As I write this post at 5:30 in the morning, our ninth-grade and four EAB faculty members are boarding a plane to Manaus and the Amazon rainforest. Their journey is the realization of a dream that began in 2019.

The original idea was to create a cross-curricular unit to explore the role of the Amazon rainforest through the lens of climate change. The culmination of the study would be a trip to the rainforest to investigate first-hand how the Amazon affects climate and how climate change affects the Amazon. Our first step was to team with RELP Tourism to build an adventure that allowed students to not only experience the grandeur of the river and rainforest but also to provide them an opportunity to interact with the people living and working in the Amazon.

It has been a much longer, harder journey than those of us in the initial meetings would have predicted six years ago. The post-pandemic reality slowed progress dramatically, and there were questions as to whether the vision we had before COVID-19 would ever happen. We needed to find someone to make the trip their own. As luck would have it, we found two.

EAB’s Sustainability Coordinator, Beto Miyamoto (center left), and IB Biology teacher, Ana Luisa Cazetta (center right), accepted the responsibility of making our dream of the Amazon a reality and created EAB’s Climate Connect program. The high school’s social-emotional counselor, Camilla Alvarenga (left), and grade 9 math teacher, Morgan Burton (right), round out the group traveling this week.

The purpose of Climate Connect is to have all grade nine students engage in “hands-on scientific research and conservation efforts, empowering them to become informed global citizens equipped to make a positive difference in their world.” To achieve this lofty goal, the kids created original research questions to investigate while in the Amazon.

While they will see unimaginable beauty, swim in the dark waters of the Rio Negro, and live an adventure most can only dream of, the real work over the coming week will be for EAB students to speak and learn with scientists protecting the rainforest, live with villagers living with the effects of climate change every day, and search for answers to the questions they have posed.

A few weeks ago, I was fortunate to travel with RELP guides for a site visit. Though it was not my first time in the Amazon, I found my breath taken away again and again. The river and the rainforest simply never get old. I am convinced that the students and faculty will have a life-changing adventure this week, and their learning will make the world a better place.

This experience has reinforced a few simple lessons: there is tremendous power in giving ownership to one’s team, dreams can come true, but sometimes it takes much longer than we think, and when a dream is finally realized, it quite often leads to another dream.

One of the more colorful people I met on the trip was the leader of a village on the edge of the Rio Negro who came from a long line of loggers but quit that business to focus on conservation and saving the trees he used to cut down. He has become a bit of a celebrity and after a Brazilian news organization shared his story with the country, he was invited on a trip to the south of Chile and the San Rafael Glacier to see how climate change is affecting the coldest regions of the world. With a smile, he told me that we have to take our students there so they can witness the reality of climate change from another perspective.

So, before the first Climate Connect got underway, the dream of Climate Connect Two and a grade 10 trip to the glaciers in 2026 was born.

Chile, here we come.