I used to teach at a boarding school.  Walking around campus, I used to feel like a minor celebrity.  Kids would say hi to me left and right.  Some I didn’t have the foggiest idea who they were.  But I was just so awesome, I guess, that they knew my name and it made me feel like a 2nd tier, over-worked version of Angelina Jolie.  Without the lips.  Well, it’s happening again.  Before I arrived in Gombe, I pictured camp to be a bucolic cluster of four or five houses, all a sort of gloaming yellow, with a few people living in each.  The reality is that the Gombe Research Centre is a settlement.  There are gads of people, lots of little squat buildings, and it takes me 5 minutes to walk to the office (I’m not complaining…just pointing out that the camp is big if it takes me that long to walk across 2/3 of it).  And, because I am the only foreign researcher and the only permanent mzungu besides Anton (who has been here for 30 years), people know me.  Lots of people.  They know my name.  They shake my hand warmly.  We exchange complicated greetings and they giggle profusely.  And I have no idea who they are.  It hardly helps that some of their names seem to encompass double-digit syllables while the rest are named Idi (4 so far and counting).  But they all are wonderful and I get to experience one of the great aspects of living somewhere in Tanzania for awhile: people start to see you as a person rather than a walking ATM machine and, as a byproduct, the conversations become infinitely more stimulating.

I am not just an un-deserved celebrity among the workers, mind you.  I’ve also made quite a splash in AC troop.  Since day one of following those baboons, screwing up my face and squinting to try and see how Umea could possibly look any different than Ubergiji, Unarasika, a juvenile female, has been trying to be my friend.  As related in a previous (perhaps several) post, I described how she backs her rump up next to me, lifting her tail suggestively and looks back, waiting for me to grab her hips and smack my lips in a friendly manner.  I have yet to do so, but she does this EVERY DAY.  In fact, several times a day.  “Maybe she’s crazy,” I told Marini today.  He shakes his head, “No.  She only began when you arrived.  You are her friend.”  Today she actually stepped on my foot, her butt was backed so far toward my leg.  The problem is, half the time I guess her name wrong and I feel this deep twinge of guilt because, man, shouldn’t I at least know my own friends?  My other friend is Yambera.  Yambera sat next to me today while I tried to figure out who some old female up the path was.  Gently, she put her hand out and touched my pants.  I looked at her.  She began to pick at a string on my pants and then smacked her lips as she contemplated doing a full-on grooming.   Of course, allowing anything of the sort is a sign of bad science (or something like that), so I deftly moved away, shunning Friend #2.  I didn’t know baboon watching was supposed to make you doubt your social skills.