Training Day
Driving through the mountains of Peru is a high-stakes game
The so-called highway often turns to one-lane right before you must make several consequential turns in a row. Other times, the highway suddenly goes dark in a tunnel, also just one-lane wide. Honking is encouraged, road signs even remind you to do it. It is a game over which you have little control, nerve wracking for drivers like us, and yet these bold curves of life and death lull the children to sleep… but never for long enough.
Recently, when we drove down from 3000-meter-high Paucartambo to Pilcopata in the Amazon rainforest, instead of napping, Elisa held the telephone and warned me each time a hairpin curve would appear in the road. She relished her role of co-pilot, a responsibility she has developed for when road travel seems dull in the back seat. Even when she doesn’t have the phone, she peers through the windshield with her “condor eyes” and announces cars and trucks that she sees through the trees or up around the corner. She may be preparing for a life in car racing or it is just part of the campervan experience, that of adopting new roles in small spaces.
We often get the question of how we homeschool Elisa and Lucia. Despite the hours spent with a bag of learning tools-reading and writing for the older sister, colors and shapes for the little-over the last four months we have realized that we are teaching more than the alphabet and numbers. In fact, overland travel provides innumerable lessons for little girls. How to navigate a map, albeit a digital map, is a useful skill. Spotting on the map the border between Colombia and Ecuador or Ecuador and Peru and then getting to cross that border is yet another way she learns how the world is organized.
There is more. Knowing the difference between 3000 meters and 1000 meters above sea level is crucial for understanding heat and cold, altitude and our atmosphere. As a parent you hope to see this knowledge translated into action. We went on a day hike up to 5000 meters; Elisa got herself ready, packed a warm hat and gloves, and with a little parental nudging, wore the right pants and shoes. The natural world is the classroom. Just being able to see so many glaciers-Peru has 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers-leaves in her mind the moraine of experience. Because in 20 years when most of that ice has disappeared, the experience of crossing the Peruvian Andes will remain.
And then there are the language skills. We joined a family from California for climbing, and when it was time for three-year-old Lucia to tell the story of how a monkey bit her hand in the Amazon, it was up to Elisa to interpret for her little sister, from a three-year-old’s Spanish to a five-year-old’s English. And the story doesn’t end without Elisa also explaining how the capuchin monkey holds a significant advantage over other Amazon monkeys, in that the capuchin can move individual fingers, enabling it to use rocks to break open fruit and nuts.
“The capuchino monkeys” as they are known in Spanish, “could even play the flute, and the Spider monkey has a really strong tail.” Another lesson learned through travel.
Though animal behavior may seem a niche compartment of information, these ideas are in fact bringing disparate topics together in the mind of a five-year-old and hopefully planting the seeds of animal science: a preliminary understanding of very basic evolutionary biology and the keys to understanding our own behavior. The best thing about travel is the chance to learn these lessons in real life instead of channel surfing Nat Geo or the Animal Planet. Kindergarten has never been so fun!
The same thing happened with the Humpback whales, how they migrate around the globe, and meet in Ecuador to birth and mate. Or the day spent roasting and grinding cacao beans, mixing with raw sugar, and making choco-balls. And there are the tombs of the Mochica, or playing instruments in Putumayo, seeing a refugee crisis (Venezuela) first hand, the list goes on… Elisa is convinced she can learn German (just like papa), and after that learn Quechua, and if there’s time, learn French and then how to properly cook Peruvian food, especially the desserts. One morning Lucia asked me in Quechua how I was doing. Alli lacu papa? I realized if I greeted the people in their local language, she would too.
Out here on the road, we watch their curiosity grow each time we cross a border or enter a new city, and as parents our job is to support and stimulate this curiosity. One thing I realize is that every child is brought up and educated according to his or her parents’ means and desires, whether its elementary school, home school, or van school. With this in mind, this post responds to those who judge parents and question this lifestyle choice for being too selfish, selfish for denying children the standard education. Standard education systems teach kids to avoid mistakes, and then when they make mistakes, teachers punish children with bad grades, a perverse form of shaming. Education needs to be about developing trust to try new things, learn, and try again. From the perspective of somebody with a standard education, the act of traveling significantly enhances everything my daughters will ever learn in a book or on a blackboard, but first they have to survive the roads.
