Over the summer, three PCD faculty took advantage of E.E. Ford Summer Travel Grants to broaden their horizons. The grants, which support enrichment opportunities for full-time teaching faculty at the Providence Country Day School, are designed to enable teachers and their families to travel. Though the destinations and programs need not relate specifically to a teacher’s classroom curriculum, the broadened perspectives and ignited imaginations that only travel can inspire inevitably make their way into the classroom and the PCD community at large. One of the three recipients, Spanish Teacher Sarah Garcia-Mata, fulfilled a long-time goal of traveling to Easter Island, a small island in the South Pacific famous for the moai, or monolithic statues that dot the island's coast. We caught up with Señora Garcia-Mata and asked her to tell us a little bit about her experience and why she caught the travel bug.
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| Señora Garcia-Mata in front of moai on Easter Island |
I love to travel! It is the only way to know cultures, peoples, languages and learn history without studying. For me it reaffirms the solidarity of humankind and the innate goodness of people. So funding for travel is paramount to me. In my language classes students have trouble remembering verb forms, but they do not forget my stories about adventures I had traveling, or some interesting factoid that I picked up somewhere along the way. Photos of pre-Incan salt mines in Peru necessitate a large amount of historical knowledge that the student would probably not remember if not seeing the pictures and figuring out (without realize their brain was doing it) all the ramifications of what pre-Incan means, the location, the history, etc., etc. My experience and personal photos of the many different Hispanic countries that I have visited make a big difference in my classes (at least I believe that). So I was incredibly fortunate to travel on an EE Ford grant this summer!
Tales of
Thor Heyerdahl (a strange Polynesian culture),
moai (gigantic stone faces), and a minute dot of an island in the South Pacific belonging to Chile all beckoned me to visit with relatives in Santiago, Chile and then proceed to visit Easter Island. My trip was fascinating as well as timely since the July 2012 issue of
National Geographic's cover story is all about the island. Humans arrived around 400AD, after an exploratory group of Polynesians found the island and then sent a group of “pioneers” back to the spot again without any navigational tools besides the heavens.
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| A moai with replicas of its original eye
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Amazing achievement in itself! Very likely, since the island has none of its own resources left, the subsequent history is a cautionary tale about husbanding your natural (and human) resources, and, of course, the human condition. The
moai were likely a form of ancestor worship, and many archeologists suspect that they came to represent power at a time of increasing environmental struggles for the island, all of which might have hastened the natives' demise. Whatever the archaeologists and other scientists ultimately figure out, it is all fascinating and exciting with tales of cannibalism, later “democratic” leaders chosen by the equivalent of a triathlon, and human ingenuity to survive on an island that is basically unfit for human survival.
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