OAKLAND — Students at Williams Elementary School traveled around the world Friday without leaving the cafeteria.

They took the trip with Jan Reynolds, an author, photographer and former United States World Cup Biathlon team member.

Reynolds’ multimedia Vanishing Cultures presentation detailed her experiences with native cultures on every continent.

Reynolds, 56, has built igloos with Inuits, rode in a camel caravan across the Sahara desert and eaten snake for breakfast with Australian Aborigines.

“Being a woman alone … worked to my benefit,” Reynolds said. “People would take me in and I could learn about their lives.”

As photographs of the Amazon basin and Mount Everest flashed on the screen to the B-52’s song “Roam Around the World,” Reynolds told the children if they saw anything that they liked, they too could experience it firsthand.

“All of you have been born in a time and place where you can do anything,” she said. “You can have any idea and make it happen. You are free to do it.”

An important lesson she’s learned during her travels is that people should be good to each other, Reynolds said.

“These indigenous tribes have almost nothing but they would share their last bit of food and water with me,” she said.

“It’s so obvious to these people to honor each other; they need each other to survive.”

She said Americans also need each to survive but that technology can mask that.

The ability to work from home, order groceries online and travel in personal vehicles erodes face-to-face interaction and communication.

As she walked for miles along rocks dropped by glaciers in Tibet to get to a market, Reynolds realized that modern cultures had invented trash.

“Everything they use they get from the land,” she said of Tibetans who rely on yaks for carrying supplies, as well as for milk, cheese and meat.

Reynolds asked the children to keep their hearts and minds open as they learned about different cultures.

In one society in the Sahara, Reynolds said men wear veils and eye makeup, property is passed from mothers to daughters and that females ask males to marry them.

“What’s important is the belly that holds the child,” she said.

After the presentation, Reynolds started the question-and-answer period by asking students what they learned and what they thought was weird.

Third-grader Abigail Carpenter, 9, said she thought it was weird that in the Sahara desert males “ride camels to get girls to like them.”

Other students found it odd that people eat goats, snakes and worms.

Reynolds said when you’re hungry and you’re offered food, you eat it.

Beth Staples — 861-9252

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