One Last Field Trip

On Friday I took twelve of my middle school students to Ruaha National Park for the culmination of our semester-long research project on Ruaha ecosystems. As on all field trips I’ve led, I was quite nervous before and during the trip but tried my best not to show it to the kids. Not until we were a few minutes from home yesterday did I relax and think to myself, “Wow, we made it!”

On previous field trips I’ve never had to worry about my students getting eaten by lions, but nonetheless, there is always an element of anxiety when removing students from the confines of the schoolyard and becoming surrogate parent to a group of teenagers. Despite the headaches of planning and permission slips, these trips are highlights of the school year for both students and teachers. For example, all I remember about 8th grade is that we went to Williamsburg and several romances blossomed and wilted all in the same weekend. Oh, I also remember it was the year I started doing poorly in math.

As a teacher at Berkeley High, my first field trip was a short outing to see “Calivera,” an exhibition of Mexicali Day of the Dead altars. As my 6th period class descended the escalators of the Berkeley BART station to ride the train a few stops south to the Oakland Museum, I was convinced that they were going to rebel and escape to San Francisco, leaving me to call their parents and send out various search parties. To my relief, the only student who went missing showed up later with a good explanation.

On May Day 2007, a colleague and I carried out our ambitious and slightly crazy idea of taking all 60 of our freshmen to an immigrant rights rally in San Francisco. Amazingly no one got lost, and we had an incredible day that included a walking tour of the Mission District murals, which tell the story of the Latino experience from the pre-Colombian era to the present day. What my students probably remember most is chasing each other around Mission Dolores Park before the rally.

When I came to Tanzania to teach in a small international school I imagined peace and quiet - a welcome change from the craziness of American public schools. I didn’t think my field trips would be as adventurous, but it turns out that bringing 12 students 120 kilometers over a very rocky road and sleeping overnight in the bush is just as challenging as taking 60 kids to and from SF on the BART.

Food, for example, is a minor detail of American field trips because we can buy it everywhere. But in Tanzania, there’s no stopping at Subway or McDonald’s. My boss and I had to go the Iringa market to buy 5 kilos of rice, 3 kilos of peas, 3 kilos of potatoes and assorted veggies and fruit so that the students would have food on the trip. When we arrived at our campsite, I had to use my not-yet-there Swahili to arrange for a “mama” to cook our food, and of course we haggled for a quarter of an hour over the price. But these are the details and differences that make Tanzania so endearing.

With the food arranged, my mind stopped running through all the possible scenarios of what could go wrong, and as we set out on our afternoon game drive I focused in on the faces of my students as they waited for their first glimpse of Africa’s famous animals. Surprisingly, four of my students had never been to Ruaha (or any other national park) so I was excited to share in their first experience of this incredible wilderness. “Look, the giraffe is eating an acacia tree!” exclaimed one of my students. “Yes!” I thought to myself, “they’ve actually understood my lessons on species interaction and food chains.”

On our first drive we saw elephants, buffalo, impala, zebra, hippos and crocs, but the highlight was coming around a corner and meeting two huge bull giraffes standing with their bodies pressed against each other, heads side by side. I’d never seen this before, and I wondered what they were doing. All of the sudden they both stumbled and the bushes shook, and I thought they were being attacked by a pride of lions. In the next instant, one giraffe quickly swiveled his head and swung it like a hammer, smashing it into the neck of his rival.

The sound of the impact was frightful, and we all sat with our mouths open and hearts beating fast, awestruck witnesses to a rarely seen behavior. Fatigued by their efforts, the two bulls stood breathing heavily for about half a minute, and then they began again. Their necks were elastic as pulled toffee, but their skulls pounded against their bodies with thunderous force. It was a moment none of us will soon forget – we were 10 feet away.

Our only “complaint” as we went to bed was that we hadn’t seen any cats, but as luck would have it we heard that distinctive roar close to our camp as dawn broke, and sure enough we encountered a pride of 20 lions on our early morning drive. As my students can now attest, there is nothing quite like seeing your first lion.

When we pulled into the school driveway yesterday, I felt a great sense of relief. The students were exhausted from the excitement and the long, dusty ride back home, and so was I. Reflecting on all the field trips I’ve taken in the past few years, I realize that all the planning, logistics and temporary parenthood have been well worth it.