Jane Goodall — Early Years in Africa: Olduvai Gorge

Jane Goodall was determined to travel to Africa and live out her childhood dream of working with wildlife. She attended secretarial school and then got a job with a documentary film company in England, until she was invited to Kenya by a school friend. She worked as a waitress to save money for the fare.

Jane made the trip to Kenya by boat at the age of 23, and it was there that she heard of Dr. Louis Leakey, a renowned paleontologist and anthropologist. She made an appointment to meet him and managed to answer many of his questions about Africa and its wildlife. Dr. Leakey hired her as his assistant, and they traveled, along with his wife, Mary Leakey, to Olduvai Gorge on a fossil-hunting expedition.

Jane reminisces about this time in her life at Olduvai Gorge: "I always remember the first time I held in my hand the bone of a creature that had walked the earth millions of years before. I had dug it up myself. A feeling of awe crept over me. I thought, 'Once this creature stood here. It was alive, had flesh and hair. It had its own smell. It could feel hunger and thirst and pain. It could enjoy the morning sun.' "

After three months at Olduvai Gorge, they returned to Nairobi, Kenya, and Jane worked at the museum there. Soon after their return, Jane and Dr. Leakey had several conversations about the possibility of Jane studying a group of chimpanzees on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. "I could have gone on at the museum. Or I could have learned a whole lot more about fossils and become a paleontologist. But both these careers had to do with dead animals. And I still wanted to work with living animals. My childhood dream was as strong as ever: Somehow I must find a way to watch free, wild animals living their own, undisturbed lives. I wanted to learn things that no one else knew, uncover secrets through patient observation. I wanted to come as close to talking to animals as I could."