Group’s Trips Help Youths Gain a World of Understanding

Summer after summer, they packed the kids in buses, drove up to the San Bernardino Mountains and in that isolated beauty, away from the city, the group put their imaginations to work.

Not only had those children traveled far from their homes in South Los Angeles, they envisioned that they also had traveled around the world to a village or city somewhere in Africa.

One summer it was Benin. Another time it was South Africa. Once it was Egypt during the 18th dynasty. Each time the organizers created in those Southern California mountains a facsimile of places they would visit if they could.

At “African Camp,” the teenagers embraced culture. They learned about nations and leaders, music, language and beliefs.

The beginning was in 1969.

Flash forward to 1989. The bus was now an airplane and instead of African Camp, the destination was Senegal, the real one.

Since then, the Cultural Education Project, a nonprofit organization, has taken youngsters to Egypt, Brazil, Ghana, places in the world where people of African descent and their culture are in abundance. On Nov. 19, the group hopes to take six youngsters to South Africa. The trip will mark the fourth major excursion abroad for the group and its 81-year-old coordinator, Georgia Beasley Hunt.

“To travel to a place like Brazil is mind-boggling,”

Hunt said. “What I admire most about the young people is they seem to really grasp the information. It becomes a part of what they’re about. It makes me feel real good.”

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The group’s purpose has not changed since it was founded as a program of the Teen Post at Vernon Avenue and Main Street. Hunt, who then worked for Teen Post, wanted to offer the children cultural experiences she hoped would expand their view of the world and their lives within it.

With no permanent financial backers or major support, the trips abroad require the same amount of vision and ingenuity it took to transform the San Bernardino Mountains into a Ghanaian village. The children come from moderate-income African American families. Money for overseas travel is not in their budgets.

But travel abroad pays untold dividends. And these families say it is worth every sacrifice.

To pay for the trip to South Africa, the group has spent the last year raising funds: holding fish fries and raffles, selling chocolate and magazines, organizing a talent show and trips to the boardwalk in Santa Monica where the students perform African dance and drumming. And they are writing letters seeking donations to cover the $2,125 each needs for the trip.

And all along the way they have been anticipating the trip.

“I feel that I need to see different cultures and the way they live and interact with them,” said 12-year-old Donovan Cosby, who will travel to South Africa next month. “Plus, it’s going to be fun.”

Donovan has sent out the familiar pitch letters, introducing himself to strangers and hoping they will see the value of his journey. He is an eighth-grader at James A. Foshay Learning Center who has worked very hard and has achieved a 3.8 grade-point average, the letter explains. He has plans to attend college and major in cinematography.

Each trip is a manifestation of the philosophy of Hunt, who never traveled outside the country until she was in her 70s.

Hunt grew up in Luling, Texas, a town that was “about big as your fist,” Hunt recalled, “the smallest and most prejudiced town that I’ve ever seen in my life.”

Her mother, Sarah Jones, did laundry and ironing for white people in the town. Jones had only a third-grade education, but when her employers allowed it, she would take home encyclopedias for her daughter. Hunt would read them aloud to her mother.

“She would fall asleep while I was reading them because she was so tired,” Hunt said.

Hunt graduated from college, moved to Los Angeles and became involved with the first of a long list of programs for youths.

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In the early 1950s, she was a leader of the Campfire Girls. Jimmy Williams, now 58, remembers seeing Hunt leading the troop that included his older sister.

“She’s been a mother to a lot of people,” said Williams, who is facility manager at Gilbert Lindsay Recreation Center, where Hunt works part-time as a recreation director.

“She’s one of the unsung heroes, one of the five-star generals. She’s that precious. Everybody stops and gives her her props.”

Much of what group members do is local. On weekends, the students may attend etiquette and cooking classes. Or they might take a hike in the Santa Monica Mountains. They participate in reading contests, go to the theater, and do lots of “nice things,” said Hunt.

“My inspiration has been Ms. Hunt,” said Karen Hempstead, the mother of Donovan and three other sons who have traveled abroad over the years. “She just says, ‘We’re going to do this.’ And it happens. I don’t know how I send my kids around the world. I don’t have any money. But they’ve been. So I believe.”

For all the traveling her sons have done, Hempstead has not been out of the country. But the trips have offered her a vicarious journey, a connectedness as well with the world community. “When we’re fund-raising or doing whatever . . . it puts Africa on the minds of people, “ Hempstead said.

Hunt’s daughter Niani Brown had what her mother didn’t: a chance to see the world in her youth. After graduating from college, she decided to join the Peace Corps. Now an immigration attorney who speaks Spanish, Portuguese and French, Brown sees her time spent in Brazil as a turning point.

“I went to Brazil thinking I’m going to make all these contributions to the world,” she said. “I ended up . . . learning much more than I ever could have taught anybody. I came back with just a deep-seated appreciation for other people and other cultures and other ways of living and looking at the world.”

The first time Hunt traveled outside the country was in 1989, when the group went to Dakar, Senegal. She’s been organizing trips ever since.

In South Africa the group will visit Johannesburg and Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned. The youths are soliciting donations from local stores so they can deliver school supplies to the schools they will visit. They also hope to establish long-term connections.

“South Africa is very important politically as far as African people all over the world are concerned,” Brown said. “I hope that [the students] will be able to appreciate the importance of political struggle. That, no matter how difficult a situation is--and I think this is what Nelson Mandela symbolizes--you never give up hope.”

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It is also the word that comes to mind to describe what pushes people like Georgia Hunt.

With the trip just weeks away, the group is still trying to raise funds for some of the young people who are scheduled to go, including Donovan. Two of the youths will not be able to go unless help arrives soon. Yet nobody has thrown in the towel just yet.

After all, there are young people around the city who have visited the Khufu pyramid in Egypt and watched dancers and drummers in Bahia, Brazil. There are others who know some Wolof and some French, taught to them by a guide in Dakar, Senegal. There are adults carrying memories of a childhood summer, spent in a camp in the mountains that could have been Ghana.

Now that Hunt has helped show the world to children, she wants to make sure folks of her generation get to see it as well.

“When she retires, she really is contemplating being a tourist guide, particularly for seniors,” Brown said. “Knowing my mother, I wouldn’t be surprised if she did it.”