Internships Completed by Geology & Environmental Studies Majors Emma Kirwan (ENVS '06) Summer Internship: Food and Agriculture Organization in Kenya     Emma's summer of 2005 was spent on an internship with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in Kenya .  As an intern, her responsibility was to assist in developing a medium/long-term implementation plan for promoting community-based and supported school feeding programs (SFP) in Kenya .  Currently, school feeding programs are supported by the World Food Program (WFP) and foreign donors providing food aid to primary schools selected according to rates of poverty and malnutrition.  The FAO wished to take advantage of the good potential that existed for linking school feeding to local production and community development through Farmer Field Schools (FFS) and SFP.  This would ideally build self-sufficiency in local communities, increase agricultural production and food availability, boost the local economy, and improve child nutrition.  The FAO wished to conduct the first stakeholder/partner workshop on community-based and support school feeding programs as an initial effort towards developing partnerships and collaboration.  It was Emma's responsibility to organize key inputs for the workshop, including background documents, invitations, logistical arrangements, a power point presentation and post-workshop report.  Then, in collaboration with FFS supported by FAO and WFP, she visited a number of schools currently receiving WFP food assistance and FFS along the southern coastal districts.  After observing, conversing with headmasters and farmers, and gathering data and research, Emma drafted a fieldwork report and concluded her internship by making recommendations to FAO about the suggested program and ways to encourage its progress most efficiently and effectively.  Emma noted, "My experience coincided perfectly with my academic interests and gave me incredible insight into the rooted problems of the developing world and global aid." This is my supervisor and I with our guide in the Kwale District.  We are standing in a patch of NERICA rice (New Rice For Africa) which grows in the arid highlands and is being tested by a group of women FFS farmers on their communal plot. This is an FFS group (notice only one man!).  They are showing us how they have reinvested profits from the income-generating crops on their FFS plot to buy cocks and build a cock shed.  Two boys from a WFP supported primary school.  They stare curiously as we approach the school (the thatched building in the background). My twin sister (right) and I with our good friend and nurse at the HIV/AIDS dispensary that is attached to the HIV/AIDS center we worked at through UNICEF.  I spent a week and a half, but Dimity's internship was with UNICEF and she lived with the local family who started this Community-based Organization (CBO), recording interviews and life histories for UNICEF publication.   Back Elizabeth Lovelock (ENVS & GEOL '06) Summer Internship: Smithsonian Institution, Summer 2005.     Liz worked in the Big Horn Basin, Wyoming with Paleobotanist Scott Wing and Isotope Geochemist Francesca Smith. She took rock samples for Dr. Smith's work, which required digging trenches to get down to the "fresh" 55 ma rock. For Dr. Wing's work they collected from an exceptionally well preserved leaf fossil locality, but also did some prospecting for additional sites. Liz notes: "I found the badlands beautiful, particularly watching the red and white striped hills turn purple at sunset, or watching the full moon rise over them. Right now as I am listening to the city outside my window I am reminded of how quiet it could be out there, or how loud the wind could be, almost keeping me up at night when it sounded like it was about to tear my tent down. We were camped about half an hour outside of Worland, Wyoming, mostly down dirt roads. The one luxury at our camp was a 400 gallon water tank for drinking and cooking." Liz in the Bighorns.   Back Graham Prentice (ENVS '07) Fall Internship: School For Field Studies (SFS), Fall 2005.   Graham is currently attending the School For Field Studies Internship in Costa Rica. Graham states: "Costa Rica is incredible. to say the least. the SFS program has already been an amazing experience in terms of applying everything I've learned to the environmental situation here in Central America, whether it is in natural resource management, ecology, economics of globalization, agriculture, waste management, the list goes on. (and its only been 3 or 4 weeks) I look forward to the opportunity to bring what I'm learning back to Penn and apply it to my further studies."   Back