Three words, and Robin Huffman’s life changed. A senior design executive who’d lived all over the world, she’d recently relocated to Manhattan. It was 1999, and the design industry, like a lot of other industries, was booming.

Asked to make a lateral transition from designer to project manager, Robin’s focus changed. Gradually, so did she.

“I felt like I was a spinning top,” Robin said to me during her visit this month to New York, explaining that her job and life in Manhattan felt exciting and fast, but that the intricate colors of her spinning top were nothing but a blur. In other words, everything in Robin’s life, from her talents and her interests and even the days themselves, seemed indistinguishable from everything else. Eventually, she grew tired of her own rat race.

Bored and dissatisfied, Robin found herself at a seminar hosted by best-selling author Barbara Sher (www.wishcraft.com). Sher, who has spent more than thirty years understanding what makes dreamers tick, is something of a midwife – a midwife to the dreams you’re afraid to say you have. Even those dreams you aren’t sure exist.

At the seminar, Sher told the crowd that in all her years career-counseling, she’d only ever given up on one person. Nearly, anyway. Years earlier, Sher explained, a woman had come into her office looking for help in seeking out her passion. Hours later, without any progress, both of them were still stumped. Nothing seemed to interest the woman. Finally, Sher gave up, and the woman left her office. On her way out the door, spotting a magazine cover of a gorilla, the woman casually mentioned that she loved gorillas.

“Surrogate gorilla mother,” Sher said, explaining to the seminar crowd that she’d suggested to the woman she become a surrogate mother to infant gorillas orphaned by bushmeat hunters.

Photo by Robin Huffman: Ndele the Chimp

Sitting in the seminar, listening to Sher’s account of the woman’s story, Robin was struck. Immediately, she’d identified with those three words: ‘surrogate gorilla mother’, and she vowed to somehow figure out exactly what they meant to her. But, like most of us who dream, Robin woke up. Six years later, she was still in Manhattan, working in design.

In 2006, many years after she’d moved to New York and many years after hearing those three words, Robin attended one of Barbara Sher’s retreats. Asked to write what her ideal job description would be, Robin thought about her love for animals and gorillas in particular, Africa, and even design and fund-raising. And of course, she thought again about those three words: ‘surrogate gorilla mother’. Putting them all together, she wrote down what she thought would be her dream job. Choosing a few words from that description, she Googled them. There, on the computer screen in front of her, was a picture of a baby gorilla sitting on a surrogate human parent’s shoulders. The caption read, “Do you want to volunteer?”

Photo by Robin Huffman: Yoda

Immediately, Robin applied and was accepted for a three-month internship at Ape Action Africa (formerly Cameroon Wildlife Aid Fund). She took a sabbatical from her design job, and left for central Africa. Of course, her sabbatical was only temporary, and she eventually returned to New York. The day she did, she found a copy of the ideal job description she’d created for herself. “I’ve lived this,” she thought to herself, as she went back to the office. Of course, by this point, she knew she had to return to Africa. It was a matter of when and how, not if.

Less than a year later, Robin sold her Manhattan apartment, put herself on a strict budget, and returned to Africa. Even her boss couldn’t disagree with Robin’s plans. “I feel like you’re settling back here [in New York, at this job],” her boss told her when Robin intimated her plans to resign. “You need to be out in the world doing greater things.” And with that, Robin left her job and her life to become a surrogate mother to orphaned primates in Cameroon.

It took her more than a decade to decide how and when to follow her dream, and she doesn’t have a single regret. “I’ve spent not one second being scared, not for one second have I doubted my decision,” she told me, wiping away emotionally happy tears.

“Sometimes, I giggle: I live in Africa and I save orphan babies.”

These days, Robin’s only communication with the outside world is an overwhelming smell of pineapple. There’s limited cell phone reception in the wildlife sanctuary where Robin volunteers, and that limited reception just happens to be next to the gorillas, who snack on copious amounts of aromatic pineapple. Often so overcome with the rhythmic nature of the moment, she doesn’t even bother to make the telephone call she’d intended to make.

Photo by Guy Evron:Robin Huffman with Yoda

Orphaned primates are those left behind when their families are murdered or kidnapped by hunters or loggers. The primates are sold as pets or meat, and the orphans are left to die. Help Robin and Ape Action Africa give a voice to those who are unable to speak for themselves: http://www.apeactionafrica.org/what-we-do

This is part IV in an ongoing series about following your career dreams. To read more, read Patricia’s IL blog or her personal blog, chronicling her journey from banking to Mongolia: http://trishsexton.blogspot.com 

(Image at top by Robin Huffman:Bella the Mandrill)