As promised, John Miller has stayed over night this past Friday in an exact replica of the famous tent of the Antarctic explorer Raold Amundsen of Norway. (John just emailed me the exciting news this weekend.) Amundsen left the tent plus a message as evidence that he and his crew were the first human beings to ever reach the South Pole, Antarctica. Robert Falcon Scott, an English explorer, and his crew actually stayed in the original tent; but they later died on The Ice from starvation and extreme cold. Amundsen and crew made it back home.
John Miller of the US Antarctic Program stayed in the tent's exact replica overnight to re-enact history. He will soon be sending us photos of the event. He said that the temperature was - 51 degrees. Although that sounds extremely cold to us, by South Pole standards, it could have been worse. Plus he reported there was little wind, so the wind chill factor was reduced. Our school is having a writing contest about John, the tent, and his incredible experiment to re-enact history. We will be posting some of the students' entries on this blog soon.
John sent us these two great pictures above. One is of the original tent photo with Amundsen and his crew nearby. The other is Norwegian artwork from 1971 commemorating the ill-fated Scott expedition of 1912.
Our thanks again to John Miller, USAP for providing our SVDP-ALC students with a first-hand understanding of this amazing piece of history from Antarctica.
John has also written an editorial for our related publication, AmeriWord, the official newsletter for Literacy*AmeriCorps New Orleans. It is all about his activities with the Antarctica-New Orleans Pen Pal Program and the major role he played helping to better educate our students from a continent away. It will be published soon, and I will also post excerpts from his editorial on this blog. So, stay tuned. John is our first ever guest editorialist for AmeriWord. So, incredibly enough, our first ever guest editorial for AmeriWord was sent to us in New Orleans via email from the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station in Antarctica.
Thanks again, John, from all of us at St. Vincent de Paul-ALC in Gentilly, New Orleans.
-- Adrian
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