Links & Photos - Writing Contest - 2004-2005 winners

First Place - Poem Category: $75
Title: "A Tango through the City of Buenos Aires"
Student: Katherine Dagenhart
Program: Winter 2005 Argentina

On my walk home from class today I passed through Trabant, partly to escape the chilly gusts of an uncannily cool Delaware March and partly to grab a late afternoon snack. Although I had returned from Peru over a month ago, adjustment came slowly and days like this stimulated warm memories of the tropical clime. Falling into stride with the mass of students making their way between classes, I flowed along to the food court before breaking free from the current. A taco craving had clutched my stomach moments before, but I was disappointed to find a long line standing between me and the Taco Bell Express. I settled for a healthy alternative, picking up an apple juice, paying my $1.25, stuffing the bottle in my book bag, and continuing homeward.

Back home at my desk I sipped my juice and checked my email. It was a busy day for the inbox, and messages from my parents in Reading, PA, my cousin in Italy, a geography professor in London, and my sister in New Zealand awaited reading. About halfway through the message from the geography professor, the bottle ran dry. Before tossing it into the recycling bin, I took a quick look at the nutrition facts, fifty six grams of carbohydrates, fifty two from sugars. Sugar water, not an earth shatteringly surprising revelation. But a bit of information to the right of the nutrition facts grabbed my attention.

The terse sentence, printed in tiny boldfaced font, read, "Contains apple juice concentrate from the U.S.A., Argentina, Austria, Chile, China, Germany and Turkey." Shocking. Concentrate from seven countries, made of apples from who knows how many others, brought together into a small 15.2 oz. plastic bottle. Troubled and having difficulty actually visualizing the origins of my beverage geographically, I turned to the National Geographic map of The World hung on my wall to the left of my desk. Thousands of miles spread between the various sources of concentrate and the Coca Cola bottling plant in Atlanta, GA.

Wide-eyed with awe I stared at the paper map, picturing apples flying, boating, training, and trucking their way around the globe, ultimately landing in the bottle which laid empty in the palm of my hand. I laughed softly to myself as I realized that the apples I had just drank had undoubtedly traveled many thousands more miles than I ever had, or likely ever would. Until this past winter I had yet to leave the country. Two days into 2005 I disembarked on a month-long UD study abroad trip, three weeks of which were spent at a remote jungle lodge in the Amazon Basin of northeastern Peru. Strangely enough, Minute Maid had not yet established a market for apple juice there.

The trip took us far into the tropical rainforest, a landscape evincing a stark contrast to any that I had experienced before. Immersing ourselves in the refreshingly unique environment, my classmates and I spent our time walking, hiking, canoeing, climbing, and playing hard. And each morning, afternoon, and evening, we sat down in the lodge to one of the most pleasing aspects of the trip, the food, expertly prepared by our skilled and charismatic cook, Panchito. Most invigorating of all was the juice.

Papaya, star fruit, mango, guava, and cashew juices appeared with our food each day. The juice was tantalizingly fresh, thick with pulp and even small pieces of fruit, and served at room temperature, quite warm in the tropics. No indication of processing, purifying, pasteurizing, pressurizing, or bottling, presented itself. The juice tasted natural and raw.

All of the food we ate at the lodge was grown and prepared locally, brought in on a small boat once or twice a week. In the context of this discussion the term local deserves further clarification. The lodge was situated approximately one hundred and fifty miles up the Amazon and Tahauyo Rivers from Iquitos, a small jungle city accessible only by plane or boat. The food we ate was bought at small markets in Iquitos and the small villages along the way; the fruits, which were squeezed into our juices, were no exception.

Unlike the world traveler apples that went into my bottle of Minute Made, the Amazon fruits that composed my juices at the lodge traveled very little. A pin prick on the map of The World would mark a distance twenty to thirty times greater than any trekked by the fruit I ate this winter. Everyone who drank the juices knew where they came from, within a fifty to one hundred mile range of error. And yet, I wonder how many people know where their Minute Maid originates.

During my stay at the lodge, I met with Dave Meyer, president of The Rainforest Conservation Fund, a small conservation organization based in Chicago. He visited the lodge for a few days to check up on a recent agroforestry project and one evening my classmates and I approached him with some questions. Over a pitcher of fresh orange juice, we sparked a discussion that rolled on well past midnight. Near the beginning of our talk, Dave explained that the primary goal of the RCF is the preservation of pristine rainforest habitat for future generations. This goal, one held by many similar organizations, can have very serious implications for the local residents, the very people who produced the juice we were drinking.

In the past, some reckless conservation organizations have simply forced residents off their land, justifying their actions by claiming that the residents were devastating the rainforest. Luckily, Meyer's organization has not been so dangerously imprudent. RCF projects encourage the people living on preserved land to incorporate ecologically friendly economic alternatives into their lifestyles. The promotion of such projects dispels the far too popularly held myth that residents of preserved land are the enemy, slashing and burning their way through large swaths of unspoiled rainforest habitat.

It is this very myth that blame for deforestation should fall exclusively on "those damn South American slash and burn farmers" that has deluded so many consumers in the developed world, distracting them from their own contribution to the problem. Were the average American consumer to look into the palm of his or her own hand and find, for example, a 15.2 ounce bottle of apple juice, a staggering barrage of questions ought to enter his or her mind. Where does this juice come from? Who produced it? Under what conditions was it produced? How did it get here and at what cost to the environment? The questions are powerful.

Once, many years ago, a small, brown-haired, brown-eyed little girl sat at her dining room table, listening with rapt attention as her father told her about Italy, the far away place he had just been to for business. Her eyes grew wide with wonder at his enthusiastic descriptions, and when she told him she wanted to go, her father promised her that someday, she would. She never forgot this promise, and going to Italy became her dream. As she got older, she kept her dream alive by looking at book after colorful book of Italy, and researching this beautiful country online. No matter what, she would get there; this dream was too big and powerful to be quenched simply by books and online research. She wanted to be there, to see Italy with her own eyes, and to stand there on her own feet.

Now, at twenty years old, she sits on her bed in her hotel room in Rome, Italy, the night before she is leaving to go home. Her roommate, as well as good friend, sits on her own bed, and the two girls are silent. The only sounds that can be heard are their pens gently scratching against the pages of their journals; journals which have been faithfully kept since the beginning of their one month stay in Italy. As the brown-eyed, brown-haired young woman writes, she reflects on her trip, and everything she learned from it.

One month before, she had finally arrived. She was actually living the dream she formed so many years ago as a little girl sitting at her dining room table. When she first arrived in Italy, she had no idea that the boy sitting in the seat behind her onthe plane would become one of her good friends on the trip. She did not know that she would be traveling to Venice on her free weekend, along with nine other close friends whom she did not know she would make. She did not know that she would have the joy of discovering Nutella in Italy, and that she would enjoy this sinfully delicious chocolate spread every morning for breakfast. She did not know what anything would be like, but that was the beauty of it. Discovering all the cities, eating the panninis in the internet café in Siena, looking forward to the Baci chocolates left by her bed after the maid had cleaned the room; these are just some of the many surprises and gifts this trip had to offer her. She met wonderful people, tasted magnificent food at restaurants like Il Biondo and Il Salotto, and experienced what it is like to live in a foreign country and speak the language for a month. She saw fabulous sights, went running in Siena's beautiful park, and saw a soccer game from her balcony in the Jolly Hotel. She helped to cook an American breakfast (with REAL scrambled eggs!) in "La Casa di Guglielmo" with her classmates. There are a million more incredible things she did and experienced, and she is so grateful for it all. Being in Italy further sparked her desire to visit the rest of Europe. She wants to discover little cafes in Paris, and to see the windmills in Holland, and to climb a mountain in Switzerland. She wants to see and do it all. She hopes, from the bottom of her heart, that this trip was just the first of many to open up her eyes and give her the types of gifts that can never be bought; the gift of discovery, the gift of awe, the gift of appreciation, the gift of wonder, the gift of seeing with her own eyes, slowly, but surely, the rest of this beautiful world, this truly wonderful gift to us from God.