The Elusive Baboon

Jennifer Jolly was a naive young woman when she, her primatologist husband, and her small daughter traveled to newly independent Uganda. This book is about how she adapted to an expatriate lifestyle. It reveals the problems and pleasures of conducting ground-breaking fieldwork on wild baboons while camping out close (sometimes too close) to elephants, buffalo, and hippos. She encounters unfamiliar cultures, and the joy of exotic vegetation and spectacular scenery, while she faces a difficult pregnancy. When civil war erupts, she survives a complicated delivery in a hospital under siege. Returning to Uganda five years later, the family lives in a spectacularly situated but decaying rest house overlooking the Budongo Forest and witnesses the descent of the country into the murderous years of Idi Amin. Braving the unfamiliar, sometimes terrified of being shot, but never bored, she comes through with her sense of humor intact.