Imagine making a collage of the Africa you’ve seen in the media.

Scenes from “The Lion King.”

National Geographic spreads.

Save the Children commercials.

CNN reports on civil war, rebel uprisings and disease.

Those are the images some Doane College students had in mind when they embarked on a semester-long journey that took them through eight countries of Eastern and Southern Africa.

And now that they’re home, they are aware at how off-kilter those images had been.

They were replaced with wonder and revelation:

For the beauty of the land, the lush vegetation and green mountainsides of Ethiopia.

For the diversity of the countries and cultures.

For the sincerity of the people.

For memories of watching lanterns bob on the great Malawi lake, as fishermen hauled in their catch in the middle of the night.

For the strangeness of seeing Ethiopian men hold hands, a sign of friendship, as they walked through the marketplace.

For the contradictory feelings of guilt and and peace that came from meeting people content to live with few material goods.

And surprises that came to them through their own self-discovery, from living each day in Africa.

Their leader, Betty Levitov, 63, could have readied her students for some of those feelings, but she did not want to spoil the surprise.

“I try not to show them too many images of what Africa will be like,” said Levitov, an African studies and English and African literature professor at Doane College in Crete.

“I don’t know that you can really prepare for it,” she said. “I just encourage them to get to know one another before we go.”

The classes she’s taught — this will be her third semester-in-Africa course — become like family.

Levitov recently finished a book about the courses, “Africa on Six Wheels: A semester on Safari,” a memoir of her travels in Africa. It will be released in February by the University of Nebraska Press.

But in general, Levitov tries to avoid telling the travelers too much. She wants students to be flexible and engage their creativity.

The students know her philosophy well:

Learn what you find and find what you learn.

And so students wander the cities on their own. Through apprenticeships, Levitov mandates they get to know the people.

For those who go, the semester is teaching and learning, 24/7.

“The intensity and intimacy is something you could never find on a campus,” Levitov said.

In four months, the Doane students moved from the Third World to the First World.

They mostly traveled by land as locals do, taking packed, dirty vans and buses known as dalladallas.

“You’d be riding this tin can on wheels crammed in with a dozen people holding their dinner, which is a live chicken,” said Tim Smith, 21, a mass communications major working toward a career in photojournalism.

“But as the trip progressed, we got so used to it we could fall asleep on the bus.”

The students began their journey in September in Ethiopia, where they climbed green mountains fresh from the rainy season, and toured old Christian churches carved in rock.

It was the most primitive country, and the favorite of Lindsy Mercer, 20, a junior mass communications major from Gothenberg.

“You realize how much we take our infrastructure for granted, our paved roads and our clean drinking water,” Mercer said.

The group then spent three weeks in Tanzania, where half of them worked in a home for children orphaned by the AIDS epidemic, and half reorganized and repainted a library at a high school.

By then, students were at ease with wandering on their own, Mercer said, though they were followed by children who begged for food and money for school.

Students took a safari in Kenya, then traveled to Malawi, where they swam each day in a freshwater lake as big and idyllic as a tropical ocean.

“Basically we were living in heaven,” said Laura Gieseking, 21, a psychology major from Nebraska City.

But it’s the tougher times Gieseking recalled most clearly.

“Some of the best memories I have are being shoulder to shoulder with regular people,” she said.

“Easier isn’t always better.”

In Malawi, each student completed a weeklong apprenticeship with a local, such as an artisan, fisherman or traditional healer.

Gieseking worked at a primitive prison, where she interviewed inmates about their lives.

“A lot of them were in there for very petty crimes, mostly for trying to get money for school fees,” she said. The men spend most of their days in overcrowded indoor cells without beds or chairs.

“They really appreciated us being there because their lives are so monotonous,” she said.

Smith worked with fishermen on Lake Malawi, who use canoes, lanterns and nets to catch sardine-like fish attracted to the light.

Of the dozen men he fished alongside, only one spoke English. “They laughed at me and I laughed with them,” he said.

Aimee D’Avignon, 20, a junior from outside Salt Lake City, worked with a wood carver, who turned out to be “a little shady,” she said.

She and another student soon realized he was selling illicit drugs alongside the wood nativity scenes, bowls and statues.

Another man they met carved wood all day and fished all night, working around the clock.

“He basically said, you have to do whatever it takes to put food on the table,” D’Avignon said.

Still, she wasn’t scared. She felt like her fellow students watched out for one another.

When you’re living in an African banda with a bathroom that’s barely separate from where several of your classmates are sleeping, you learn a few things about yourself.

“When you’re not feeling good, everyone knows. You just have to get over that. You had to get over being uncomfortable with yourself really quick,” D’Avignon said.

She learned to keep her composure even when embarrassed or confused. To go on being herself.

“I learned to be a lot more open,” D’Avignon said.

Levitov led them through yoga and Swahili classes in the mornings.

Students passed around paperbacks of African literature, and met in informal groups. “Like a book club,” said Levitov.

They wrote response papers and journaled and shared their writing aloud during evening seminars.

They stayed in places with bathrooms and running water and ate at restaurants or local holes-in-the wall or bought bags of groceries to take home.

D’Avignon said she began to enjoy exploring cities by herself.

“I’ve always been the kind of person who had to have someone with me.”

Those trips took her and others past the gut-wrenching faces of children who begged for food or money. They found the class and racial divides in the more developed countries hard to ignore, and hard to swallow.

They learned to cope and keep moving.

Levitov learned the value of living abroad while volunteering in Liberia in the late 1960s.

“I realized how narrow my own education was,” even though she’d earned a master’s degree.

Here in the United States, “We have a much inflated idea of what we know,” she said.

In more than 20 years at Doane, Levitov has taught classes all over the world during the three-week interterm semester between fall and spring semesters.

She developed the semester in Africa program in 1998, and aims to offer it every four years. She’s also made trips there on her own.

Maybe that’s why locals across the continent recognize and welcome her, Smith said.

“She’s an amazing woman. She’s wise and she knows so much about the world,” he said. “Being with a woman like that, you felt secure and confident and like you’re under the watchful eye of an experienced world traveler.”

With this trip, Levitov has taken more than 65 students to Africa.

“I have about a 20 percent return rate,” she said, from students who returned on subsequent trips with her or on their own.

Before they go, Levitov interviews students to assess their independence, personal grooming requirements, responsibility, health, financial stability, adherence to or love for routines, academic standing and generally “how high maintenance they are,” Levitov said.

“I don’t want any whiners. It has to be somebody who can adjust well to surprises and disappointments.”

Students pay regular tuition and living expenses are comparable to living on campus, she said.

Overall, the semester abroad costs about $3,700 per student, Levitov said, which included flights, transportation, lodging and about one-third of their meals.

“There are no luxury hotels. We cook a lot of our own food. We eat a lot of peanut butter,” Levitov said.

Still, they had fun.

From Malawi, they traveled to Zambia, where they tried adrenaline pumping extreme sports such as white-water rafting and swimming above a cataract of Victoria Falls.

Next, they explored the clean and westernized cities of Namibia, a former German colony with fast cars, shopping malls and disposable incomes.

They went sandboarding, like snowboarding, and — Levitov included — raced four-wheelers across dunes in the Namib Desert.

They wound up in Capetown, South Africa, a city as cosmopolitan as any the students had seen.

Coming full circle to a modern city was a good way of adjusting to returning home.

Africa seems unreal now, the students said.

Smith has grown a little more impatient with indulgences of the United States. He said he was impressed at how Africans he met spoke seldom of celebrities or entertainment, Smith said.

Instead, they wanted to talk with the students about politics, government, the ways they get by.

By January, that’s what the Doane students focused on as well.

Smith said he’ll miss the exhilaration of experiences like his 21st birthday in Ethiopia, spent climbing a mountain by day and feasting on a traditional meal with wine and dancing by night. “It’s going to be hard to top that,” he said.

The 15 students became like family, the students said.

“It’s surreal to seem them back on campus now, all bundled up in snowsuits,” said Smith.

Six young men, nine young women, all different goals. They reflect on what they learned.

“I was looking for some clarity and answers for what I want to do,” said Mercer.

While she did not find a specific answer, she hopes to help with international efforts someday.

“I was hoping it would change my outlook on life and be an awakening,” said D’Avignon, who plans to study international public health after graduation.

For Gieseking, “It affirmed for me that I could live far from home for an extended period of time, and I can deal with a much lower standard of living.”

She, too, wants to return.

Coming home, “We all realized how different it is over there. Everything is different,” said Mercer.

“We have so many choices.”

Reach Kendra Waltke at (402) 473-7303 or kwaltke@journalstar.com.