COWS are pretty thin on the ground at home in Orange County. Trina Dixon remembers spotting a mysterious fourlegged creature of the milk yielding variety in the California hills on only one occasion. It was miles away. Until the 16 year old student came to Ireland to take part in a new summer camp for American students this month, it was her closest encounter of a bovine kind.
"Before I came to Ireland I had never been on a horse, and I had never seen a cow except maybe 50 miles away on a hill. There's no farms or anything where I'm from," says Trina, one of 10 American teenagers taking part in the new Dublin based, three week Adventure Ireland Summer Camp, which runs until July 27th.
"I had a Scottish great grand parent and an Irish great grand parent and I had a bit of Irish on the other side of the family as well. I always wanted to go to Ireland. It's my dream.
The Adventure Ireland Camp, which offers a wide programme of academic, cultural and outdoor leisure activities to students between 13 and 18 years of age, has drawn students from all over the US, including Boston, California, New Jersey, Vermont and Pennsylvania. And the US Ambassador to Ireland, Ms Jean Kennedy Smith, visited the camp to welcome the youngsters here.
During the first two weeks of their stay, the students are attending classes on a wide range of subjects of Irish interest at Ashfield College in Templeogue, Dublin and are living with host families nearby. They will spend the third week at the Delphi Adventure Centre, Leenane, Co Mayo, where a variety of outdoor activities including surfing, rock climbing and pony trekking are on offer. The cost of the summer school, excluding flights, is $1,800 per person.
Although there is an emphasis on fun and relaxation in the camp, learning about Ireland's past and present is integral to Adventure Ireland's Dublin programme. Among the subjects studied by the students are Irish history, folklore, sport, culture and Anglo Irish literature. The classes, which take place in the morning, are supplemented by afternoon field trips to museums, art galleries and sites of historical and natural interest.
The highlight for the students so far has been a visit to Newgrange, according to 17 year old Kelly Costan from Chicago.
"It's good to fill in the gaps of what your grand parents didn't tell you," she says during a break from a class about the Normans in Ireland. Like Trina Dixon and several other of the students, her family is of Irish extraction.
"I've been here before with my grand father and my mom and we have family here. We stayed for three weeks. My great grand father came over to the US in 1904 and I still have fifth and third cousins who live here," she says.
Attending Irish history classes has been an enlightening experience according to Trina, who had received all her previous knowledge about Ireland from relatives. "You learn that they invited the English in, the Irish lords. That's not the sort of thing they tell you at home," she says.
"There is more of a novelty in teaching Irish history to American students," says programme director, Niamh Hill. "They are more interested in their roots. We had an Irish class and we showed them how to write their names into Irish and told them what they mean and they liked that," says the 30 year old secondary school teacher.
"A summer camp is a way of life over there and it is a matter of establishing a relationship with a number of schools and them then sending a number of students over every year, explains Niamh, who visited 15 schools in America this year to promote the new summer camp.
ALTHOUGH America represents a sizeable proportion of the Irish tourist market, only a small percentage of American visitors have traditionally been school children, she says.
"There just didn't seem to be a junior traffic coming in here from the US." Despite general praise, Ireland does not escape criticism from the students.
"The peanut butter is gross and there is too much butter on everything," says Sara Melville (15) from Boston, while tan Cunningham (15) from Vermont adds that he has noticed our bad driving habits. "They drive at 95 miles an hour and down narrow roads," he says, shaking his head in disbelief.
Although Mary Cronin (17) from Boston finds the Irish very friendly, she is astounded by the fact that "everybody smokes", while Alex Minshaw (15) from Sacramento in California, could easily have mistaken Dublin for the Wild West when he witnessed a brawl between a dozen youths in the Temple Bar area last Sunday night.
"I've seen a fist fight before but I've never seen a huge group of people in a brawl before," he says, shrugging his shoulders.
Before returning to the classroom to continue studying the Norman conquest, Trina Dixon turns to the problems in Northern Ireland: "The Irish always have something to fight about," she comments. "Ain't that the truth" - as they say in Orange County.
