Sydney Wuu

Dartmouth's Environmental Studies Foreign Study Program: Part 1

This fall, I wasn't in Hanover… I was over 7,000 miles away! I had the opportunity to study abroad for the second time and join a cohort of 16 students and three Dartmouth professors on the Environmental Studies Foreign Study Program (ENVS FSP) in South Africa and Namibia. My peers brought a wide range of academic backgrounds, from botanists and soil scientists to aspiring policymakers and environmental lawyers. 

Unique to the ENVS FSP, we took three courses but only focused on one at a time for three-week single-course increments. For this blog, I will reflect on the first course, ENVS 40 (Synthesizing Empirical and Theoretical Approaches to Community-Based Natural Resource Management), taught by Professor Doug Bolger.

After over 24 hours of traveling, I arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa in mid-September, where a representative from EDU Africa greeted us all with a Dartmouth flag. We then boarded a van to Soweto, a nearby township and acronym for "South West Township," and settled into our backpacker's accommodation. During this first week, we soaked up the social history of the new environment while touring famous sites like the Apartheid Museum, Mandela House, and Cullinan Mine.

While the first few days of our FSP were in South Africa, the rest took place in Namibia, one of the world's driest and least densely populated countries. In this beautiful nation, we watched cheetahs race for food at the Cheetah Conservation Fund, marveled at the magnificent wildlife at Etosha National Park, combed through camera trap data at Ongava Research Center, and helped build a community garden at the Uibasen-Twyfelfontein Conservancy. I also checked off some personal bucket list items like trying game meat (zebra, kudu, oryx) for the first time and camping for 17 days in a row!

One of my favorite parts of ENVS 40 was the game drives. I will never forget the thrill of riding in the open-air vehicles—how the wind rushed through our hair as we peered through our binoculars at zebras, elephants, giraffes, oryx (Namibia's national animal), rhinos, and more spectacular wildlife during sunset. It was liberating to cruise through the landscape, far from the hustle and bustle of city life, and feel so close to our planet Earth.

A huge component of the study abroad program was fully immersing ourselves in the rigorous camping experience. Every few days during ENVS 40, we packed up and pitched our tents at new campsites across Namibia. We rotated chore duties in three groups so we could take turns cooking food, washing dishes, and cleaning up the truck before our next adventure. 

Stripped from a steady WiFi connection, I was pushed out of my Dartmouth comfort zone as I wrote papers in my tent and learned to decompress without technology. However, through the initial discomfort, I grew more through ENVS 40 than in any course on campus. The learning never stopped as we spoke to local stakeholders about the politics of global conservation non-profits, trophy hunting, and human-wildlife conflict, all topics that fall under the umbrella of community-based natural resource management. In our writing, we practiced integrating the empirical (our own observations) and the theoretical (concepts from academic literature), a useful skill I will carry back with me to Dartmouth and beyond.

I hope this gave you a peek into what it's like to study abroad on one of Dartmouth's many off-campus programs and can't wait to update you all about the next three weeks of my adventure in Southern Africa: ENVS 42!