Mother Visits a House from the Past

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Exchanging Books for Llamas

For five generations, the Snodgrass family's 100-acre farm just north of Baltimore, Maryland, produced fairly predictable crops, but these days the fertile land is nurturing a unique combination: llamas and kids. How they grow up together is the genius of farm owner Ed Snodgrass and the Living Classrooms Foundation, a nonprofit, Baltimore-based organization that provides hands-on education and job-skill training to kids who need extra help.

For Snodgrass, 41, it all started with the llamas. He had to find something to keep the grass down after he sold a dairy herd in the 1970s. He didn't know much about llamas, except that they were fairly low-maintenance, gentle beings, so he bought a few. Several years later he learned about the Living Classrooms Foundation, which takes inner-city, at-risk kids on boat trips to educate them about the Chesapeake Bay and teach them communication, teamwork, and other skills that make boats—and people—function successfully.

Wondering what his llamas could do besides eat, Snodgrass sprouted an idea. He proposed taking the kids on llama treks around his farm to give them a chance to learn stream ecology and see how the bay is affected by what happens to the land and water far from its shores.

"We connected spending a day with the streams and a day on the bay so they could see what happens to the clear stream water, how it becomes the Inner Harbor in Baltimore," Snodgrass says.

The first year, 1988, he did about five treks. By 1992, about 900 youngsters, as well as physically disabled adults, visited Emory Knoll Llama Farm for a variety of excursions. The trips include studies (and swimming) in streams, discussions about Native Americans and how they lived off the land, overnights in teepees, stargazing through telescopes, learning where vegetables come from, and walking through the woods in total silence.

About half the children are from the inner city. Many have never spent a night sleeping under the stars or lived a day beyond the city's relentless noise. Snodgrass says some are astounded when they learn that carrots grow underground and lettuce comes out of the dirt.

"The experience of experience is underrated in our culture," Snodgrass says. "We take the extraordinary for granted. I think it's nice to take groups and step back and have the ordinary be extraordinary."

The llamas provide a couple of services. They carry backpacks in which the kids can place their food and gear. More importantly, though, they are completely new to the children and as such, they are at first intimidating. Then, as the kids groom, handle, and lead them, they gain a new measure of confidence, one of the program's fundamental goals. Snodgrass tries to "sneak the learning in."

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