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Alum takes Quest Team adventure to Okinawa
In high school, Rachel Binns, B.A., 2002, used to follow Dan Buettner's Quest Team from continent to continent, dreaming that someday she would be out there with them. Last fall, she found herself boarding a plane for Okinawa as a lead writer for Quest Team's "Blue Zones: Okinawa Expedition." The team's goal was to meet with Okinawa's "longevity all-stars to bring their influence back to the world," she said. Ten team members stayed in a large guesthouse and learned to work together in time crunches to get things done during the two-and-a-half week expedition, she said. Each morning, the team set off early to collect stories. At night, they would return to the guesthouse and work frantically to create written and video pieces that ran live on AOL, National Geographic and The Blue Zones Web sites in English and Japanese. "Among our experiences, we met with and received a special blessing from Noro priestesses, did karaoke with a 90-year-old woman who harvests seaweed, and went to the funeral of a 105-year-old man, where we watched his bones mix with his wife's so they could finally be together again," she said. As a lead writer, Binns set out each day to find stories for herself and others who wrote reports. She was responsible for writing profiles of children, and for daily reports that connected love and relationships to longevity. "We met kids who believe they can live to be 150, and several who might get close," she said. "The idea of the quest was that children in classrooms around the world guided our adventure," she said. "We sent daily reports via the Internet, and they voted for where we would go or whom we would see next." The team's discoveries and videos can be found at www.bluezones.com. And next year? "We're off to investigate Sardina, Italy," she said. "I set it as a goal of mine to someday be in the field as a member of the Quest Team. It took about eight years, but it finally happened." |
