Liberty LEADS News

Farhad Asghar, Director of Liberty LEADS, profiled in the New York Daily News.
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"Journey To Another World,"  from Bank Street College Street Scenes.  Summer 2006.

On their last day in Antarctica, the boat carrying four I-LEAD students, their advisor, and fifty other passengers became wedged in pack ice and for a while, could move neither backward nor forward. Everyone disembarked onto the ice. One student, Lucas Alvarez, recalls that instead of feeling fear, the group was awestruck. "We forgot about our predicament and instead stood in absolute silence for several minutes. Around us, there was no sound, there were no buildings - it was just flat ice all the way to the horizon," he says. "It was an unbelievable experience, standing on top of a few feet of ice with 300 feet of ocean beneath it. This was the most intense, yet peaceful, moment I've ever had. Four months later, I am still trying to figure it out. Antarctica was a life-changing experience for me."

This was exactly the kind of reaction that Geoff Green, Director of Students on Ice, the trip organizer, hoped the participants would have. He says, "Our goal is for students to experience a transformative connection with nature, a connection that changes the way they understand and act in this world." Students on Ice, founded by Green in 1999, is a shipbased expeditionary program that has made dozens of educational excursions to both Antarctica and the Arctic. The program focuses on a wide range of natural and environmental sciences aimed at helping young people connect with the natural world, increase their awareness of the earth as a global ecosystem, and understand the importance of Antarctica and the Arctic to maintaining a healthy ecosystem. Four students from I-LEAD (a Bank Street after-school program) embarked on this ten-day trip: Lucas, Wendy De La Rosa, Sarahn Uhuru, and Aryana Jacobs. They were accompanied by their I-LEAD advisor, Becky Hamilton. The journey began in late December 2005 during Antarctica's "austral" (southern) summer, along with about fifty people from half a dozen nations, including twenty-eight other students, a dozen chaperones, and a team of educators. They left Tierra del Fuego aboard the Russian ship Akademik Shokalsky; sailed down the Beagle Channel; spent a day navigating some of the roughest waters in the world, the Drake Passage; and finally landed on Roberts Island in the South Shetland Islands just north of the Antarctic Peninsula.

Says Wendy, "After forty hours of sea and sickness, we were greeted by elephant seals, gentoo penguins, chinstrap penguins, skuas (Antarctic birds), and a whole lot of guano (animal droppings). The scene was breathtaking:¨the feeding of the chicks, penguin parents fighting to keep their young safe from skuas, seals mating and fighting, young and old chicks struggling for their mother's food, and penguins waddling across the land and up to their nesting places on top of the hills." Sarahn adds, "It was much more than I ever expected."