Michael Kevane has a suggestion for academic parents traveling with restless kids: Get them a couple of goats—and maybe some chickens.
Since 1994, Mr. Kevane and his wife, Leslie C. Gray, have paid regular visits to Burkina Faso as part of their work as faculty members at Santa Clara University, where he is chair of the economics department and she directs the Environmental Studies Institute. In 2007 and 2008, the couple took along their children, Elliot and Sukie, who were 9 and 4 at the time of their first visit. A month into that stay in a walled garden home that the family rents in the capital city, Ouagadougou (pronounced wah-guh-DOO-goo), the kids clearly needed some distraction.
“We had a couple other expatriate neighbors, and my wife quickly gleaned from them that the single most important thing to do was to get some goats and chickens in the house,” says Mr. Kevane. “That made all the difference for our kids, who until then were a little bored.”
After that, he says, the kids spent hours hanging out with the chickens and staging goat races with the friends they soon made. The parents were able to resume their work planning summer reading camps and a small study-abroad program at Santa Clara that sends students out to villages in Burkina Faso, where they work in libraries that Mr. Kevane helped establish through the nonprofit group Friends of African Village Libraries.
Anyone who teaches or does research in a remote place abroad knows well the scramble to secure the money, gear, travel documents, inoculations, and official permissions that are vital for a productive trip. When scholars choose to bring their families along, the hassles can increase tenfold, but the rewards—both personal and professional—are usually vast. And often comical.
Mr. Kevane and Ms. Gray kept their kids in the relative comfort of Ouagadougou for most of their stays—six months in 2007 and three weeks in 2008—but also took them five hours away to the village of Bereba, introducing them to the experiences of eating corn porridge out of a common pot and squatting over a pit latrine. At night the family slept in the mud-brick home that the couple built a decade ago on a plot that Bereba’s elders provided them after talking it over and sacrificing a chicken.
The two academics hope to go back to the village next summer for a much longer stay, a prospect that has the kids thrilled. “They’ve forgotten all the negatives,” says Mr. Kevane. “They both have very positive memories.”
Tatiana Lowell-Campbell’s very first memory is from a summer she spent in China when she was not yet 2 years old: It was of a large red star hanging from the Communist Party headquarters at Nanjing University, where her parents, David G. Campbell and Karen Lowell, taught for a summer as part of a faculty exchange with Grinnell College. Tatiana traveled extensively with her parents as a child, says Mr. Campbell, a Grinnell biology professor, who describes their relationship in Papa, Ph.D.: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy (Rutgers University Press, 2010). She was surrounded by ambitious, college-age role models on study-abroad trips, says Mr. Campbell. And she has never had a serious cold, something he attributes to an unsavory habit in Nanjing.
Spitting is now outlawed in the province, he says, “but back then everybody spat and blew their nose on the street.” Mr. Campbell still remembers the “SHOO-bah, SHOO-bah, SHOO-bah” sound of the stroller’s wheels as he pushed it through the gobs covering the sidewalk in late afternoon, before the rains. “And, of course, Tatiana was a toddler and wanted to pick up everything,” he says. “You can’t stop that. We tried. But she probably acquired an enormous amount of very useful antibodies. There are immunological benefits from this kind of life.”
Suzanne Fox Buchele’s daughter Grace was not so lucky during her family’s 2006-8 stay in Accra, Ghana, where Ms. Buchele taught at Ashesi University as a Fulbright scholar. Grace got malaria and a case of food poisoning so severe that it landed her in the hospital. On top of that, she caught way too much attention from would-be suitors.
“She had just turned 14, and the Ghanaian boys—it was like flies to honey,” says Ms. Buchele, an associate professor of computer science at Southwestern University, in Texas. “She would walk out of the gate and the boys would just start coming.”
When Ms. Buchele and her husband, Steve, announced to their three kids that they would be extending their visit for another year, Grace “threw quite a fit” and refused to stay. She eventually struck a deal with her parents to spend her second year abroad at a boarding school in Japan that cost roughly what they were paying for her to attend Accra’s international school.
The remaining Bucheles had embraced Accra’s cosmopolitan flavor and easygoing pace. Steve Buchele, a Methodist pastor on leave from his church in Temple, Tex., found a niche helping coordinate teams of missionaries. The family lived in a spacious two-story home. The electricity failed every other day, but the house had good security, and visitors were frequent.
“We kind of became the Fulbright mom and dad for the students passing through,” Ms. Buchele recalls.
Trouble arrived one day at the beach in the form of a fluke wave that slammed Mr. Buchele, breaking and dislocating his shoulder. He eventually had to spend a month in South Africa to get the injury properly treated. When the family returned to Texas, he got more bad news: He’d been moved to a smaller church as a part-time associate pastor.
Even after all that, Ms. Buchele says, she and her husband wouldn’t trade the family’s experience overseas. “When each of the bad things happened, we immediately saw circumstances where it could have been a whole lot worse. We were thankful it wasn’t a whole lot worse.”
It was not boys but dogs that kept Edward J. Brantmeier’s children indoors during their stay in Varanasi, India, where Mr. Brantmeier served as a Fulbright-Nehru lecturer at Banaras Hindu University in the fall of 2009. His wife, Noorie Kelsey Brantmeier, and their sons, Noah and Ian, ages 3 and 1, were given the use of a three-bedroom apartment in a faculty complex next to a forest. Unfortunately, a pack of wild dogs roamed the area, so the boys had to play inside, where the heat and humidity were stifling. Mr. Brantmeier had requested an air-conditioning unit, but it could capably cool only one room, the bedroom where the family slept.
As it turned out, theirs was the only air-conditioner in the entire complex, and when it began leaking condensation into the home of the professor below, Mr. Brantmeier heard about it. “We had to figure out how to reroute the water,” he says. “It was kind of embarrassing.”
Also embarrassing, says Mr. Brantmeier, an assistant professor of learning, technology, and leadership education at James Madison University, was the realization that his family was using twice as much electricity as any other professor.
“For me it was a Hot, Flat, and Crowded moment,” he says, referring to Thomas L. Friedman’s book on the growing competition for global resources.
When it comes to research-related travel, Scott M. Fitzpatrick has what many would consider to be a plum gig: He specializes in island archaeology. An associate professor of archaeology at North Carolina State University, he has worked on excavations on the Pacific island of Palau and in the Caribbean. His wife, Teri Berlant, and their daughters, Lily and Audrey, who are now 6 and 4, have accompanied him abroad several times, along with a nanny to care for the girls. What’s more, Ms. Berlant does customs-compliance work for companies importing goods to the United States, a job she can do from anywhere, as long as she has an Internet connection.
There’s just one problem, Mr. Fitzpatrick says: “On all the islands where we work, we usually have to take a boat, and my wife gets really, really seasick.”
In 2008 the family flew to Puerto Rico and met up with their nanny, who had surprised the girls with inexpensive gifts like necklaces and purses. They caught a connecting flight to Grenada, then took a two-hour ferry to Carriacou.
Along the way, Ms. Berlant began to feel ill. Eyes frantically searched for a receptacle and landed on Lily’s new purse. “It was the only thing available,” Mr. Fitzpatrick says wistfully, the shock on his daughter’s face forever etched in his memory.
Jill DeTemple’s children, John and Molly, have sweet memories of the 12 weeks they spent with their mother in rural Ecuador in 2009, when they were 2 and 4. Ms. DeTemple, an assistant professor of religious studies at Southern Methodist University, is married, but her husband, Brian Bunge, works as a corporate accountant and couldn’t go along for the full trip. Ms. DeTemple rented a tiny room in the home of a family that ran a small grocery on the first floor.
“People would run in to get flour and sugar, and they also happened to stock a lot of penny candy,” says Ms. DeTemple. “So my kids remember this place as, ‘We lived in a candy store!’”
She split her visit into two six-week trips and was able to share child-care chores with her host family, who had a 3-year-old daughter. The arrangement worked pretty well, she says, though her work demands and the tight confines wore on everyone: “Cranky kids, cranky mom, trying to get all this research crammed into a very short time.”
At the end of the first six-week stretch, Mr. Bunge came for a visit. When he arrived, Molly had a 104-degree fever and, says Ms. DeTemple, “the whole gamut of intestinal parasites.”
She and the children weren’t the only ones relieved to see Mr. Bunge. “The priest was very concerned that my husband was not there,” Ms. DeTemple says with a laugh.
She was less amused by the raised eyebrows she had gotten from some of her colleagues before the trip. “People thought I was nuts,” she says. “This is not really the Dallas parenting style.”
But what Ms. DeTemple and other scholars have figured out is that taking one’s family into the field can actually make the job easier.
“I showed up with the ultimate coup de grâce, which was having two kids,” she says. “That opened up a lot of conversations.”
A scholar who travels with a child becomes “a real human being” in the eyes of the locals, says John B. Haviland, chair of the anthropology department at the University of California at San Diego. “You’re not like some sort of strange person who pours flea powder in his blankets and won’t eat the food.”
Mr. Haviland has been mixing his children with his research since 1969, when he took his month-old daughter, Sophie, to live with him and his wife in a dirt-floor adobe house in a remote Mexican village. He was doing graduate research there as part of the long-running Harvard Chiapas Project, run by the anthropologist Evon Z. Vogt.
“There was no water, there was no toilet, and in those days people didn’t even have outhouses,” Mr. Haviland says. “You basically used your cornfield.”
Sophie, who spent the first two years of her life in Chiapas, was adopted as the godchild of an indigenous Tzotzil father and daughter. As a gift, the man offered Mr. Haviland space to build a two-room cinder-block house.
Over the years, the house grew, as did Mr. Haviland’s family. A second daughter, Maya, was born in 1976 in Australia, where he was studying aboriginal people, and a third daughter, Isabel, came along in 1988. He also acquired godchildren, who went on to have kids. Having such an extended family, he says, has been important to his work as a linguistic anthropologist.
“There’s a focus in what I do on language in creating closeness, in creating social ties,” he says. “You pretty much have to be living as part of a family in order to get some idea of what that’s about.”
He and his wives (Mr. Haviland has been married three times) have spent long stretches with the girls in Australia and in Chiapas, where he still stays in the cinder-block house during his frequent visits. He’s added electricity and a water tap, along with a wood-fired water heater for showers.
And Mr. Haviland, 64, has continued to add to his family: In July 2010 his wife gave birth to twins, Luca and Alice, and the people of the village are already asking when they will visit.
