WIJABA in Mexico City with Dr. Jane Goodall
Written for The World is Just a Book Away nonprofit.
On Tuesday, April 26, 2016, The World is Just a Book Away (WIJABA) had the invaluable honor of hosting Dr. Jane Goodall, UN Messenger of Peace & DBE, with The Mexican Fund for the Conservation of Nature (FMCN), in Mexico City.
“We may have different colored skin, we may have different culture, we may have different clothes, but underneath that, we’re actually one family.”
In a lecture hall located on the campus of Universidad Iberoamericana in the Santa Fe district of Mexico City, Goodall introduced herself in "Chimpanzee" to a room of local sixth-grade students from Matilde Acosta Elementary and friends of WIJABA from Los Angeles.
Goodall shared her story of how reading books as a child opened up her world and inspired the seminal dream that would fuel her life's work.
While growing up in England, she would frequent her local library and second-hand bookstores. An early favorite, The Story of Doctor Dolittle by Hugh Lofting, about an English country doctor who attends to animals rather than humans, inspired her love of animals.
“Our local library was a very important part of my childhood. As I have said, we had little money and so most of our books came from the library. Today libraries are desperately important in many disadvantaged communities, and are still of great value everywhere.”
When asked by one of the local students present what took her to Africa, Goodall simply answered, "Tarzan," referring to the protagonist of Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs.
“After reading Tarzan, I got this dream: I’m going to grow up, I’m going to go to Africa, I’m going to live with wild animals, and I’m going to write books.”
Bestowed with a mission by her beloved book, Goodall set off for Africa at the tender age of 23. Just a few years later, in 1960, she began her groundbreaking work studying chimpanzees at Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania. She observed the apes' behavior of manipulating grass stems and tree twigs by a method of picking off the leaves and then using them to retrieve food from surrounding termite mounds. This finding disproved the long-held notion that using and making tools were unique to human beings and distinguished us from all other members of the animal kingdom. The discovery redefined the contemporary definition of man. She endeavored into more unprecedented territory by employing some unconventional approaches, such as naming the chimpanzees she studied, rather than assigning number to them, which was then the scientific procedure. Her research uncovered new insights on chimpanzees' social behaviors, their capacity for emotion, and their volition towards both aggression and altruism.
Most importantly, Goodall learned through her work that, "they (animals) are just like us."
While her work with the chimpanzees in Africa illuminated the similarities that unite animals and human beings, it also revealed a grave irony: that people, beings of the highest intelligence in all of the animal kingdom, destroy the environment, when creatures of lesser intelligence do not.
Goodall reminded us that among all living creatures, "we may have different colored skin, we may have different culture, we may have different clothes, but underneath that, we're actually one family." Encouraged by this notion of unity, she launched The Jane Goodall's Institute's "Roots & Shoots" program in 1991 with the aim to educate young people about the indelible connection among humanity, animals, and the environment. The program empowers children all over the world to find solutions to issues specific to their region as well as to the global challenges facing the environment, e.g. deforestation, greenhouse gas emissions, and loss of natural biodiversity.
Through "Roots & Shoots," Goodall hopes to bridge the disconnect between the decisions we make today and their effects on future generations.
Goodall dedicates her time to traveling 300 days a year, enriching younger generations with the knowledge that people, animals, and the environment are part of one family. For her work, she was appointed as a UN Messenger of Peace in 2002 by Kofi Annan.
Asked by a student from Matilde Acosta how she became a UN Messenger of Peace, Goodall replied,
“When people think something is funny, we laugh. If we cry, the tears will be exactly the same. And if we cut ourselves, the blood will be the same red-colored blood. And, you know, inside each one of us is a heart that beats. If you look at that heart, it’s exactly the same wherever you live, whatever the color of your skin, or the clothes you wear, or the food you eat, the heart is the same. ”
WIJABA proudly presented Dr. Jane Goodall with our Children's Literacy Award in culmination of the event. We were honored to surprise her with the announcement of our two-part plan to help spread her message of peace in Mexico: building WIJABA's first library in Mexico City in her namesake and committing to expand WIJABA Environmental Education Program in Partnership with JGI's "Roots & Shoots" across 20 schools in Mexico.