WASHOUGAL — Heather Kassel’s second-graders at Cape Horn-Skye Elementary had a young brush with wealth Friday morning, but it was short-lived.
As Kassel handed out wallets to her students, each one with a name tag taped on, their classmate, Zylus Italiano, told them to look inside. The students reached in their wallets, pulled out pink and blue bills and held them up high, comparing with each other who received a bill with the highest numbers.
It turned out they received Nepali rupees equaling about 35 cents each. The gifts were sent by Zylus, who was not in the room with them. Instead, he was video chatting with his classmates from the other side of the planet.
An image of Zylus, 7, wearing pajamas and sitting in a dark room, was projected onto a large screen in front of the class. He was in Nepal at the moment and checking in for his weekly visit.
The students started off their chat asking about the time change, which, at a little more than 12 hours, made it a bit before 9 a.m. Friday in Washougal and a little after 9 p.m. for Zylus and his parents, who are in the midst of a 180-day journey around the world.
The family left Washougal on Feb. 12 and are scheduled to return on Aug. 15. So far, they’ve visited Fiji, Australia, Bali, Thailand and Nepal. Still on the agenda are China, Mongolia, Zimbabwe, Morocco and Italy.
“I’ve always wanted to travel the world and realized that we could make this trip happen, and that Zy would be old enough to absorb a great deal and young enough to leave his life in Washougal without too much impact,” Heather Keller, Zylus’ mother, wrote in an email.
Keller wrote that she and her husband, Dave Italiano, are far enough along in their careers to save up for their dream trip and make it happen. She has her own business as a professional harpist; Italiano, an engineer who worked nearly 20 years for the same company, resigned his position.
He wrote in an email that part of what made him want to take the trip was advice from a friend: “If your dreams don’t scare you, you’re not dreaming big enough.” For Italiano, the trip was about family bonding and letting his son experience all different ways of living.
“My expectation was for Zy to get 24/7, six months of quality time with his family while we could,” Italiano wrote. “This trip is not necessarily about making lifetime memories for him, but rather foundational experiences which will shape his life. Much like acquisition of a first language, it will become part of the fabric of his being.”
While Keller and Italiano were excited for the trip and to bring Zylus along, they also knew it was important for him to keep up on his schoolwork. They started talking to Cape Horn-Skye Principal Mary Lou Woody about the trip a year before departing.
“It’s not something they did just spur of the moment,” Woody said.
Woody put Zylus in Kassel’s class because she knew Kassel was technologically savvy. Kassel started thinking about how to bring Zylus’ trip into her class in addition to his weekly video visits. She also made sure to send Zylus on his trip with his schoolwork for the rest of the year.
“I decided to create a booklet that we could follow all of his travels,” she said. “We are able to talk about continents, countries, capital cities and flags from this booklet. It opens up discussions about the spoken language of the country and currency, along with the population of the different countries.”
Zylus also files video reports from his various stops. Some highlights include petting a koala bear in Australia, taking part in the solar new year celebration in Thailand (it’s the year 2560 by that country’s calendar) and the Nyepi lunar new year observance in Bali (where it’s the year 1939 by their calendar).
He also liked eating scorpions in Thailand, which Zylus said tasted like “salty chips” in his report.
The students each have a chance to ask a question to Zylus each week, and a lot of questions on Friday focused on eating bugs, and the cows featured heavily in his Nepal video. Zylus told his classmates cows are sacred, and so people milk them but don’t kill them to eat.
In an email, Zylus wrote his two favorite parts of the trip so far were celebrating the different new years in Thailand and Bali.
“I loved it because you get to have a water fight, but no ordinary water fight: it’s a water fight that takes place throughout the whole entire country,” he wrote about Songkran, Thailand’s solar new year’s celebration.
Zylus and his family also regularly send packages to the class. Besides the wallets full of money, they’ve mailed the class shells and pumice from Fiji and a tube of Vegemite, which the class tasted with crackers. A majority of them enjoyed it. In the package the class opened Friday, Zylus and his family also sent a scarf to Kassel from Nepal.
“I make sure I don’t schedule anything else for this time every Friday,” Woody said. “The students are so excited to talk to him every week, and he always sits there and answers all of their questions, no matter what time it is. It’s my favorite part of Fridays.”
