Darwin and the Adventure Day 3 (Pictures)

As promised, here are some pictures from last Saturday. We are back in business now, held our last day of the event and will spend tomorrow collecting all of our thoughts. In my view it was a tremendous success. Our link up to the International Space Station worked and the children got to ask their questions in English to Mike Barrett. They were so nervous and excited. It was absolutely adorable! Afterwards, Karen and I extracted DNA out of another students saltwater mouth rinse using dish soap and their local spirit, Cuchaca – distilled form sugar cane. It was amazing how much impact we made on the students here. This will be for another blog post soon, but I wanted to relay how exciting it was for them, but also for Karen and I!

In short we managed to facilitate of network of South American researchers who are interested in using tall ships as a scientific and educational endeavour, set up and operate a small molecular lab on board the sailing vessel, contribute to a potent local campaign with the Tocorimé, impact the lives ~60 kids locally, connect a multibillion dollar International Space Station to a rural coastal brazilian town through 50 meter telephone line out of a rusted connection at a bar across the cobblestone and mud street, advise local teachers on how to seek funding and collaborations for scientific supplies and projects with their K-12 classes and contributed heavily to the local economy (I don’t want to know what our bar tabs were!). I can’t wait to write up each blog post in greater detail.

Here is a slideshow from Saturday’s photos. Enjoy!