just after they catch a baby bush buck.
Obviously, chimps get very excited about meat and it is often very hard
to figure out what is happening. I use video to study their behavior.
This allows me to watch the same scene and figure out what is going on.
Sometimes the chimps peacefully share meat with each other, and sometimes
they fight over it. I'm trying to figure out why sometimes they share,
and sometimes they don't. As you can see, today Frodo doesn't want to share.
What I'm finding is that chimps tend to share most with the persistent beggars,
not with those that they associate with the most.
When the chimps are not eating meat, I record their behavior on check sheets.
Among other things, I record grooming, displays, group composition,
and distances between individuals.
With this information, I can understand which chimps associate closely with
each other, and see if their relationship influences their meat-sharing behavior.
When I return home in the evening, I enter my notes into my computer so that
I can analyze them when I return to Minnesota.
Before I came to Gombe, I wasn't sure what following Chimpanzees would be like.
I was surprised at how thick and steep the forest was and found the work extremely
challenging, but spending time with these amazing animals makes it all worthwhile.
My name is Adrienne Gilby.
I sometimes accompany my husband Ian to Gombe National Park.
While he is in the forest doing his research, I spend my time
in the village and helping out at the park school.
The children of Tanzania are expected to get an elementary education so we
take a 20 minute boat ride to another village in the Park to get to school each day.
Today I wait for the rains to end and the waves to lessen before we can get on the boat.
Finally, the rains end. We get the children on the boat -and anyone else
that needs to go to the next village- and we're off to school.
The school at Gombe is like an old fashioned one-room schoolhouse
and there are many different ages in one class.
The lessons are done in Swahili (language).
The students don't have textbooks or workbooks so they copy the day's
reading, writing and math lessons off the chalkboard.
Since I am learning Swahili myself, I mainly help out by correcting their papers.
We also leave plenty of time for recess.
The kids play schoolyard games just like kids in the U.S.
They also get a mid-morning snack of porridge.
The head teacher and I cook the porridge over a charcoal stove outside the classroom.
The students are responsible for cleaning up and even the littlest ones helps out.
School is only a half day, so around noon, the schoolboat comes to take us home.
In the afternoons I swim, read, write, or practice my Swahili with
the woman who does our cooking and cleaning.
The kitchens are separate from the rest of the living space, and because
there is no electricity or running water, chores can take all day.
Women in the village count on being given jobs as cooks and
cleaning ladies so that they can make extra money for their familes.
We have Margaret working for us this year.
Margaret does all of our cooking on two kerosene stoves.
She cleans up after meals by washing dishes on the beach.
We use the lake as our sink, our bathtub and our washing machine.
This is my regular weekday routine. Although it is very different from my normal job
teaching high school in the U.S., fundamentally I find kids everywhere are similar.
We laugh and play, and I enjoy this experience very much.
On rest days, life is very relaxed. One of the things Ian and I both love about Gombe
is the peace and simplicity. There are no outside distractions like TV or telephones.
We often spend the evening reading, talking or listening to night sounds of the forest.