We shall not cease from exploration. And the point of all our exploring Will be to return to where we started And know the place for the first time.

This poetic verse, from T. S. Eliot's Little Gidding, has served as a theme for my entire academic life.  I have pursued my education both in and out of the classroom with a sense of exploration.  It is difficult to say where this desire for exploration began.  Perhaps it was during my childhood growing up in southern Florida near the Everglades, and trekking through the rainforests and swamps with my Seminole Indian and African-American friends.  Or perhaps it was later, when I read accounts of people living in faraway places in various magazines.  In any case, this wanderlust for exploring new places and new knowledge, both in textbooks and the real world, has served as an important motivation for what little success I have attained.

I am frequently asked by undergraduate students for advice as to the most important component of an undergraduate education: I invariably answer that it is exploration.  Nothing enlightens the mind or enriches one's life more completely than exploring worlds other than one's own. Certainly every person will benefit from college training that will provide the basic and advanced technical skills necessary to function in the modern technological world.  This provides a basic training. But one's education, in contrast, involves, among other things, learning about other peoples and other societies, their values, their needs, their concerns, their conditions, their environments, and ultimately how we may develop friendships with them.

There is no question that we are all products of our circumstances, and what we achieve in this society is based in large measure to the advantages that we have while growing up and the ability to turn even the most difficult circumstances into advantages.  For example, growing up in the late 50s and 60s in rural South Florida, my fellow African Americans and Native Americans were not permitted to swim along with white children in the public swimming pools.  We, therefore, had to resort to recreational activities in the swamps and canals, which were abundant with wildlife. This required us to be taught as children to identify the local flora and fauna by our elders.  This experience stimulated in me an interest in biology and biodiversity. This is a way in which one can turn a negative situation into a positive one.

Twenty years later, I am on the staff of the biology department at Harvard University.  During the summers, I spend my time in research and study at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory with my mentor and good friend, Professor John Dowling.  I enjoy our work in neurobiology tremendously, but I am constantly hounded by the urge to get out of the laboratory and explore more of the world.  So I set out for Brazil.  I wanted to visit areas where there are large numbers of African-descended people who were brought to this hemisphere as captives by European enslavers. It was in Brazil that my questions about the preservation of African traditions led me to a country on its northernmost border, Suriname, formerly Dutch Guiana. 

My desire for adventure and exploration took me to the deep interior of the Suriname rainforest in the 70s and even today.  There is not a purer group of Africans in this hemisphere than those who belong to the tribes living along the rivers of the Suriname interior.  In fact, Suriname was known as one of the most brutal centers of European parasitic enslavement, since it was reputed to work to death a "compliment of slaves" about every five years. 

In reaching the people of the rainforest interior, I had to travel by dugout canoe for many miles.  Many of the rivers were blocked by waterfalls, which meant taking the canoe out of the water and across land until one could reach the next part of the river.  The native villages are built at the heads of the rapids, so that they can spot intruders and attack them during portage.  It was near one of these villages that I first spotted human movement on a large rock in the river, just before the village.  As I paddled toward the person, I realized it was a small child of about age six or seven, standing on a rock washing her moongas, shiny silver anklet rings that are worn in large numbers on both legs. Once she spotted me approaching, she leapt into her canoe, and paddled furiously toward the bank. Once we reached the bank, she bounded from the canoe and fled into the rainforest yelling something akin to the word, "outsider."  Before I could reach the bank, a group of men and women clad only in loincloths, some with machetes, others armed with sticks and every kind of projectile had run to the shore to investigate the intrusion.  There were large palm fronds (azangpaus) strung around the village to protect it from evil and to cleanse any evil person who entered the village.  From the river, you could see that every structure in the village was a grass hut, which served as home for the villagers.  I tried to explain that I was a friend, who was visiting the rainforest interior to conduct studies on medicinal plants in the area, as well as on the history of the people there.  Since the people spoke no English, but something called "Sranan tongue," a combination of Dutch, French, Portuguese, Spanish, English, and several African languages, I was at a loss to communicate clearly.  In a short time, however, a translator I had earlier hired and brought to the interior with me arrived to offer his assistance.  When I explained to them that I too was a person of African descent, but that I lived in a northern land quite different from their own; and one in which the Black people lived with, and very much like, the European-descended Americans, they expressed great curiosity.

Perhaps nothing dramatizes the connection to old African culture as much as the traditional plant medicines that I later came to know in the village.  After being welcomed to the village, and getting to know a number of the men and women, I began to record my day-to-day experiences. Of particular interest to me was a plant I observed being administered to a woman who was having a difficult pregnancy.  She was said by the Obeah women to be "carrying a rat."  In one ritual, they took the woman into the deeper rainforest, and many of the village women spat upon her stomach, and rubbed the saliva into her skin, as the woman lay in sweaty convulsions.  At one moment, all the women surrounding the pregnant woman jumped and screamed as if they had beheld a monster.  They claimed to have seen a rat leave her body.  While I could not see any such thing, I was later told by a medicine man that this was an important ritual, and that the woman had delivered a stillborn child some time later. 

I was later escorted by one of the Obeah women to the plant that she used in treating the sick woman.  We identified this plant as Tephrosia toxicaria, and it had no immediate significance in Western literature beyond its toxic nature.  However, some years later, I came across an unusual book entitled Insectorium Surinamenseus, written by Miriam Sybilla Miriam, a prominent seventeenth century female scientist.  In her beautifully illustrated book on the flora and fauna of Suriname, she had an entry on January 22, 1700, that contained a drawing of Tephrosia toxicaria .  Beneath the drawing Miriam Sybilla Miriam wrote, "This plant Flos pavonis was got by me in the rainforest interior of Suriname.  It is used there by the African women who come mainly from Guinea and Angola, to induce abortions."  They, like the Indian women of the area, do not wish to bear children forced on them by their slavers, so they use this plant to abort the slavers' children. The African women also use the seeds of this plant to commit suicide, so that their bodies will die here in slavery, while their souls return to Africa, as they have told me themselves."

I visited the rainforest interior of Suriname numerous times over the next decade.  Each time, I came to know other African-descended people in the area, and gained in my understanding and appreciation of the African culture that they had preserved in the Western Hemisphere.  They had heard almost nothing about their African-American brothers in the United States, and appeared quite well-adjusted to their "new Africa" in the Americas that had no European Americans.  Their proud and dignified existence answers the important question of what Black Americans might be like today, if they had been able to escape slavery and establish a new homeland in some part of the United States; and held a 100-year guerrilla war, as these people did, to protect their new homeland.

In 1997, I returned to the deep interior rainforest of Suriname, South America, for the first time in 17 years.  I witnessed the widespread devastation of the rainforest from the air.  It was no longer the pristine natural environment that I had once known and come to love in the 70s.  Much of the land had been stripped by large gold mining operations and there were thousands of informal and illegal gold miners from Brazil called garimpeiros.

As I walked through the village, which I had not seen in over 25 years, I could see many signs of change, and not all for the better.  Much of the foliage around the previously verdant village had been cut down.  Some of the grass huts had been replaced by wooden or brick buildings.  Some of the yards had been fenced in, in areas where families had previously known no boundaries and shared everything with their neighbors.  The most striking difference that I noticed the moment I entered the village was the number of young men whom I had known as boys, who smiled at me with brilliant gold teeth.  Many of the men were working with the garimpeiros, and had also learned the art of gold panning.  This was in stark contrast to their parents and grandparents whom I had known in my first visit to the area in 1972, who, like the neighboring indigenous Amer-Indians, would not touch gold, because, they said, "it is evil, it drives white men crazy."  When I reached the chief's home, Granman Gazon greeted me like a long lost son whom he had not seen for 25 years.  He welcomed me back to his village and held a krutu, or assembly of elders, in my honor. I was also overjoyed to see my old friend Pompey, with whom I had hunted and trekked through the jungles some 25 years ago.  In fact, I had taken actor LeVar Burton to this jungle village in 1978, immediately following his success in the starring role of the television classic Roots, and it had been Pompey who led our expedition deep into the rainforests

Chief Gazon's initial good cheer rapidly faded to sadness as he told me of the decline of mores in his village.  The young boys, he claimed, had been lured away from the village by the gold miners, and as a result, lost respect for their elders and abandoned many of their tribal rituals.  The young women of the village had also changed, he said, as a result of being spoiled by the money brought in from the gold.  Many, he said, had contacted unknown diseases brought in by the gold prospectors.  In some cases, family feuds had developed over the gold that brought previously harmonious families into violent conflict.  The infants and children were also showing signs of illness that could not be cured by the medicine men, and his good friends in the neighboring Indian villages were complaining about similar diseases and medical problems.  The granman pointed out that the gold mining operations were destroying not only his people, but were killing the sacred rainforest that had given them sustenance and protected them even since the days of being chased by enslavers in the 1700s.

Sometimes, in the course of exploration, you will encounter situations that will test your mettle, your courage, and your compassion, and ultimately, teach you a lot about yourself.   Some years ago, while exploring the Andes Mountains, I came across two enclaves of African-descended people. Some lived as high as 12,000 feet (2,900m) in the Andes, in the village of Chota, while other African-descended people lived at the base of the Andes, in the lush green rainforests in a village called Pichiyacu de los Negros, or 'Little River Village of the Blacks.'  It was one day while visiting the latter village that I observed the children in the all-Black one-room Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) Elementary School sitting on the ground during their lessons.  There was no electricity in the school, or the entire village for that matter, only a truck battery to which the teacher hooked a radio and tape player to provide some music for the class.  After observing the teacher conduct classes for several days with a very attentive group of students, who had no books or pencils, I had the opportunity to come to know the teacher, Sra. Nuz-Cevallos, an Afro-Spaniard who had come to the rainforest interior without salary to teach the underprivileged Black children of the area.  Before my departure, Sra. Cevallos asked me a simple question: "Could you help me get some benches for the schoolchildren so that they will not have to sit on the ground?"  While on the surface this seemed like a simple question, it posed great challenges.  First of all, I had no school benches or any access to them.  And, I thought, even if I could get desks from the outside, how could I get them to Ecuador?   But, in my heart, I had developed a deep sense of sympathy and compassion toward those poor Black children.

I returned to the United States and contacted members of the Massachusetts School Department.  I appealed to the department to provide me 25 used school desks that I could ship to the schoolchildren on my next trip to Ecuador.  Several very kind people at the school department agreed that this was a worthy cause, and provided me with 25 used school desks. I took them to a local computer company, where my research assistant Tony Jacobs and I boxed each desk for shipping.   I then approached a U.S. Airforce group at Massachusetts Westover Air Force Base, and asked them if they could fly the desks to Ecuador along with some supplies that they were shipping for Project Change, a medical group.  The Air Force agreed and the boxes and desks were shipped to Quito, Ecuador.  When I arrived in Quito, I told officers in charge of the Ecuadorean military airline the story of the schoolchildren sitting on the ground in the schoolhouse on the Cayapas River, and appealed to them to assist me in flying the desks over the mountains to a nearby airbase.  The sympathetic officers agreed and flew the desks about the distance of New York to Boston.  When the desks were unloaded, I rented a truck stacked the boxes on the bed of the truck, and drove for five hours until I reached a dead end at the river.  I then found two extra-long canoes, in which I tied each box containing a schooldesk, and with the help of some villagers, paddled the desks upriver.  After a two-day trip, stopping over once at night to avoid the dangers of the river, I delivered the 25 school desks to the Cristobal Colon School in Pichiyacu de los Negros.  With the help of proud parents, we reassembled the desks and for the first time ever, the African-American-Ecuadorean children had decent schooldesks in which they could sit comfortably and learn.  I had also brought about 100 children's books written in Spanish.  The most popular of those books was read to the class by the teacher, Sra. Cevallos.  It was the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement.

As I left the school on the first day, I observed that the children had refused to leave their desks, even at the teachers' urging.  When I inquired of the teachers why the children were reluctant to leave school, she replied, "They are afraid that you will take the desks back."

Allen Counter, Ph.D., D.M.Sc is a professor of neuroscience at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.