If you ask our Scholars what it was like to journey down the Rio Negro in the Amazon Jungle, they’ll begin with a list of things they’ll never forget:

...they met with indigenous tribes and learned about their customs, culture, and ways of life...

...they trekked into the jungle and slept on hammocks elevated between trees, reveling in the cacophony of nightsounds that abound there under night skies filled with stars...

...they swam with pink dolphins and learned about efforts to preserve native turtles from poaching and observed the flora and fauna of one of the most diverse ecosystems on the planet...

...and perhaps, late at night, while they slept, were observed in turn by the jungle’s panthers...

As Baret Fellow Ronan MacRory put it, what they experienced was a sort of “floating classroom” that took them into parts unknown. In fact, Ronan was so entranced by the landscape and environment, that he made his own documentary short about the journey.

The trip began with much excitement and even trepidation: the Amazon, after all, is one of the world’s last truly wild places, where it would seem easy to get well and truly lost. But quickly, the river began to reveal its secrets to them. James Etherington, a Scholar from Australia, was enchanted by the rhythms of the Rio Negro:

“The thing about being on the river is we wouldn’t necessarily know what was going to happen on each day until it happened. The amount of life there is incredible. You can’t understand the volume of biodiversity. The life speaks for itself. We went to bed early because there was no electricity, and we were all up to watch the sunrise. As soon as nighttime comes, the whole river is swarmed with bats.”

Our Scholars’ guide, Saru, head of Aracá Expeditions, grew up in the Amazon. His desire, as much as it is to teach people about the way people live on the river, was for them to enjoy themselves. The best learning, after all, comes from joy.

Thus Saru made a point of showing the Scholars how people on the Amazon live, and what they live for. For example, a little competition always makes life interesting: it wasn’t uncommon for our Scholars to be challenged to a vine-climbing competition by our guides, which of course they lost.  James put it this way: “Saru wanted to show us why he loved the Amazon, and share his love for it with us.”

As one of the main goals of the journey was cross-cultural pollination, they also visited several Indigenous communities. One Scholar, Pau, who hails from Mexico, found that rather than a staid tour of the grounds with slideshows and lectures, the community brought them into the fold:

“As soon as we entered the village we felt welcome. In fact, a group of children approached us immediately, grabbed my friend Jackie, and began drawing on the floor, saying “fish” in Portuguese. We understood: they wanted to teach us new words, and learn some themselves, so we began exchanging words so we could both learn.”

The cumulative effect was that the Scholars didn’t feel as if they were touring a village–they felt like they were in dialogue with people who were excited to share their own customs, and to learn from them in turn.

James also related playing impromptu games with pink dolphins who happened upon them on the beach. If you haven’t been kicked in the butt by a dolphin, James recommends the experience for all.

Without cell phones or the internet, they found themselves getting to know their peers in a deeply human way. A game they played, called “We Are Not Really Strangers,” underlined a truth about Baret: although our Scholars come from all over the world, what they share in curiosity and openness is what binds them together.

The crown jewel of the trip was a night sleeping on hammocks in the jungle. Astonished at the biodiversity, James took a moment to actually try to count the creatures. In just one square meter, he found remarkable abundance: “the number of things we saw in that section was immense. A scorpion, a tree frog, ten spiders, a beetle, cicada…there was so much life everywhere.” It was experiences like this that reshaped the way our Scholars think about human relationships with the flora and fauna they’re surrounded by. These relationships are both contingent and necessary: we survive together, growing only insofar as we are willing to share the world with each other.

Aware of the various ways in which human development is encroaching on the Amazon, our Scholars nonetheless found it jarring that a place that was so vibrant could be under threat. Their reading and study told them that it was, and yet they were surrounded by such wonder, such joy, such irrepressible life. It was hard to imagine that their fellow human beings would threaten “the lungs of the world.” But just as the jungle contains such diversity, so too do human beings: in fact, although it is human beings that threaten this jungle, there are also those who are protecting it.

To wit, near the end of their journey, they met a man who rescues Amazonian turtles, targets for poaching, and maintains a turtle hatchery to raise these creatures in a safe environment before releasing them. Each one has a number assigned to it and a date that it arrived: small signs that they are valued not just as a symbols of preservation but as creatures with their own lives and futures.

Here was one man, sustaining a threatened ecosystem for no reason other than it was the right thing to do. In a world where it has become almost a cliché that individual action is hopeless, where there is so much cynicism  in the face of any number of threats to the environment, he was making a difference every day.

Preserving this pristine jungle may be a collective responsibility; at the same time, nothing can be saved without the actions of individuals. It is lessons like these that our Scholars take with them as they journey around the world and into the rest of their lives.