Project 2009: Amazon

The Amazon River Basin seen from space. Photo courtesy of NASA

In the fall of 2009, Jungle to Jungle voyaged to South America to explore the Amazon and brought some of Maui’s sharpest students with us! Virtually, that is.

Click here to see our travel map, Google style.

The Jungle to Jungle Project 2009 had two arms: The first is to bring the wonderous information about the Amazon jungle into Maui classrooms. The Amazon holds so much secret and amazing information: It is the world’s largest river in volume, an enormous and extremely dense jungle, and a Brazilian state. It is touted to contain nearly 40,000 plant species and the world’s richest diversity of birds, freshwater fish and butterflies. It also happens to be sublimely beautiful.
Our students this year were members of Kalama Intermediate’s Science Club. We met with them two weeks before we departed to introduce the project and to find out what sorts of questions they had about the Amazon region. We also introduced them to ooVoo videoconferencing, set up a blog we would all be using as a virtual interface, and tested the hardware: Webcams, microphones, and the computers themselves all must be up to speed.

We'll be using ooVoo to video conference with students.

The second aspect of the project this year was to share information about Hawaii’s geography, geology, and biology with classes in the Amazon. The first was an all girls school called Rosa de America in Iquitos, Peru. We had arranged to work with them before hand, and so we were able to ask our girls at Kalama what kinds of things they wanted to learn from and teach the Peruvian girls. The Peruvian girls, in turn, prepared things, such as their favorite foods (ceviche) and favorite bands (The Jonas Brothers!) to show as well. We communicated over 5,800 miles, sending videos and information between cultures and classrooms! It was a blast, and we are presently still working together.

The adventure was full of surprises, of course, one of which being that we were invited into another school! This one was in Costa Rica, Colombia and was called Selvalegre, which just so happens to mean “happy jungle”. We got the opportunity to share our information about Hawaii with them in their language and teach them a few words in Hawaiian!
We also got to explore the Amazon Animal Orphange, where we met a jaguar, a tapir, and monkeys, and research institutes like SINCHI of Colombia and INPA of Brazil. After much discovery and boat time, we finally made it into the deep jungle, outside of Manaus, where we got to eat maggots, meet caimans, catch piranhas, and hear the wildest jungle noises: all of which we documented for our girls back home.

This spectacled caiman volunteers at the animal orphanage.

Now that we’re back, we are still meeting with our students who are busy completing their comparison projects between an Amazonian species and a Hawaiian one, as well as painting an extremely impressive mural! (Coming soon..)
We have also already begun our research for Project 2010, so stay tuned!