From Fear to Frontier

Each of my second graders at High Tech Elementary learned to swim and ride a bike.

I believed — and still believe — those are the foundational skills to a life spent outdoors. You can't fall in love with the ocean if you're afraid of water. You can't explore a trail if you've never trusted your own balance. By the end of that school year, we'd partnered with San Diego Junior Lifeguards and taken every kid to the beach for a single day. Surfing, boogie boarding, kayaking, stand-up paddle. All of it, in one day. We called it Bridge to Beach.

Some of those kids had been in the ocean their whole lives. Others had never been comfortable getting wet.

I thought about that day a lot during my conversation with Forbah Sandra Ngwemetoh.

Forbah is 26 years old. She grew up in Limbe, Cameroon — a coastal city at the edge of the Atlantic, ringed by mountains, sitting inside one of the most biodiverse marine environments on the African continent. Cameroon is home to some of the most critical sea turtle nesting corridors in Africa. It has four distinct climate zones. Its geography is extraordinary.

Forbah grew up not knowing any of it.

Not because she wasn't curious. Because there was no bridge. Environmental science wasn't in the curriculum. Ocean literacy wasn't a concept that existed in her school. When she became an educator and asked her students what careers they dreamed of, 98% said doctor. One in 80 said anything connected to the outdoors.

"I don't blame them," she told me. "Myself included — when I was younger, I wanted to become a doctor."

She said it without bitterness. Just clarity.

What Forbah did next is the part that stays with me.

She didn't wait for a curriculum to be written. She started volunteering — first at a wildlife center caring for orphaned animals, then with AMCO, the African Marine Conservation Organization — learning the species names herself, reading the research herself, then walking into classrooms and teaching what she'd just learned.

The curiosity compounded. She applied for an externship sponsored by National Geographic and the Nature Conservancy. She didn't get in the first time. She applied again. Eight weeks later she was learning from global experts and producing a research project on the conflict between artisanal and industrial fishing trawlers off Cameroon's northern coast.

Months later, she was nominated as a 2024 National Geographic Young Explorer.

"This particular award really shocks me," she said.

It shouldn't.

Through her nonprofit, Bridges — Building Resilient Individuals, Developing Generational Environmental Sustainability — Forbah is doing what I tried to do in that second-grade classroom, but at a scale and under conditions I can barely imagine.

She's teaching photography not as a hobby but as a career. She's teaching swimming not as recreation but as the first step toward becoming a marine biologist or an underwater cinematographer. She introduced swimming into her program two years ago. That's when she first learned to swim herself.

Since then, she's dived to 18 meters in the ocean off South Africa as part of the National Geographic Explorer network. She came back to Limbe and walked into classrooms and told her students: I've seen what's down there. It's extraordinary. And you can have a career studying it.

That's not curriculum. That's testimony.

The Ocean Splash Academy — the physical space Forbah built from her National Geographic project — is not big. She'll be the first to tell you that. There are chairs. A projector. A small, mostly empty library. A rented room paid through the end of the year.

In that room, she's hosted teachers' workshops, organized eight outdoor field experiences, brought in experts via virtual exchange, and watched skeptical parents come around — start asking when the next program is, start imagining futures for their children that hadn't existed before.

She wants to build a permanent facility. A swimming pool. Lecture halls. A maker's space and art workshop. A space that doesn't disappear when the lease runs out.

I want to help her get there.

Cameroon has 28 million people. Twenty-eight million people on a coast that is ecologically extraordinary, in a country that spans four climate zones, bordering an ocean that holds careers and ecosystems and wonders that almost none of its young people have been shown.

Forbah is, as far as she knows, the only person doing this work.

If you're in ocean conservation, environmental education, or the outdoor sector, here is what BRIDGES and the Ocean Splash Academy actually need:

• Books. A library that can teach. 

• VR headsets. Forbah has been renting one to bring 360-degree ocean footage into landlocked classrooms. She can't afford to own one. 

• Binoculars. For the outdoor trips that are already happening. 

• A building fund. A permanent home for the first ocean literacy institution in Limbe. 

• Volunteers. People willing to give time — to train young people, to help build an organization that is punching far above its weight class. 

• And an audience. Share this. Tell someone. Post it somewhere Forbah hasn't been yet.

  
  

You can find her at www.bridgesforocean.org and across social media under BridgesforOcean.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts. And if something in this conversation moves you — reach out. I'll make the introduction myself.

— Scott Shepherd -- Founder, Wildward Institute

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

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