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| Volume 51, Number 4, Fall, 2002 |
QUEST FOR ADVENTURE LEADS TO EDUCATIONAL WEB SITE VENTUREby Emily Sohn The helicopter dropped us off on an isolated riverbank in the Peruvian jungle, 15 days’ walk from any sign of civilization. I had just met my seven companions—a group of writers, photographers, videographers, and editors. We would work together in the rain forest for the next five weeks creating AmazonQuest, an educational Web project (http://quest.classroom.com) for K-12 students across the United States. AmazonQuest was my first assignment with the “Quests,” a project begun by explorer Dan Buettner, who set three Guinness world records for long-distance cycling (including a trip literally pedaling around the world), before deciding to add an educational element to his expeditions. San Francisco-based Classroom Connect, Inc., has produced the Quests since 1998. Twice a year, the Quest production team travels to remote regions of the planet to explore mysteries of history and science. AsiaQuest, for example, asked the question: Did Marco Polo really go to China? MayaQuest went to Central America to try to explain the downfall of Mayan civilization.
Five days a week, reports, videos, and pictures are beamed via satellite to the California headquarters for uploading to the Web site. Our audience of hundreds of thousands of school children follow the expedition from classrooms and their homes, but their involvement is far from passive. Every Monday, for instance, they’re invited to participate in “Set the Course,” during which they vote on where the team should go and what activities it should do that week. Our overarching plan on AmazonQuest was to travel from remote stretches of pristine jungle to highly developed river towns in order to assess the health of the Amazon rain forest. In a weekly segment called “Make a Difference,” we encouraged kids to be proactive by, for example, writing letters to Peruvian president Alejandro Toledo about a proposed natural gas pipeline project or perhaps tackling an environmental project in their own community. Students posted messages on discussion boards and corresponded with online experts. They were also invited to e-mail the team members, and they weren’t shy about doing so. The e-mails came pouring in. Up to this point in my career, I could count on one hand the number of positive letters I’d ever received in response to newspaper or magazine stories I’d written. The kids were universally supportive and concerned about us. “Are you homesick?” “What is the coolest animal you’ve seen so far?” “Do you ‘like’ anyone on the Quest team?” “How’d you get to be a science writer?” were typical questions. Because our faces are on the Internet, kids treat us like movie stars. Last spring, speaking about Quest to an audience of third and fourth graders at a school in Eden Prairie, Minn., students lined up for my autograph. That never happened in the newsroom! It was in the spring of 2001 that I first ran across an ad seeking writers for AmazonQuest. At the time, I was working in a windowless office in Washington, D.C. Ever since graduating from the UC Santa Cruz Science Writing program the year before, I’d been searching for a way to combine my passions for writing, travel, adventure, and education. But so far all I’d managed to do was alternate among them: a summer internship at the Dallas Morning News followed by a backpacking trip through Thailand and Nepal, then back home for another internship, this time at U.S. News & World Report. My route to becoming a science writer was equally circuitous. In the two years following college graduation, I traveled for a few months before taking a job at an experiential education center in the high desert of Southern California teaching astronomy and environmental science to kids. Between teaching seasons, I led teenagers on outdoor adventure trips in Colorado and the Pacific Northwest. When I finally entered graduate school, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I also knew I didn’t want to sit behind a desk. AmazonQuest seemed like the ideal opportunity. Then, we landed in the jungle. We all had our share of insect-induced welts as well as an encounter with Africanized killer bees that swarmed over our gear and crawled up our shorts. Calamity struck when Nick, our technologist, stepped on a venomous sting ray which left him writhing in pain and unable to walk for days. Then David, our photographer, was nipped on the head one night by a vampire bat. We shared these travails with our audience. Nick’s toe received a lot of sympathetic e-mail, and David’s fear about rabies sparked equally supportive fan mail. (He was eventually flown to Cusco then Lima for a series of shots and then sent back to the States.)
Setting out, we had the usual provisions for a river trip: boats, tents, bug spray, clothes, and food to last us several weeks. We also carried eight computers, a handful of digital cameras, extra videotape, batteries, a generator, and a portable satellite, all packaged in clunky, waterproof cases. In fact, we were so well equipped that we couldn’t fit all of our gear into the inflatable canoes. Undaunted, our Peruvian guides immediately chopped down balsa trees and built a raft to transport the surplus. It was late in the dry season—an especially dry season. The Rio Azul, our intended fluid highway, was too low to paddle. Instead we ended up dragging the boats for days through ankle-deep water. Each night, exhausted, I’d sit down in the communal, bug-infested tent to write 500 to 700 words for my “Creature Feature,” “Nature Notes,” “Bugs!” or “Gross and Disgusting” (for which I once ate a grub worm). I’d also select photos, write captions, edit the other writers’ work, and record sound bites to accompany the reports. Transmissions went out around midnight. There were moments where I seriously questioned how much suffering and danger I should endure, even for the sake of education. During one particularly intense lightning storm, water poured from the sky for hours, eventually forcing us to abandon camp for the relative safety of the boats. Using our lightning-rod aluminum paddles we pulled away from shore but lost half our food (and almost lost Nick) when the now-raging Rio Azul tipped the balsa raft and a canoe. I shivered uncontrollably, appalled to think that hypothermia would be the death of me in a tropical rain forest, and I wondered if the kids had any appreciation for what we were going through. In the end, the power of the project outweighed the pain and suffering. Working as a team we produced stories that were better than any of us could have done alone. We addressed topics such as ecotourist lodges, a natural gas pipeline, and deforestation. As the weeks went by, our audience became part of the team, too. When two boys from a primitive tribe asked us for machetes to supplement their bone and stone tools, we posed the question to the kids in our cyber audience and let them decide what we should do (56 percent yes, give them the knives).
In the small village of Bretaña, along the Rio Ucayali, which dumps into the Amazon, local children were raising—for the first time—endangered turtles for eventual release into the wild. On the day we arrived, the first turtles from this project were hatching. We filmed while the entire community gathered around the enclosed sand pit to watch, whistle, and cheer. That same day, we had a videoconference with schools in Iowa. Several of us sat in front of a camera while American kids peppered us with questions about the Amazon. We couldn’t see them, but we knew our faces were being projected onto screens in school auditoriums. After the usual questions about the animals we’d seen and the gross things we’d eaten, one student asked, “What can we do to help the poor kids in Peru?” It was an impossibly large question to answer in the remaining two minutes. It was also a profound question, and certainly one I would never have thought to ask when I was in the fourth grade. Maybe our efforts are making a difference, after all. This October, ColumbusQuest—the Web site’s 11th expedition and my third—will take viewers from the Bahamas to Cuba, in an attempt to pinpoint where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World. # Emily Sohn is a science writer based in Minneapolis. |