Homer's odyssey teaches kids

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

This is a note-in-a-bottle-story with a new twist.

Instead of taking a group of kids to the ocean and floating their letters around the world in the hope that a few might reach some people who would write back, a teacher in Irvine, Calif., updated this age-old game.

Last Jan. 13, Kathy Calkins and her fifth grade class of 33, pinned a laminated letter on a stuffed bear, fitted him with a backpack in which they stuck a diary, and gave the bear to a student's mother, who is a flight attendant. She marked the bear with an "unaccompanied minor" tag, put him on a plane and buckled his seat belt. Then she and Calkins and the kids sat back and waited to see if the bear would return.

Return he did, five months later, fluent in Russian and Japanese and laden with messages and gifts from people from around the world.

Homer was on the road 134 days. He visited 20 nations. He got his picture in newspapers. He was a star on TV in South Africa and in the Netherlands. He flew on the Concorde from London to New York. He went to a slumber party in Vienna, a classroom in Amsterdam, and a seminar in Bangladesh. He sunbathed in Hawaii, Aruba, Florida, Australia and New Zealand.

But none of this went to his head. He returned to the Springbrook Elementary School the same, sweet affable bear he always was.

Of course, the children wanted to know about his travels - where he went, what he saw, all he did. So Homer began with a map. He traced his route from Los Angeles to Honolulu to New Zealand to Australia to Thailand. He read from his diary what a member of Quantas Airlines wrote in Bangkok on Jan. 18: "Every country has its good points and its bad points, and good people and bad people mixed together, so don't be negative if you hear someone talking about other countries, especially in the Third World. Because if we're friends, it doesn't matter if we're black, white, Asian, American or European. We have only one planet to live in together."

He showed the children postcards he was given, and wings from all the airlines on which he'd traveled, his wooden shoes, his T-shirts, his chocolate and his pens.

The children read the letters Homer brought back and the entries in his diary and wrote to all the people Homer had met. And the world became real to them.

"I have to admit I didn't have great expectations for Homer," Kathy Calkins says. "I told the kids a hundred times, `Don't be surprised if we never get the bear back. It's a big world and there are a lot of places for him to go."'

But Homer did come back. On May 18, Homer was in Amsterdam. The Amsterdam people arranged for him to go to Denmark, Stockholm, and Moscow before routing him home. Calkins picked him up at LAX on Memorial Day weekend. When she walked into school with him on June 1, the children were overjoyed.

"The ultimate lesson the kids have learned is more than geography," Calkins says. "It's that even though there are bad people in the world, there are millions of good people, too. You just don't hear about them often enough. So many good people took the time for Homer so that 33 students could learn something about the world. They didn't get a reward. They didn't get money."

But they got Homer's thanks and the respect and admiration of kids, who because of the kindness of strangers, see the word as a friendlier place.