| At
the end of her freshman year, Jeanne Lambert boarded a plane
for Kenya with Professor Richard Koesterer’s Biology
390 class. Before she returned to the states, the trip would
work a monumental shift in her life’s plan, turning
her focus outward even as it helped ground her inward sense
of balance.
Lambert
grew up with a love for plants and animals. Her mother was
a biology teacher, so she was dissecting clams and growing
petri dish mold before she learned to say “photosynthesis.”
She also developed into a skillful volleyball player, which
is how she got to Coastal from her Lakeville, Minn., hometown.
Recruited to play for the Chanticleers, Lambert decided to
double-major in biology and business management. (“It
couldn’t hurt, whatever you go into,” said her
mother, who has an M.B.A. as well.)
Monkey
on her back - Lambert in Ecuador |
Although
Biology 390 is an upper level course, Lambert, an honors student
who graduated in December 2002, took it as a freshman because
everyone raved about the exotic destinations where the final
two weeks of the class are held. On odd number years, Koesterer
takes his class to Kenya; on even number years they head for
Ecuador and the Galapagos Islands.
Koesterer
began his teaching career in Kenya in the 1970s, having been
hired (“by mail,” he says) to teach at Kenyatta
University Nairobi. He taught there until 1979, when he came
to Coastal, but he always dreamed of going back.
During
a sabbatical there in 1991, he began organizing a trip for
Coastal students, and the inaugural expedition set out in
the spring of 1993. The Ecuador-Galapagos trip had its debut
in 1996.
In Kenya
members of the group camp in primitive sites inside unfenced
game parks where they often have to fend off baboons looking
for food. In Ecuador they lodge in rustic hostels in the rain
forest. Each year a couple of upperclassmen serve as teaching
assistants (TAs)—Lambert was a TA for the 2002 trip
to Ecuador—who helped Koesterer give quizzes, handle
logistics and do a lot of the leg work.
On
the trail again: Koesterer leads students into the jungle. |
“We’ve
taken over 150 students out over the years, and we’ve
managed to bring them all back,” he laughs. Students
from all majors may sign up for the course, but they must
have had entry-level biology as well as possess some ability
to discuss science. Every day the students get up at 5:30
a.m. and spend six or seven hours in the field. They are required
to keep a logbook, where they record and classify virtually
every plant and animal they encounter.
“Student
experience is the purpose of this endeavor,” says Koesterer.
“Even the best textbooks can’t convey the feeling
of humidity in the rainforest or the vivid colors of the wildlife
in Africa. And the Galapagos give students and educators a
extra sense of awe because Darwin based his theories largely
on observations he made on his visits to the islands in the
1830s.” Koesterer is always struck by the irony that,
with so many gorgeous and unusual birds all around him, Darwin
chose the nondescript finch to illustrate his theory of evolution.
“What was he thinking of?”
From the
moment Lambert and her fellow sojourners touched down in Africa,
she was inspired by everything about the place. Riding along
in their field vehicle—“We called it a humvee
on steroids”—they spotted lions and lion cubs
along the roadside. “Tribal people would appear from
the bush in loincloths carrying spears,” she says. “They
were pointing and laughing. We looked as odd to them as they
looked to us. Dr. K., who speaks Swahili, said they were making
fun of our pale skin and hair, calling us ‘ghosts.’”
The spiritual
summit of the trip, for Lambert, was the climb up Mt. Kenya
that each class undertakes. When it comes to physical challenge,
Lambert is no wuss. She has earned a string of Big South Conference
honors in volleyball and she is known for her competitiveness
and drive. But the mountain was different.
“To this day I feel that climbing Mt. Kenya was one
of the most important experiences of my life,” she says.
‘In volleyball, the coach pushes you. On Mt. Kenya,
you had to push yourself, and your classmates, sometimes literally
on your hands and knees. It’s a different kind of challenge.
The air was so thin some of our group threw up from altitude
sickness. But it was the only year since Dr. K. first organized
the trip that everyone made it to the top.”
Class
picture, on the Isle of Bartolomé in the Galapagos |
Lambert
says that she returned from that trip—her first time
abroad—with a different idea of herself and of the world.
“It started something in me. I started thinking and
reading about other countries. I wanted to see how other people
live. Since then I’ve traveled to Austria and England.”
Having
graduated, Lambert is planning to go to graduate school and
study environmental economics, and then find a job abroad.
But her first order of business after receiving her diploma
is to make a trip to Korea to visit her best friend Doug Marabito,
a Coastal graduate who is teaching English there. The two
became friends on the trip to the Galapagos last year. “That’s
another thing I have to thank Dr. K’s class for—some
of the best friendships of my life.”
|
