Zink

Africa Day The football field at Briarly Middle School was ablaze with color. One hundred forty sixth-graders, all in traditional African dress, were scattered in groups around the sun-dappled field. Beads danced brightly in the girls' braided hair, and the scary animal masks most of the boys wore seemed almost alive. Becky Zaslow sat cross-legged in the bleachers, just below a huge banner that read AFRICA DAY: SEPTEMBER 28. Her class was watching Mrs. Hudson, their language arts teacher, cook ugali, the Tanzanian national dish, and some spicy bean stew over an open fire in a pit dug into the field. Mrs. Hudson had been born and raised in Tanzania, in East Africa, and she'd explained that ugali--a stiff porridge made from ground corn and water--was eaten at almost every meal. The spicy stew came from a recipe her grandmother had taught her. Becky looked around the football field, where African games, arts and crafts, storytelling, and tribal medicine demonstrations were under way. Today was the grand finale of their first long study cycle, which had concentrated on Africa. Briarly was on the total immersion method. In math, Becky had used cutouts of African nations to study geometry. In music, she'd learned to sing Swahili songs and to play different African instruments. But her favorite thing had been working with Ms. Flinn, the art teacher, Mr. Izbecki, the science teacher, and Dr. Keino, an African ecologist from the state university to create a huge scale model of the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania. That model now covered the center of the football field. They'd fashioned grassy savanna plains from AstroTurf, carved baobab and acacia trees from wood, and painted aluminum foil brownish gray for the muddy Mara River. But the best part had been making the animals. They'd molded clay to create animals that were indigenous ("native to a country or climate"--the word had been on her last vocabulary test) and painted zebras, lions, warthogs, wildebeests, even a strange antelope called a dik-dik. Hundreds of species lived on the Serengeti, and the model had representatives of most of them. Before the sixth-graders had begun their work, Mr. Izbecki had shown a film about the Serengeti zebra migration. Thousands of herds of zebras instinctively followed a seven-hundred-mile route in search of grass and fresh water, only to end up nine months later right back where they'd started. All during the perilous journey, the plant-eating (herbivorous) zebras were stalked, attacked, and eaten by meat-eating (carnivorous) predators like lions and leopards. "The laws of nature seem brutal sometimes," Mrs. Hudson said with the tiniest trace of a Tanzanian accent as she stirred the stew. "I once saw a pride of lions eating a young zebra they'd just taken down. Hyenas waited to pick at the bones, and so many vultures circled overhead that they blotted out the sun." Becky shuddered and looked at the zebra herds on the scale model. They gleamed in the afternoon sun. "But the parts make a whole that works," Mrs. Hudson went on. "For example, the predators usually take down the weakest zebras, so the animals don't overpopulate and starve to death. Stronger zebras survive to reproduce, you see?" No, I don't see, Becky thought. Why should any zebras have to die? "So, while I cook, we'll review some things that will be on your exam tomorrow," Mrs. Hudson said. A few rows away from Becky, Brian Green made a face. A lot of kids didn't like Mrs. Hudson because she was strict and formal with her students. But Mrs. Hudson said her teachers in Tanzania had been the same way with her, and she always spoke of them with reverence. "Who can define migrate?" Mrs. Hudson asked. To pass from one region or climate to another for feeding or breeding, Becky thought, but her hand didn'tBennett, Cherie is the author of 'Zink', published 2001 under ISBN 9780440228103 and ISBN 0440228107.