Goodall Reminds Kids The Sky Is The Limit Billings School Takes Part In Chimp Expert’s Environmental Program

Chimpanzee expert Jane Goodall says she still gets to Africa four or five times a year to see the animals she grew to love during her 35 years there.

“I go and sit and they come up and sit beside me and they’re thinking, ‘Oh, it’s her again,”’ Goodall told several hundred Billings school children as she sat on a gymnasium floor.

Speaking at Rimrock School on Friday, Goodall told the children that her dream as a youth was to study animals in the wild, and that her mother told her to pursue it.

“She said if I worked hard, took advantage of opportunity and didn’t give up, that I could achieve my dream,” said Goodall, whose elementary school years were in London. “I got a job as a waitress and saved my tip money until I could afford to travel to Africa. I know you have dreams, and that’s why I tell you my story.”

Later Friday, Goodall was scheduled to address the Montana Environmental Education Association.

Now 63, Goodall went to Africa as a young woman and planned to be there for three years. But her stay stretched to 35 years as she became immersed in the study of chimpanzees in Tanzania.

Wearing blue jeans, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a pony tail, Goodall thanked the children for their work on environmental projects. Their activities include recycling, tree planting, an adopt-a-wolf program and the study of rain forests.

Rimrock School has joined “Roots and Shoots,” an environmental education arm of the Jane Goodall Institute. Roots and Shoots are the names of twin chimps whose birth Goodall witnessed in Gombe in 1991.

She said the names suggest “a firm base for something to take root, and the way in which ideas can grow - like shoots - with commitment. A shoot can break through a brick wall. That’s what you young people are doing, as you help stop pollution, crime and the killing of animals.”