Editor’s Note: Students from Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering are working in Tanzania to help improve sanitation and energy technologies in local villages. The student-led group , known as Humanitarian Engineering Leadership Projects (HELP), will file dispatches from the field during their trip. This is their sixth blog post for Scientific American.

After hearing many rumors, we finally received confirmation that the famous Dr. Jane Goodall was actually in town to celebrate 50 years of chimpanzee research in Gombe National Park . This discovery came about after finding out that the Land Cruiser that we had reserved to drive to Kalinzi had been used to escort Dr. Jane Goodall to one of the villages. We took our unexpected delay with alacrity as we considered how incredible of an opportunity it was to be in the presence of a living legend. When we finally arrived in Kalinzi, we made our way past the cornucopia of emerald green bananas at the market to the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) field station, which would serve as our headquarters for the rest of the summer. [More]















Jane Goodall – Tanzania – Jane Goodall Institute – Gombe Stream National Park – Chimpanzee