In E. Africa, a Last Lesson in Survival

If Willy Adams’ fingers weren’t clamped to a ridge of rock 60 feet above the ground, they might be scratching his head.

“This is a little tricky!” Adams, a flame-haired college student from San Francisco, shouts to his rock climbing instructor below. “What do you hold on to up here?”

Moments later, disaster. Adams’ foot slips and his body tumbles backward into space. The reaction below is blase. Adams’ instructor, Alnavaz Amlani, watches calmly while another student anchors the safety rope and brings Adams’ body dangling to a midair halt.

“If you’re gonna put your foot somewhere in a hole, make sure it’s gonna stay!” Amlani shouts up to Adams.

Amlani and 19 students are testing their climbing skills on Fischer’s Tower, a jagged, pyramid-shaped pile of granite that sits like a monument in this Kenyan wildlife reserve about two hours northwest of Nairobi.

But even as Adams and his companions struggle for a toehold on these rocky cliffs, the survival-skills program that brought him and thousands of other young Americans to Kenya -- including John F. Kennedy Jr. -- is slipping away.

Officials with the nonprofit National Outdoor Leadership School say that after nearly three decades, declining enrollment, regional instability and recent terrorist attacks in Kenya have prompted them to pull the plug on their East Africa operation, one of the longest-running educational programs for Americans in Africa.

The planned closure, to take effect June 30, is being felt from Lander, Wyo., where the school is headquartered, to Kenyan villages that depend on the program to provide jobs as instructors, guides and guards.

“This the single most difficult decision I’ve had to make,” said John Gans, director of the school and a graduate of the Kenya program, breaking into sobs during a telephone interview. “Kenya grabs your heart and holds it.”

But in recent times, Kenya has also been a source of constant worry for officials at the school, which has sent about 60,000 people into the wilderness since its founding in the 1960s. The State Department ranks Nairobi, Kenya’s capital, as one of the world’s most crime-infested cities.

Since 1974, the school’s operations here have been generally safe and uneventful -- with two notable exceptions. One involved John F. Kennedy Jr., who got lost while hiking in the Masai Mara game park and ended up in the National Enquirer. The second involved a Marin County woman and her Masai guards, who fought off a hyena that attacked her while she slept, gnawing her face.

But November’s suicide bombings at an Israeli-owned resort in Mombasa, on the Indian Ocean, which killed 16 people, hit too close to home. For years, the school’s students have taken sailing lessons on wooden dhows not far from the bombing site.

“The whole security situation in the world is changing, particularly for us as Americans,” said Peter Blessing, the director of the school’s programs in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. We are “an organization that pays a lot of attention to risk management ... but the risk of terrorist activity is something that we have no experience with.”

After paying $10,000 in tuition, students are guaranteed to take home a bundle of memories plus 10 college credits in biology, leadership techniques and environmental ethics.

The 10-week semester in Kenya includes wildlife safaris in three national parks, rock climbing at Hell’s Gate and three weeks of hiking in southern Kenya, where students learn about the customs of the Masai.

Teacher Kirstin Henninger said the closure is understandable. “But the irony is quite painful that we’re closing the program when Kenya has a new government and the country is quite hopeful.”

Some students acknowledged that they were worried about traveling to Africa and that it was a tough sell to nervous parents. But others said that once in Kenya, they found no reason to be afraid.

“I feel more safe here than if I was in the States right now,” said Noelle Nicols, 18, sunning herself at a picnic table after scaling more than 100 feet of vertical cliff.

Henninger’s 20 students spent the last month learning basic mountaineering skills on the slopes of snowcapped Mt. Kenya. Hefting 70-pound packs up the 17,058-foot mountain, coping with the freezing temperatures and the sudden onset of fog and hail “totally changed my life,” said Matt Janetta, 20, a sophomore from the University of Wyoming.

“Having your home on your back is a completely new experience,” he said. “After you climb a mountain, you realize you can do so many things. It makes you a stronger person.”

Blessing, the director of the Kenya program, said the school offers Americans a chance to expand their worldview. “Our own culture is very dominant in the world today. Just about anything we do as Americans is going to influence things globally,” he said. “For Americans to get out and see the world is very important.”

Non-Americans in the group said meeting students from the U.S. was also an education.

“American young people have more freedom,” said Donatus Gadiye, a Tanzanian park ranger who, at 30, is the oldest member of the group. “In Africa, girls do not mix so freely with boys. American women are strong; they act like boys.”

Foreign adventure may be a risky luxury for American travelers. But Kenyan instructors, such as Amlani, feel the risk is worth it. International exposure, he said, may help shape a future generation of American leaders who think globally.

“One day, if these guys are sitting up in government,” he said, “they might think differently because of something they did in Kenya once.”

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Special correspondent Driscoll reported from Hell’s Gate and Times staff writer Maharaj from Los Angeles.