USU doctoral student Yared Fubusa is building a school in a forest near his native village in Tanzania and Gombe National Park, where Jane Goodall has been studying chimpanzees for nearly half a century.

Unlike the elitist, authoritarian teachers of his childhood, the teachers at this school will work alongside the villagers in the fields and the forest, and the villagers will learn how to read and write, support themselves with more sustainable farming practices and cottage industries that appeal to tourists, and take good care of their land. In partnership with Utah State University, the Teton Science Schools and Westminster College, Fubusa also plans on establishing an international exchange program.

This past summer he convinced the Tanzanian government to designate 3,000 acres of the Kitobe Forest for the school, the Gombe School of Environment and Society. “Environment and Society” is the name of the department where Fubosa is earning his degree in the College of Natural Resources.

His story:

I WAS NO MORE than five years old when my village authorities hired a group of hunters from neighboring villages. Their job was to locate and kill all notorious baboons and monkeys that had been raiding crops in the high slopes of the Great African Rift Valley Mountains surrounding my village in Tanzania. Many of my friends were jubilant to see dead wild animals, but I never felt that way. Their dead, open eyes looked like the eyes of my grandmother who had died the year before, and their faces clearly bore an uncanny resemblance to many people in the village. Even at that age, I felt that wild animals near our village were in danger and that their end was near.

When I was 12 years old, Jane Goodall came to my middle school in Kigoma to speak. I was the student body president. She encouraged me to join Roots and Shoots, her global environmental program for youth. I didn’t know it at the time but I was one of the “founding members.” I mobilized my fellow students to plant thousands of seedlings in our deforested countryside. During breaks when I was in high school, I worked for her as a research assistant in Gombe National Park, the chimpanzee preserve where she has been conducting the longest continuous study of animal behavior in the history of science.

While working at Gombe Park, I hosted a group of high school students from Virginia. As a gift to my impoverished country, they secured my admission to Longwood University in their hometown and raised money for my airfare. I was an honor student in economics at Longwood, and I was invited to many other campuses to speak on Jane Goodall’s behalf about chimpanzee behavior and their endangered habitat. A professor at the University of Utah heard my keynote speech at a conference in West Virginia, and he encouraged me to consider the University of Utah for my master’s degree in parks management and sustainable tourism. The Rocky Mountains reminded me of my village in the Great African Rift Valley, and the decision was easy to make. more