The Madagascan Adventure - A Teen Ambassador Book Creation

By: Jenaya, 18, Current Teen Ambassador

It’s around 5:45 pm on a Tuesday evening; Teen Ambassadors (TA) Kadeem, Justin, Christina and I are trying to compile a list of projects to do during the academic school year. Projects range from making videos to creating plays that all speak about the Zoo and Teen Ambassador missions. The project we brainstormed that sounded truly amazing was the creation of a children’s book. We were extremely excited about making a book come to life. We started forming many ideas but ultimately knew we wanted to base our book on biodiversity. However, we immediately ran into a roadblock. How do we make a book fun yet informative for children under the age of 12?  Well, the excitement and motivation we experienced that Tuesday evening was awesome! In all honesty, we thought creating a children’s book would be a piece of cake – that we would be done with the book in no time … WRONG!  We were definitely not ready for what would lie ahead.

It took an enormous amount of time to figure out the plan for the book, just the plan! We ran into many obstacles:

1.       How do we make the book fun and engaging for children below the age of 12?

2.       Who was going to illustrate and how do we illustrate?

3.       What would be the setting and plot of the book?

4.       Which animals would go on an adventure?  

So many questions needed to be asked and answered! It was a huge thought process and around midyear, we figured out the format for the book. It was awesome to get to the point where we knew what we would be writing. Towards the end of the academic school year, with the help of the rest of the Teen Ambassadors, we all started to draft pictures of the animals we were going to use and began working on the story line. However, June came around and it was time to close out the first Teen Ambassador year before summer began. When the second year of the TA program started, three new members – Arjanae, Isabelle, and Randy – were ecstatic about the idea of continuing the book from the previous year. The previous year’s teens however, all looked at each other with the same stare that indicated how much work would need to be put into the project. Ultimately, we all came to the conclusion that we wanted to finish the children’s book.

As mentioned, all of the teens from the previous year had worked extremely hard to bring the book to life. People who were great at illustrations, drew the animals for the book. Teens who were good at editing spent time editing the story line of the book. Everyone was contributing to the book in their own way to make sure it would be complete! The day came when our book was finalized and we had to pick a title. We came up with “The Madagascan Adventure” … PERFECT! 

After our book was complete, we connected with Dr. Machanda from Harvard who eventually took our book to Uganda, Africa where it was shared with students from the Kasiisi Project. Hundreds of students were able to enjoy and learn from our project. We were told one of the kids’ favorite parts from the book was when the animal’s canoe had a leak and they all tried to work together to remove the water! Not only did our book reach Uganda, it also made its way to Madagascar. When the TAs heard this, we found it so cool that a book a bunch of teens created turned out to be an international hit. The book was a success! Just like chameleon in the book, who thought he did not have the power to make a difference in his home because he was small and couldn’t be heard, actually did make a difference. As Teen Ambassadors, we may be a small group, but we know that hard work and dedication truly pay off.