International travel takes a lot of work and planning, even for a solo traveler. But for nearly 20 years a Sitka High School Spanish teacher has been taking a growing group of students, sometimes dozens, to Guatemala each spring. While the language immersion program has been a big hit, she says after this year she’s hanging up her hat.
Nearly 20 years ago, Sitka High School Spanish teacher Ariel Starbuck took her first couple of international trips with students – first to Costa Rica, then to Spain with a popular tour company and several other school groups. But she said something was missing.
“It was a beautiful trip, but it had a lot of components that I thought were missing from travel, like everything was really geared towards high school kids, so not a lot of cultural food, a lot of burgers and fries,” Starbuck said. “I felt like they didn’t really have to speak Spanish. They just spoke English all together.”
When she got back, her friend Davey Lubin and his family had just returned from a trip to Guatemala, and he was eager to tell her about a man they met, Rigoberto Zamora Charuc, who operates a traveling library in the country.
Lubin connected Starbuck with Rigoberto, and the next year she hopped on a plane with around 15 students, and some funds they raised to support his efforts to open a rural school. They had dinner and met his family, then they traveled on the library bus to northern Guatemala.
“Think of like, a 1985 Detroit school bus,” Starbuck said. “Shelves are lining the sides of the busses, and there are chess tables in the middle, so they’ve taken out a lot of the seats, and it’s just this big bus full of books. Every town you roll into the kids get so excited to see the library bus coming into town, because that’s kind of their only access to books. It’s really limited.”
The trip was a hit. It became an annual tradition for Starbuck’s Spanish students– one that gave a big boost in their language fluency.
“The kids live with families. They go to school for four hours in the morning, eight to noon, with a one-on-one Spanish teacher, which is awesome, and that just meets them wherever they are,” Starbuck said.
“It’s something I can’t recreate in the classroom, right?” she said. “I can’t give that individualized attention to each student for four hours a day, every day.”
Each afternoon, the students meet up and they venture out into the country- visiting bustling markets, women’s weaving cooperatives and coffee plantations. Every year they hike a volcano that’s a touch warmer than Mt. Edgecumbe.
“Sometimes they get to the top and they roast marshmallows over the lava. The very first year we went, we were able to poke sticks into the lava,” Starbuck said. “There were melted shoes all over the place.”
Traveling with teens internationally is not always easy- a lot of work goes into making sure the trips are safe and successful, and even still there have been some hairy moments, like the occasional injury and subsequent trip to the ER. One student choked on a steak at the airport and ended up having emergency surgery abroad. And once, a student mistakenly brought live ammunition in her bag.
“Guatemala does not take kindly to that,” she recalled. “And that was a big deal. The military had to come and [we] had to talk them down about letting her go back in the country.”
But the trips have generally gone smoothly, with the help of many volunteer chaperones over the years. Starbuck says the work has been worth the payoff. Students walk away from the experience with stronger language literacy, and a renewed appreciation of privileges taken for granted, like free education and access to books.
“Travel is amazing, and it really opens your eyes and broadens your perspective, and gives you faith that you didn’t know you had, maybe? It just provides so many things,” Starbuck said. “And I think that’s so cool to think that I can help kids see this bigger perspective, and that they can travel.”
This spring, Starbuck plans to lead her final trip with students- she’s taught for 21 years and plans to retire at 25. She has two kids in the Sitka School District, both with just a few years left before they leave the nest.
“I feel like this is going so fast, I don’t want to miss any of their time,” Starbuck said. “So I’m going to make this my last trip, so I can just be part of whatever they’re part of.”
The final trip to Guatemala is shaping up to be a big one- as of right now more than two-dozen students are planning to go next March. But Starbuck says there are more trips in her future. After she retires, she’s thinking about leading an adult Spanish class in Sitka that culminates in a similar international trip. No chaperones required.
