Charlotte West couldn't wait until the end of school to visit Latin America. So the industrious 16-year-old found a way to make the trip part of her schooling.
West, a junior at Nova High School in the Central Area, is one of seven students - the other six are from The Center School, at the Seattle Center - on a six-week journey to the tropical rain forests of Costa Rica from mid-February to mid-March.
There, the group is spending much of their time at Rancho Mastatal, a nature learning center dedicated to promoting environmentally responsive lifestyles. They are studying exotic wildlife, learning about the region's agrarian culture, establishing the area's first archive of oral histories and researching ways to preserve the natural environment - all while earning the precious academic credits they need to graduate.
The school district approved the unusual arrangement after West and fellow travelers Sydney Silver, Emma Epstein, Cate Bridenstine, Krista Coleman, Kia Sanger and Oscar Gubelman mounted an extraordinary effort, mostly on their own, to craft a curriculum and fund-raising strategy around the proposed trip.
Center School principal Brian Vance said the student's final proposal showed "an unbelievable amount of work...of extremely high quality." As a result, the district found the student's request "hard to refuse."
In some ways, convincing the district was the easy part, compared to fund-raising. Over the last several months, the students, who named themselves Cultural Connections 2004, devised a multitude of schemes to raise money, including weekly car washes, a bike-a-thon, baby-sitting, cleaning houses and peddling organic coffee beans.
The group staged an auction and then a Latin music concert in November that featured a Brazilian vocalist, a Chilean band and gospel singers.
West, a slender, light-skinned young woman with curly, brown hair and a passion for theater arts, explains the group's energy comes from the uncompromising love the youths developed for Costa Rica during a 10-day, spring-break visit last year.
About 20 high-school students from throughout the Seattle School District and a handful of adult chaperones attended that first trip to the center near Mastatal, a small village of about 160 residents on the edge of La Cangreja National Park, a protected habitat for more than 2,000 different plant species and fauna.
That trip "was the purest 10 days of my entire life," West said. "It was the happiest I've ever been."
In fact, all the students who attended the first trip were deeply affected and changed by the experience, said Tom McDonald, the educator responsible for selling the school district on a Costa Rican journey.
McDonald - an avid adventurer known by Spanish speakers as "El Tiburon," or "the shark," for surviving a shark attack that left a deep gash in his arm - is founder of Tropical Adventures in Education, a learning program that takes students of all ages into the wild. Nature, like that of the undeveloped tropics, he said, reverberates with a universal life force capable of shaking people to their cores and raising their awareness of their roles, as components of a profoundly intricate ecosystem.
McDonald added, "There's so much life.... It's going to come at you from all directions, and learning becomes more extrinsic, not intrinsic.... You have to go out there."
Indeed, West and her Cultural Connections mates found Costa Rica overwhelming but welcoming. There, the students were introduced to a life far removed from that of a typical Seattleite: a village comprised mostly of wood huts, a deep forest offering a bounty of exotic fruits - as well as giant tarantulas and scorpions - and people who reveled in simple joys but offered unparalleled hospitality.
"When we got back home, about half of us got together with mangoes and pineapples and sat in Queen Anne, just on the verge of tears," Emma Epstein said. "We tried to recapture the sensations we had on the trip."
The students ended up feeling an inexplicable bond with the people of Mastatal and saw beauty in the way they lived.
Even before the first trip was over, several of the students were already planning their return. They knew, however, that district policies would prevent them from attending another similar stint.
So, when they got back home, the students began exploring their options. After a few months, only seven continued to show for the regular planning sessions - the only ones apparently undiscouraged by the work they saw before them. They named their effort Cultural Connections 2004.
Krista Coleman didn't attend the original trip but opted to join Cultural Connections because she was so inspired by the stories she heard - and the happiness she saw: "Seeing the passion for it, it's hard to describe the looks on their faces," she said.
Then again, since the second drive toward Costa Rica began, "I would say this group is on overload," Coleman said.
Epstein put it another way: "We worked our asses off."
Less than a month before the trip, the group remained several thousand dollars short of its overall travel budget of $21,000. But the students had earned an abundance of mutual respect for each other.
"This is the first group I've been in where I can feel trust that much," Oscar Gubelman said. "Each one of these people is putting out until they can't do it anymore."
Kia Sanger agreed, saying, "This has changed me a lot, made me a lot more confident in what we were doing. We started from zero."
If there were any lessons Cultural Connections could tell others, Sanger said, it's that younger generations do have something to offer.
"I was capable! I want people to change their outlook, rethink how youth are seen," she said.
McDonald said the real value of the trip will be apparent when those in the group learn how to free themselves from the inhibitions of society, no matter where they are.
"I want them to recognize the passion within themselves," McDonald said. "I want them to dance on the tables."
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