Click photo for larger image & cutline |
BAY MILLS - It is no secret that Bay Mills Community College's Director of Research Dr. Michael Doyle is a well-traveled man; he'll tell you all about his past exploits. The man once sailed across the Pacific with another person in a Sexton sailboat just to "see what was out there" and to learn about navigation. As a plant scientist seeking rare and exotic plants, Doyle has traveled to such far-off places across the globe as Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, and French Polynesia. He has mingled with Pygmies in the Congo, the "bungee jumpers" of the Vanuatu Islands and cannibals in Fiji.
When he was working towards his Ph. D., Doyle earned a reputation in the scientific community as a guy who would "do whatever he had to do to get what he wanted." When a National Geographic photographer learned that Doyle was in the Cloud Forest of the tropics rapelling off the sides of cliffs and suspending himself from a helicopter by a cable to obtain the elusive gunnera plant, he asked to tag along and take pictures. The photographer documented Doyle's exploits as he collected the "unique plant with multi-kingdom symbiosis" that only grew on the sides of these particular cliffs. Soon magazines and newspapers began writing about Doyle's work. The Los Angeles Times even coined Doyle as "The Indiana Jones of Botany" as a result of his daring adventures in the name of science.
As he got older, Doyle began to take time off from "all of the international stuff," or trips sponsored by organizations such as the World Health Organization, European Union and the Asian Development Bank. However, when the United States Department of Agriculture Foreign Agriculture Service asked him to be a part of a school garden project being developed in Rwanda and Congo and funded by the President's African Education Incentive, he decided to come out of his self-imposed retirement and jumped on the opportunity.
Doyle traveled to the remote Lekoumou District of the Congo, located between the Congo River and the Atlantic Ocean, with an educational team from the USDA-FAS this past fall and teamed up with government officials from the country and various non-governmental organizations to set up the model school garden. Doyle provided his expertise as a plant scientist to help translate the science of gardening into the school curricula and assisted in the development of a resource manual/curriculum for use by African teachers.
The garden was designed to produce food to help feed the 2,000 students in the region and to act as an outdoor science lab to help integrate aspects of agriculture, ecology, earth science and climatology into the educational curriculum. It included crops of beans, corn, squash, carrots, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and peppers, and also included a nursery, and composting bins. The model garden would then be used as a training center to train teachers and Pygmies living in the area to go off and start gardens elsewhere.
Doyle said the feeding programs at these schools act as an incentive for families to send their children to them, adding that enrollment at some of these schools increase by as much as 50 percent just by adding a lunch that consists of U.S. donated beans and rice. With U.S. aid to the region reportedly being cut off by next year, Doyle said the AEI is trying to implement school gardens as a way to help mitigate the damage that cutting the food supply to this already devastated region would cause.
"Americans have no idea what is going over there [in Africa]," Doyle said. "Millions of people have died as a result of civil wars. The situation is so bad that when I would get back to the place where I was staying I would often times cry. Cutting their food aid would, ultimately, be a death sentence for many of these children. There is just no way that we can produce enough food in these gardens to feed them."
Doyle said most Americans would not be able to comprehend the suffering the people from these particular regions in Africa have had to endure. Ravaged by civil war, Doyle said every building in the capital is riddled with bullet holes and there are families living in buildings where the walls and roofs have been blown out by rocket-propelled grenades. The people living in the countryside are even worse off, he added. Chinese logging trucks are continually cutting down the Congo rain forest, which is the second largest rain forest in the world, and the home of the Pygmies. Doyle said the Pygmies, who are treated like slaves, go to school primarily just to eat the food. What really bothers Doyle about the situation of the people in the Congo is the fact that the country generates billions of dollars in revenue from their vast petroleum reserves each year, but none trickles down.
"There is horrid, horrid corruption over there," Doyle said. "These people are beyond poor. There are really no words I can think of to describe their situation. It truly is hard to believe how great these people can be, given the hard times they have had to endure. I feel really privileged to have had the opportunity to meet and work with them."
After establishing the model garden in the Congo, Doyle traveled to Rwanda in January and February of this year to begin the planning phase of their school garden. While most of the Congo is wet, tropical forests, Doyle said that developing a gardening strategy for Rwanda was completely different, given the fact that the country is mountainous and ranges from wet to nearly desert conditions and has the highest population density in Africa.
Doyle met with Rwandan government officials and various NGOs during his trip and said they are in the process of selecting schools for the gardening project, which he hopes to begin at the end of this year. He said they would expand Rwanda's garden to include a "micro-farm," complete with farm animals to provide additional nourishment.
After traveling back to the states and his job at BMCC to pursue his other passions, most notably alternative energy sources, Doyle learned via letter from USDA Administrator A. Ellen Terpstra that he had been selected to receive the International Honor Award from the USDA-FAS for his work on the school garden programs in Africa. While honored to receive the award, Doyle said he has no idea how he got it, or how he was selected, as he was unable to attend the recent awards ceremony in Washington, D.C., due to a bout of "jet lag."
Whether dangling himself thousands of feet above the ground to collect an exotic plant, or working side by side with Pygmys in the remote rain forests of the Congo, Doyle would be the first to agree that he has earned his reputation of a guy that will "do whatever he has to do to get what he wants." And what does Doyle want so badly that he would risk life and limb to try and get it? Personal accolades? Nope. Doyle said he just wants the opportunity to help people - wherever, whenever, and in whatever way he can.
"I really love having the opportunity to help people, especially those in Africa," Doyle said. "I'm really passionate about it. If I can help them improve their lives in any way then I will have done my job and I will be happy. These people live in conditions unimaginable to Americans. They don't deserve it; they're victims. They have an incredibly rich culture and we have much to learn from them. I learned just as much from them as they did from me and I'm the scientist."
