Welcome to the Jungle

Chances are you squandered your summer dissecting frogs in the name of medical science. Or maybe you were an aide to an aide of the undersecretary of transportation in D.C. Or if you were really lucky, you stayed here in Cambridge and fulfilled your biochem requirement.

Sure, you could have fallen victim to the boring routine that characterizes the summers of most Harvard students. But some resourceful upperclass students escaped the Ivory Tower to frolic with poisionous sea serpents and to schmooze with llama-eaters.

Amber L. Keasey '94 just wanted to do a little thesis research during the summer. Examining and recording the mating habits of fish in the Great Barrier Reef seemed a safe enough project, but little did she know it would be hazardous to her health.

During one of her routine dives off the coast of Heron Island, Australia, Keasy encountered more than she had reckoned with. As she filmed her underwater subjects, a four-foot, olive-green sea snake wrapped around her ankles, coiled around her torso and slithered over her shoulder.

"This is a snake that can kill you in six seconds," Keasey says. "I kept thinking `please don't bite me, please don't bite me."

Luckily, Keasey's research assistant was able to free her from the reptile's clutches. And when Keasey met the same snake on later dives, she even named her Claudia.

After receiving grant money from several research groups Keasey spent 28 days diving off a five square-mile island and filming the reproductive customs of the clown fish for research on her biology thesis. Keasy lived in cabins along with other biological researchers and dove three times daily with an assistant.

These fish are extremely interesting, says Keasey, because in the final phases of their lives they change from male to female.

"It's pretty rare in nature for the female to be the final state," says Keasey. "That's why I decided to study them."

While Keasey was surrounded by 12 foot-tiger sharks, water turtles and mantarays in the deep waters of Australia, Arthur P. White '94 braved the forests of central Africa among lions, leopards and crocodiles.

White spent six weeks of the summer conducting geochemical and geophysical surveys on the western border of Tanzania for a geological firm.

White, who lived in an aluminum shack, says he was lucky to have water and electricity in a village where all the native inhabitants live in mud huts.

White says he walked daily around the bush with a magnetometer on his chest and an eight-foot aluminum pole in his hand and took photo samples of the ground which he then examined in the village.

"I was actually applying school maps to study rocks," says White who is a geology concentrator. "Being out in the middle of nowhere with no one in sight...it was pretty exciting."

Bliss M. Dake '94 was walking in the street in San Francisco one day this summer with Lavista, one of the youths he was worked with, and encountered a number of local gangs.

"I was pretty paranoid and scared, but she knew them...so I felt better." he says, "She feared nothing...she was really tough."

Dake spent the summer in the Mission District of San Francisco working for a non-profit organization which helps youths stay off the streets by providing them with jobs and activities.

"A lot of them [the youths] had been in gangs," Dake says. "Lavista was the leader of an all-women's gang [which] raped men, robbed, killed, sold and did drugs."

Dake, who eventually helped Lavista apply to a local college, says working for the organization was an eye-opening experience.

"I was really naive," he says. "I thought I knew what was going on...I was surprised."

Dake says the program is a very important system to teach youths skills they can use in the workplace such as computer literacy, autoshop and other clerical tasks.

"There's a great need for people to do this service," Dake says. "Anything helps."

During the early days of the ArabIsraeli peace accord, Christopher P. Glew '96 was up to his elbows in dirt--very old dirt.

Weekdays, Glew says he helped to excavate a tel, a mound in which newer cities have covered older cities for centuries.

He strolled the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv on weekends. Israel, both old and knew, says Glew is an experience not to be forgotten.

While sifting through the earth which covers the Tel Beth Shemesh, Glew says he helped to uncover one of the oldest cisterns in Israel and a gate which dates back to the time of Solomon.

Although he says digging on his allotted square was "grunt work," Glew says he was fascinated to be part of a blend of the old and the new.

On the site he worked among ancient ruins. In the streets of Jerusalem and on the kibbutz where he lived, he saw signs of a new peace.

"Most of the people I talked with were kibbutzniks," Glew says, "They were excited but skeptical about peace."

In Jerusalem, Glew says he was surprised by the strong military presence.

"I saw a lot of guns," he says. "It's not uncommon to have a tour guide who carries a gun."

Many Harvard students went home for the summer, but few had as memorable a homecoming as did Jamian Lai '96.

Lai travelled to his ancestral village in Quon Dong, China to see the home his family fled at the onset of the Japanese invasion during World War I.

"My grandfather worked for the Chinese government," Lai explains. "Had [the Japanese] found out they would have killed the whole family."

Lai says his family had no choice but to escape on foot to Hong Kong.

When he returned to his village Lai says he was surprised to find clans in which the entire population share the same last name.

"There is an old Chinese custom that the wives have to go and live with the husbands--everyone has the same last name," Lai says.

Lai spoke with members of the Wong clan who told him they remembered his grandfather from the days before the war.

The clan members told him of the cruel treatment Chinese villagers received during the Japanese invasion.

"It was pretty brutal," Lai says. "They took people out and chopped off their heads.

When most people think of a llama, they picture a large furry animal--sort of a cross between a horse and a camel.

But to Clare A. Sammells '95 llamas now mean much more.

Sammells spent her summer in La Paz, Bolivia, where she researched middle-class attitudes towards eating llama meat.

The llama, which is native to South America, Sammells says, is a far more ecologically sound form of meat than beef or mutton.

Still, Sammells says, most Bolivians are loathe to eat llama although she knows from experience that it can be tasty.

"I've had it and it tastes just like beef," Sammells says.