Death at life's high point

Until the night of her death, Brenna Fessenden was relishing the life-changing experiences her parents dreamed she would have when they agreed to pay her way to Africa for a semester-long study-abroad program.

In poignant e-mails, the 20-year-old recounted her first brush with racism, newfound "skills in assertion" in an argument with a crooked cab driver and lugging buckets of water to her dorm for cold showers, a particular hardship for a young Rincon Valley woman who had a professed love of luxuriant bathing.

Even the sky above the West African nation of Ghana seemed weighted with meaning: "Elliot told me before I left that the stars here would be different, and at the time it made me sad," Fessenden wrote. "But in this moment, I just (feel) a vast connection."

Then came the night of Nov.20, when Fessenden and three American friends boarded a "Tro-tro," or minibus, outside a game preserve for a journey back to the University of Ghana in Legon, near the capital city of Accra.

The rollover crash that killed five people, including the UC Santa Cruz student and the bus driver, brought home in a tragic way the conundrum of how far to push the limits of authentic experience before going too far and risking injury or death.

More American students are taking part in study-abroad programs, fueled by the desire for youthful adventure and the need to understand a complex post-Sept. 11 world.

The vast majority have positive experiences and return home safely. But Fessenden's death underscores the risks of living abroad, particularly in developing countries, which are increasingly popular destinations.

Fessenden, a 2004 Maria Carrillo High School graduate, did nothing more than get on a crowded bus. But she had been warned of the dangers of traveling on Ghanian roads at night in numerous orientations and in a student handbook that she and her mother had gone over line by line, highlighting many passages and noting others with little red stickers.

Fessenden's reasons for pushing past those fears were laudable. She had not flown halfway around the world for the tour-bus version of Ghana. To get a truer sense of a country the size of Illinois and Indiana put together, she felt she had to experience it the way 22million people who live there do.

Ditching the school-sponsored tours had helped her get over an early bout of homesickness after her arrival in Ghana in late July.

"I'm happy to say that while the first couple of weeks of this excursion were a bit culturally shocking and filled with homesick nights, it has since turned into a really wonderful and exciting adventure," she wrote Aug.21. "This is probably mostly due to the fact that I've gotten out on some good independent travelling fun, and in doing so, have made some good friends and met awesome people."

The e-mails made Fessenden's parents aware of the risks she was taking, although in their minds, diseases and crime were higher on the list of things to worry about.

"I worried about her every day," said her mother, Kristie Gardner. "The first thing I'd say when she called was, 'Are you healthy?' I was worried about malaria because a lot of kids were getting it. I really did not fathom death by an accident."

The couple had agreed to Fessenden's request for more money for one last adventure to Mali, which involved a boat ride on the Niger River and traveling by caravan to Timbuktu.

"I didn't want her to be so close and not experience that," Gardner said. "She wanted it very badly."

Fessenden never made the Mali trip. She was killed one month before she was scheduled to leave Africa. Her body is expected to arrive today at San Francisco International Airport.

Gardner said she's most interested in having her daughter's belongings to help fill in the portrait of her time in Africa: the clothes she wore, the pictures she took, the items she bought.

"I want to see her stuff and her friends that were with her these past five months," Gardner said. "We haven't seen her since July26, and they had her every day."

The three young women who were with Fessenden the night she died cut short their trips and have returned home. Their feelings may best be summed up, however, by another student who is still in Ghana.

Elizabeth Pierce of Santa Rosa is a UC Berkeley student who lived in the same dorm as Fessenden. In an e-mail to her parents, she described how the fatal crash changed her opinion of the African country.

"Everything is different," wrote Pierce, a Summerfield-Waldorf graduate. "Although it could, and does, happen in any country, the fact is it did happen here, and because of that Ghana has been tainted by death in my mind. I love and respect this country, and always will, but can never forget what was lost here."

It may never be known what caused the fatal crash. For some reason the driver swerved suddenly on the dark road, jerking Fessenden and her friends awake.

Elizabeth Parker, a fellow student at UC Santa Cruz and Fessenden's roommate in Ghana, was riding in the bus that night and shared what happened next with Fessenden's family.

She said the bus rolled over several times, causing everyone inside to be upended. After the battered vehicle came to a rest, they took stock of their situation, only to realize Fessenden wasn't moving.

Smelling fuel, Parker pulled Fessenden from the wreckage with as much care as possible, worried about possible neck or spine injuries. She checked her friend's pulse, but she already was gone.

Eric Fessenden, Brenna Fessenden's father, said he was told medical help did not arrive at the crash scene for three hours. One of the American students used her cell phone to call her parents in the United States, leading to calls to the Education Abroad Program offices in Santa Barbara, an insurance office in Ghana and, finally, to emergency medical services to dispatch help.

"You know you're in dire straits when you're relieved your daughter died quickly," said Eric Fessenden, a teacher at Alta Mira Middle School in Sonoma. "But at least she didn't bleed to death before the ambulance arrived three hours later."

The delay reflects the realities of life in many developing countries, which have grown in popularity among students seeking to enrich their educational experience.

More than 200,000 young Americans studied abroad in the 2004-2005 academic year.

According to the Institute of International Education, while Europe continues to be the most popular region for U.S. students studying abroad the percentage studying there has declined by 18 percent since 1985/86. The percentage of students going to Latin America has doubled since 1985 to 14% this year. Other regions attracting more students include the Mideast, up 15 percent, and Africa, up 8 percent.

Fessenden showed courage in joining this trend and in selecting a nontraditional destination, when most of her peers are headed to London or Paris. She'd also traveled to China and went to Italy last summer with her parents.

"That's one thing we console ourselves with, that she got to fall in love and feel the pain of falling out of love, and travel to different cultures," her father said.

The family is planning a private memorial service at the Petaluma ranch where Fessenden lived the first years of her life. They've also established a college scholarship fund for a Maria Carrillo student at Community First Credit Union.

Gardner said she takes comfort in the fact her daughter was living her dream when she died.

"It's who her spirit was and how she wanted to travel," she said. "She wanted to immerse herself in another culture, and I think that's the only way she could have done it. It sounds cliché, but she was really happy and she died doing what she wanted.

"She could have died in a traffic accident on Farmers Lane and Fourth Street," Gardner said.

You can reach Staff Writer Derek J. Moore at 521-5336 or dmoore@pressdemocrat.com.