Debbie Brawn steps out of a commuter bus and onto a floating dock swaying with the current of the muddy waters below. She stops, closes her eyes and inhales deep, savoring the air of the Amazon basin, pure and pristine, tinged by the aroma of ripe fruit and rich and damp earth. 

“I’m home,” she says to no one in particular as students ramble past her, their bulging suitcases click-clacking against the dock‘s wooden slats as they board the Iracema, the three-story wood-paneled riverboat that will serve as the study tour’s floating home for the next nine days.

It is Brawn, the administrative director of the University Honors Program, who first dreamt up the idea of bringing students to the Amazon after visiting the area in 2007 as part of a study trip led by tropical ecology expert Cindy Howard, a biology and environmental sciences professor at the University of Houston-Clear Lake. The experience proved so transformative for the ardent nature lover and sustainability advocate that she returned with Howard again in 2009.  

“This experience profoundly changed me,” Brawn said, “The Amazon is the most mystical and enchanting place I’ve ever seen.  Going on that trip better informed my perspective of who I am in this world, the choices I make and the impact those choices have. I knew I wanted it to be an honors seminar class.”

That hope became reality when UC launched its first study tour to the Amazon in 2012 as part of a partnership between the University Honors Program and the Environmental Studies program in the McMicken College of Arts and Sciences. The experience has since become a biennial one, offered again in 2014 and 2016 to a waiting list of students. 

Joining the tour as the lead faculty member proved an easy sell for Jodi Shann, a biology professor and Environmental Studies program director. Shann, whose more than 25 years of research centers on the cleanup of highly contaminated locations designated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as Superfund sites, knew that what would keep students most invested in the imperiled fate of the Amazon would be to experience it firsthand.

“Students definitely do better in classes where they have an active learning component in which they have to participate in what they’re learning.  This just takes that to the extreme,” Shann said. 

“These are the same students who performed very well on their tests and classroom projects and discussion, but the reality of the trip puts them into an environment that they thought they knew,” she added. “They discover there’s a big difference between theoretically understanding something and really knowing.”

Aboard the Iracema that first night, students clamor on the uncovered top deck straining for a view of the immense river they’d been studying for the past two-and-a-half months in class. It’s after midnight and the waters are inky black, but even the darkness can’t obscure the sheer vastness of the river and the forest that lies beyond.

A student approaches Brawn, a look of wonder and amazement on his face as he struggles for words.  “I’m outside of myself right now,” he simply says.    

“That was all he could say,” said Brawn. “He was left fairly speechless upon arrival, to this place that he had dreamt about and tried to envision. And now he was there, in pure awe.”

Several nights later, the group gathers as the fast-setting sun casts a blood-orange halo above the horizon. They had discussed this in class, the scientific concept for the brevity of twilight in this place two degrees south of the equator. Still, there are audible gasps as the glowing moon rises quickly, shining on the black waters like a celestial mirror. 

“You have those moments where time stands still,” Shann later recalled. “They’re all watching the moon going up and you can feel this level of awe. They were all in that moment. You don’t get a lot of opportunities like that. Those moments can happen anywhere, but here, you have the potential for that much more than in many other places.”

And that’s what the Amazon study tour is all about, Brawn and Shann say.  There’s no cell phone signal here on these remote waters.  No internet. No television. Without the lure of electronic distractions or the hubbub of their daily modern lives, students are free to just be in the moment, to experience, more fully and expansively, this place of enigma, reflection and mystery.

“Students share with us that their lives are profoundly changed and that they are not the same after this experience,” said Brawn. “They have a newfound, deeply felt, transformed perspective on their lives and on the world.”  

For some, the liberation from a digital life allows them to focus more on their physical one: the chirrup of the birds singing, monkeys howling and the murmur of insects in a symphony nonpareil; the cloud of air that clings, hot and moist; the feel of the rough bark of ancient trees so tall they seem to touch the sky; how time seems to meld where river meets sky, and the overwhelming sense of wonder at being immersed in one of the world’s most important ecological treasures

For yet others, it’s the challenge of communicating in a new language and navigating interactions with people whose world views and experiences differ greatly from their own, and the cultural sharing with indigenous Brazilians, many of whom exude a carefree spirit despite the challenges of their lives.

Above all, Brawn and Shann say, it’s an experience that thrusts students outside the safe structure of a classroom, away from all that they know and identify with, and into a new and exotic environment that drives them to re-conceptualize their perceptions of themselves and the larger world in ways like never before.   

“Students share that they discover who they really are, once given the time and space to be ‘quiet’ and just ‘be,’” said Brawn.  “I think this type of experience, in particular, connects us to what it really means to be human in ways matched by few other opportunities and experiences in life.”