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But who would be reading this now?  We've all headed off in our various directions, the world we'd constituted on the ship now dispersed, new folks in our cabins.  Parents of students on the voyage--the main intended readers of this page from the start--can be relieved to have their children home or at least on land.  In San Diego, where my family spent a few days before heading home, we had, at the Zoo, what had become a typical sort of Semester at Sea experience, finding a familiar face in an unexpected setting, as we boarded the SkySafari or Skyfari or whatever it was called: there was a Semester at Sea student!--only this time with his dad, who thanked me, in the kind way many of you have through your kids, for this blog.  I've very much appreciated those comments, I can assure you, as the form's been new to me, and the 18th century poetic convention of setting one's words out on the water ("Go, little boat"), for anyone who might find them, necessarily occurred to me more than once.

In the end there were final exams and papers, the Alumni Ball, Convocation, packing, computer glitches, more packing, tears, more tears, rowdy waiting parents at the dock, a few last blasts of the ship's horn, last hugs, relinquishing our ship id's, customs, and land.  Though we'd seen a game in Yokohama, my family headed right for the ballpark, where, on the very first pitch of the game, my wife caught a foul ball: we were back; nothing to it.  I'm going to end this as I began it, with Cavafy's "Ithaka," which is as much a poem of returning as of venturing out--I heartily recommend my friend Theo Dorgan's response, if you want to know what comes after--but for us the end came at the end of two drives in San Diego, the first to Legoland, which, on the way home, gave us our last view of the ship, dwarfed by a big cruise liner but still solid, real, and ours, and the second to the airport, along the waterfront, which looked just like and completely different from so many we'd seen, and past the Broadway Pier, where our ship had been.  Now it was gone.

Ithaka

As you set out for Ithaka hope the voyage is a long one, full of adventure, full of discovery. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them: you’ll never find things like that on your way as long as you keep your thoughts raised high, as long as a rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body. Laistrygonians and Cyclops, wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them unless you bring them along inside your soul, unless your soul sets them up in front of you. Hope the voyage is a long one. May there be many a summer morning when, with what pleasure, what joy, you come into harbors seen for the first time; may you stop at Phoenician trading stations to buy fine things, mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony, sensual perfume of every kind— as many sensual perfumes as you can; and may you visit many Egyptian cities to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars. Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you are destined for. But do not hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you are old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you have gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you would not have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

--   Victor Luftig, Associate Professor  and Director, Center for the Liberal Arts  University of Virginia  Department of English  PO Box 400121  219 Bryan Hall  Charlottesville, VA 22904-4121  (434-98)2-5205  luftig@virginia.edu  

almosting

Final exams ended yesterday, and the Alumni Ball—a remarkably fancy dinner (we’re in the middle of the ocean!) for which students dressed formally, for the most part—was last night, in two seatings.  The faculty will be hard at work today computing final grades, and there are a series of programs designed to ease re-entry.  Tomorrow is Convocation and our final pre-port briefing.  Somehow packing and the computing of Customs declarations must happen too. 

The most remarkable thing about last night, I thought, was that somewhat heavy seas—maybe a bit heavier this morning, or maybe I was just up too late—seemed to trouble no one.  Not the waiters carrying full trays of soup—the crew in general get the biggest applause here, and surely deserve it—but not the rest of us either.  We lurched from side to side as we walked or sat, and we hardly noticed it at all.  The phrase “sea legs” isn’t sufficient to describe it. 

Jenna Lawrence from Columbia, who’s been teaching Marine Biology classes on the ship, had wanted all voyage to see an albatross but didn’t see one until yesterday, when Paul Muldoon, a poet who’s our most illustrious faculty member, came all the way from the stern to the bow to find her, in spite of his being up against a deadline.  And there it was, larger and more magnificent than one could have imagined, like everything at sea.

4 more nights

Certainly we have never been more like a typical college campus than these last couple of days: it’s exam time, and students have been hunkering down.  I met a student in a corridor yesterday who’d just completed his last exam—classes that have met on “A” days gave theirs yesterday, and the “B” classes (these are just scheduling designations and indicate nothing about the level or quality of the courses) will have theirs tomorrow, with a “Study Day” scheduled for today.  The faculty now face a very demanding time, with their grade deadlines fast approaching, and I am caught up in their haste, since I have 80 or so Global Studies papers to grade along with my preparations for the Convocation event that is scheduled for Tuesday afternoon and lots and lots of wrapping up (and packing).  The shipboard auction a few days ago included an item according to which Dean Vieira and I have to serve as waiters for a meal in his cabin tonight; that’s just as well, because in order to settle a conflict between staff members who wanted to hold a backgammon tournament in the faculty/staff/Lifelong Learners lounge this evening and faculty who wanted to be able to do their grading there, I volunteered my office for the tournament and offered to provide refreshment from the last dregs of my budget.  (That negotiation took much of yesterday morning, which will tell you a bit about what academic administration consists of.)  My family and I had a kind of farewell dinner in the special dining facility on Deck 5 last night—very pleasant, very celebratory, and as astonishing as everything else here: I mean, to be brought Cherries Jubilee in the middle of the Pacific!  So we are not entirely like a typical college campus.  We’ll be least so on Wednesday—a couple of days ago we had a logistics briefing in the Union to get ready for our final disembarkation in San Diego—at least from my point of view, because at home I’m used to the students’ leaving while the rest of us stay to get ready for the next round, the next semester, the next bit of writing.  But on Wednesday only the crew will stay, and the rest of us will say our goodbyes, transients that we are, have been.

the red-tailed tropics bird

 

We have our tug and have slowed way down: Honolulu’s right before us, and it’s a gorgeous, brilliant, sunny day. Everything gleams.  Planes are taking off and zooming right above us. In comparison to our usual muted dawn arrivals, this one looks, well, American, though our pre-port briefing last night made clear how distinct and important is Hawaii’s history.  We are not—except perhaps for the four Hawaiian students who were at the center of that wonderful briefing—home yet.

 

I just stood and watched our arrival at the spot on Deck 5, just around the corner from my office, where the red-tailed tropic bird sat for a day or two this week.  It turned up there, an astonishingly beautiful creature, one morning, a long, pointed, red tail and a sharp red beak book-ending feathers that my wife properly identified as just like angels’ in Renaissance paintings.  Why was it there?  Prof. Doughty, who knows, said it was “puffed,” needed a rest, and he and a student with some animal rescue experience set about trying to feed it a bit of fish and water.  The crew cordoned off the area—we could see the bird either from a distance on the deck or close up through a window, and every time I went in or out of my office someone was there, speculating on its state.  And then one day at around 3 PM, an hour or so after its most recent feeding, it was gone.  It had flown off after its hitch, ready, Prof. Doughty thinks, to move on.  It advertised itself so obviously as a metaphor or symbol for something about our voyage that I can hardly believe it was real—maybe that’s what it’s a symbol of—but I suspect I’ll figure it out at home some time.

 

We must stay on the ship today during our refueling here, and then we’ll all get off for one last round of adventures in Hilo tomorrow.

 

fog

A few observations, though today is a day when observation is in fact out of the question:

 

1)      That’s because now that the sea is calm, we’re encased in an astonishingly thick, white fog.

2)      Yesterday and the day before our faculty bird specialist, Professor Doughty, spotted a number of albatrosses, a couple of which came very close to the ship.  These he has now identified, with the help of a student photographer, as black-footed albatrosses and Laysan albatrosses.

3)      Last night Paul Muldoon, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet on our faculty, gave a reading from his works. These include not only poems but song lyrics, so he interspersed his readings with sound recordings of the songs being performed by his band and also a student-filmed video.

4)      The other night we all went to the crew talent show, a boisterous event filled with good spirit, whoops, and hollers.  The excellence—the efficiency and the generosity—of the ship’s crew is one of the most remarkable features of the voyage.  I’m not sure it can ever be conveyed sufficiently.

5)      Even as I write this, the fog is receding a little.  I say that with slight regret, because the fog has seemed appropriate in a way.  Tomorrow, after all, comes a day we’ve all been long anticipating—at least those of us on the voyage’s administrative team have long anticipated it, since it has muddled every schedule we’ve tried to concoct.  Tomorrow is the day that, because of our crossing the International Date Line, we will experience twice.  It happens to be the seventh birthday of one of the ship’s passengers, and his parents are being very creative about providing him with a celebration worthy of a double birthday without setting unreasonable precedents.

 

rolling

We are at sea again, and, given how windy and rainy it was during the end of our time in Yokohama, the rough seas are no surprise.  It seems to me that most of us have long anticipated this next stretch as the most challenging part of the voyage—simply because we will now have so much scarcely-interrupted time at sea.  But not many of us (the exceptions being the few folks who have previous experience with this kind of SAS itinerary) could have imagined the particular challenges of facing this long stretch after a series of successive intense times in a sequence of Asian ports.  Since we reached Singapore, on March 22, which now seems years and years ago, our time on land has been scarcely interrupted, by brief (two- or three-day) periods at sea.  It’s not just that we’ve gotten used to having lots of mostly free time in the ports; it’s that we have, most of us, rather exhausted ourselves in the ports.  Last night, as we left, it was evident that a lot of folks are weary.  I’m told that lots of folks have colds.

 

Still, everyone I saw or spoke to yesterday seemed to be in very good spirits.  I think the fact that we arrived in Japan at the height of the cherry blossoms made especially vivid to everyone our astonishing good fortune at being able to do all this, and the fact that people dispersed so much in these last few ports means that there is a lot to share and celebrate now that we’re all back together.  It’s rather easy, even automatic, to contextualize whatever challenges we’ll now confront—we’ve to conclude our semester between here in Hawaii, with each class meeting four times between now and April 23 (though that schedule’s made a bit merciful by some days when we won’t have regular classes scheduled: today’s “reflection day,” which will have no classes until our final meeting of the Global Studies discussion sections at 3 PM; then a “reading day” next Saturday so that students can get caught up in anticipation of the final class sessions on April 22 and 23; and finally a “study day” on April 24, so that everyone can be ready for final exams, which begin, with the Global Studies exam, on the day after we leave Hawaii, April 26) and final papers to write, exams to get ready for, etc.   This part of the voyage will be further elongated by a sequence of time changes that will each cost us an hour (of sleep, usually), and by our crossing of the International Date Line, which will mean we’ll have April 20 twice.  Still, the sea’s vastness—we’ve a light blue sky today and whispy white clouds above the big “wine-dark” waves—means we can’t help but be aware of a bigger picture, in relation to which what we’ll be doing for most of the remainder of the voyage seems both urgent and small.

 

Kobe

Dean Vieira’s reference, at last night’s logistical pre-port session, to Japan as the last of our international ports drew deep groans, and not the kind of ironical half-chortles that similar comments had elicited on earlier occasions: the end of the voyage is now in sight, and that’s the source of a good deal of unhappiness, at least on those occasions when we’re made to acknowledge the facts of calendar life.  We’re in Kobe now, and the crew is just now going through the rapid and odd process the rest of us completed in the past hour, according to which a squad of Japanese officials has us all marching through the Union, in one door and out the other, having our temperatures’ taken by a machine that looks like a camera on a tripod and that doesn’t even require us to slow down as we walk past.  We have been warned that this country’s serious in its desire to limit the spread of viruses and such—we’ve all been coached on where and how it is and isn’t OK to sneeze—and this temperature-taking process thus is for us comprehensible, even if bizarre.  Out the window is a kind of scene we’ve become rather accustomed to since it first appeared to us in Cape Town—a busy city with high mountain walls behind it; in the foreground lots of ships; and on shore lots of containers. 

 

And if you’ve been reading this, you may by now feel you know the drill.  In a few minutes a US State Department official will board and brief us; we’ll then go through an immigration process; and we’ll then disperse to various places around this country, reconvening here a few days later to compare notes and get ready for what’s next to come.  When we return this time we really will be in the home stretch, mostly final class sessions, final papers, final exams.  One day off the ship in Hawaii , but otherwise all at sea.  A friend of mine who sailed last year told me that on final arrival he and his family and everyone else he knew on board would have been content for the ship to turn around and start over again, and that now seems entirely understandable to me.  (We’ve a family member who doesn’t like me even to say the words “San Diego,” for all my promises of baseball and zoos and long longed-for food items and such.) 

 

I think all the time how different this would have been if we’d gone, as many SAS voyages do, in the other direction, if we’d begun with our big Pacific crossing and then this rapid barrage of ports, one after the other.  I feel as if our itinerary has been just right, but I suspect every voyager feels that way.  Today we are in Japan; it’s just three days ago we were in China, fifteen days ago in Vietnam, a little over three weeks ago in India. How can that be?  India feels so literally as if it were in another lifetime—I’m perhaps influenced by time spent in Buddhist temples, which will resume tomorrow in Kyoto—that it seems impossible to imagine putting it together with our time here, though that is just what, via email, I just asked the faculty to think about doing with their students on the day after we leave Yokohama.  None of this seems, in any case, like part of a life I can recognize as mine: I never thought I’d see these places.  Indeed, I spent months before the voyage saying that I’d always been happily resigned to that fact of missing these places.  Now that seems like a very stupid thing to have said even once; now I think that visiting China ought to feel like an obligation for every educated American.  The more this goes on, the more we’re struck by how little we know of the world.

 

It’s sunny here and cool, just lovely, though rain’s expected for later in the week.  And everyone I saw in the long line passing by that weird machine seemed hearty and happy and ready to go.

 

PS And I wrote that and then the diplomat came on, and then some Kobe city officials, and now it’s the evening, and everyone’s all around everywhere.

 

ports

Hong Kong’s harbor at night is a magnificent thing to see, lights on massive buildings flashing everywhere in deliberate patterns.  This is one of the rare stops on this voyage when we’re docked in a central location—the cruise ship terminal is a magnificent shopping mall in its own right (as one of our Chinese students noted during our cultural pre-port session a couple of nights ago), and from there one can get on the famous Star Ferry or pick up any one of a number of different forms of transportation—and yet it’s also one of the stops from which we’re dispersing most fully.  A hundred or so people will remain on the ship when it leaves tomorrow night for Shanghai, while many of the rest headed off today in the direction of Beijing or Tibet or elsewhere.  Some folks will leave us for good in Shanghai—among them Senator Charles Robb and his wife, Lynda Johnson Robb, who’ve been with us since Cape Town; our visiting medical team from the University of Virginia will depart then too.  And last night at the logistical pre-port session Dean Vieira noted that we’ve only about 30 days left, an observation that drew painful, plaintive groans.  Here, for the first time on the voyage, our ship seems small, dwarfed by the buildings’ size and brightness.  Like any community we’ve been diminished too by the passage of time—by injury, by loss, by error—even as the community has almost visibly grown in stature through all it has learned and experienced. 

 

It has long seemed to me that one of the most delightfully unbearable human types is the first-semester freshperson home for Thanksgiving break: the beginning of college is jerry-rigged to provide such a person with an inflated sense of how much she or he has learned, and that trip home at Thanksgiving is necessarily an occasion to show high school friends that one has become...something more.  And parents, poor parents, and other relatives are almost incidental to those demonstrations of grandeur: the showing off, like the mating displays of some exotic birds, are very precisely directed at particular peers, and while the freshperson may be ready to primp and perform for those high school friends, the relatives are simply supposed to concede that that freshperson has outgrown them.  The parents and aunts and grandparents gathered at the Thanksgiving table are to be only mute witnesses to the freshperson’s heft.  Now one thing that has been obvious to me about Semester at Sea is that it necessarily renders its participants insufferable for an extended period after their return: all they want to talk about is the darn voyage, how they went to this place and that, had this experience and that experience, were dumbfounded by this and that newly discovered aspect of life.  The returned Semester at Sea voyager, that is, is much like the returned freshperson, only worse, much worse.  (I’m already resigned to a life of a kind of isolation come May, in which I’ll be able to converse only with people who were with me on this voyage and maybe some folks who were on others.)

 

The first goal of all the adults on the ship is to keep the students safe, to return them home well to their families.  A not-too-distant second comes some notion of growth: to my mind the program is still developing a precise idea of what that growth might entail, but some version of it will, I feel sure, be evident in every returned passenger.  In the meantime, any reader of this blog should feel confident, if, as is likely, you are reading it with one particular voyager in mind and are wondering where exactly that voyager is right now, that that voyager is walking a little taller, possessed of a new kind of alertness, able to anticipate situations that some weeks ago would have seemed baffling.  Travel’s never easy on the folks who stay at home—I often think of the end of Conrad’s The Secret Sharer, one of the strangest of sea-going tales, which ends with what I’ve always thought of as a kind of perfect gesture epitomizing the situation of the one left behind, a kind of nautical version of what one does when one foists an umbrella or an overcoat on some departing house guest who’s headed off into a stormy night—but what should reassure you is the sense that we wanderers are, by this point of the voyage, doing it a good bit differently, have gotten better at it.  You’d might as well relish that, because when we all get home in a few weeks we’re going to be a bit tough to take.

lately

Since my last we have had

a)      the Sea Olympics, which, aside from an opening invocation from our now departed (for vacation) and much missed senior crew member, Kostas, quoting Homer and referring to matters of honor and sportspersonship, in no particular way resembled any other Olympics I have ever heard of (though, having been eliminated in a matter of seconds from the only event in which I participated, three-legged dodge ball, I may not be the best commentator on the event),

b)      two days of classes in the midst of what must be, for the faculty and perhaps the students, the most challenging part of the voyage, with class sessions only sporadically between extended stays in various Asian ports,

c)       the Talent Show, which, while exhibiting extraordinary skills in dance, music, comedy, etc., seemed to me most remarkable for its duration, of a kind I’d previously, in the cultural realm, associated only with Wagner,

d)      a day devoted to preparation for Vietnam, which showed off our educational capacities at their best: a splendid overview from Ted Farmer, one of America’s foremost experts on the history of Asia; a one-of-a-kind interview with Senator Chuck Robb and Mrs. Lynda Johnson Robb about their experiences during the American war in Vietnam; similar reflections from our marketing professor, Donald Howard, who served in the air force; and very moving reflections from two students and one resident director of Vietnamese descent, including recollections of their family members’ experience during the evacuation of Saigon, followed that evening by brilliant preparatory talks on Singapore from Farmer (again), business professor Molly Takeda, and M.I.T. anthropologist Stefan Helmreich (the last of these perhaps the most impressive performance of the voyage so far, in my opinion, and I say that not only because the Hotel Director told me the next morning that he’d liked it and assumed it had been I who’d given it), and

e)      a day, yesterday, in Singapore, which left a young member of my family perplexed as to whether he liked the food better there or in India, a quandary that, as I’m sure you’ll agree, every young person must come to be faced with at some time or other.

We’ll reach Saigon in two days.  The sea’s calm, aside from the occasional floating by of large red oil drums (!), and, at lunch, a school of dolphins swimming in the ship’s wake on the starboard side.

 

after India

Just two observations about our students as we lose the lights of India:

 

1)      My family and I went to Kathikali performances on successive nights and by unlikely (so the director at the second performance assured me) coincidence happened to see the same scene performed by two different companies.  Both were astonishing—the form belies everything I’ve tended to assume about drama, in spite of my having received good, relevant tutelage by folks who know better, and I’ll need to start over, in a way, now—so that the most apparent difference was between the two audiences.  Our students, confronted with something new and, to most of our eyes, very strange, with all kinds of baffling cues about gender, language, and bodily movement, both behaved well and clearly got it.  The next night, a crowd of French adults whistled and hooted and misbehaved and clearly hadn’t a clue what they were seeing. 

2)      Tonight the usual post-port “reflection” was a bit different from the usual: we had an hour beforehand in which students and faculty presented work they’d done in India, and then the usual “sharing” that happens on most such nights at 8 PM was replaced by small group discussion.  The students were very impressive at both—none more so, clearly, than the “gap year” student who (I’ll not name her here because I haven’t asked her permission) under the auspices of a Presidential scholarship is doing research on women’s issues in the various reports and gave a powerful talk about her interviews in India with victims of sex trafficking. It was the kind of serious undergraduate work one would hope would go on in a program like this.

 

At the end of the first session there was a splendid exchange between two members of our faculty, John Downing and Chandra Ranade, about the value of “anecdotes”—which are, after all, the best we sometimes muster, any of us, students or faculty, during these short visits—and about how they can lead, under the best of circumstances, to further research.  We none of us, those of us (like I) who stayed in Kerala and others who traveled far, saw much of India.  But we all saw enough to bring something back, to bring something to bear.  The headline in Wednesday’s Hindu, reporting on a new census, reads, “Half of India’s homes have cellphones, not toilets.”  How do these things happen?  How do they get undone, improved?  One way, I suppose, is that someone says, “This is so,” and some others then say—John Downing talked about Naipaul and the million mutinies—“This must change.”  And a long time after, maybe, something different this way comes.  One way to hear the “This is so” would be to ask a student.  It’s best when it comes from them.

calm

We have had, knock on wood, calm seas for a bit now: their sunny, flat beauty is a lovely luxury.  There is, accordingly, something of a routine to our regular class days by now too—we have passed, or are passing, through midterms, and people are getting a clearer sense of where we all are, academically and otherwise.  By tomorrow the run-up to arrival in the next port will begin in earnest, but really it has already begun, because two “interport students” from India have been with us since Mauritius.  They were just here in my office to talk about their role in tomorrow’s cultural pre-port briefing (our ritual for our second night before any port), and when I asked them what they might say about how Semester at Sea has struck them, they took great delight in celebrating the openness of American students.  For just a second I was able, for one of the rare times on this voyage, to remember myself at 20 and to recall how the English and Irish students I met then would comment on our American “openness,” our splendid self-serving naïve Yankee gab. 

 

There is also, I confess, a little shadow over this sequence of the voyage, occasioned by some bad behavior during our brief stay in Mauritius.  But that is being processed in a steady, deliberate way, and there is reason to hope that it will have been only an unhappy exception.

 

The best ‘the-dog-at-my-homework’ excuse I have ever received came about 15 months ago, when I was having to pester all the faculty on our voyage to submit their syllabi for approval by the relevant UVA departments.  One among them, Rob Thomas, an astonishingly accomplished professor from Montana-Western, explained that he was about to leave for Nepal to train sherpa guides in geology; he’d be on or near Mt. Everest for some weeks and wouldn’t have an internet connection—could his syllabus be a little late?  Well, yes.  He’ll be lecturing about his experience in Nepal in the Union tonight after dinner.

a passage to India

My silence here has a simple and unhappy explanation: beginning two days short of Cape Town the heavy seas began to get to me, and between Cape Town and Mauritius—which we left earlier today—I alternated my required sessions here at the desktop computer, or at the nearby table where I meet with students faculty and staff, with recuperative sessions in bed.  I am hoping that perhaps I may now have found the right sized patch to allow me to be both awake enough and other than ill enough so that I can fulfill my duties.  But with that very sentence the boat resumed its steady rocking—big waves now, and my desk chair wants to lurch back, and my desk drawers have already swung open.  We’ll see.

 

Cape Town’s, and South Africa’s, combination of a horrific political and social past, and a not much redeemed present, with astonishing natural wonders is hard to put together in one.  It needs instead half a dozen headings or more.  Our morning spent in Mauritius—which, as you may know—came, because of the heavy seas, a full day late, was half so long as originally scheduled, and came only after we had announced on the ship that no disembarkation was possible: that seems a much clearer and digestible (if I can, without excessive risk, use that word just now) mélange.  Or rather it was such an extraordinary mix of so many elements—Chinese, India, African, European—that, especially given the brevity of our visit, it seemed much easier simply to take as a mélange, an impressive one, a moving one, but a kind of quick glance at a collage, the individual materials of which will have to be returned to at another time.

 

But now, per Whitman:

 

Passage to more than India! 

O secret of the earth and sky! 235

Of you, O waters of the sea! O winding creeks and rivers! 

Of you, O woods and fields! Of you, strong mountains of my land! 
Of you, O prairies! Of you, gray rocks! 

O morning red! O clouds! O rain and snows!  O day and night, passage to you! 240   

 

O sun and moon, and all you stars! Sirius and Jupiter!  Passage to you!    

 

Passage—immediate passage! the blood burns in my veins! 

Away, O soul! hoist instantly the anchor! 

Cut the hawsers—haul out—shake out every sail! 245

Have we not stood here like trees in the ground long enough? 

Have we not grovell’d here long enough, eating and drinking like mere brutes? 

Have we not darken’d and dazed ourselves with books long enough?

 

Well, no.  But give us time…

 

 

fins

All afternoon yesterday you could see, if you looked closely, little pops on the ocean’s surface, followed each time by a strange skidding, hovering that shortly disappeared back into the water: little diving birds, I thought at first, but no, they were too small; little flying fish they were, lots of them, using the surface to escape (so one of our scientists explained to me) our big hulking ship.  Yesterday a faculty member saw a hammerhead shark, and someone else saw a whale up ahead.  And this morning I glanced up from my computer screen here just long enough to see fins—several, I thought, looking, at their distance, as if they made up one big beast’s back (so this is how those sea monsters got their shapes on the old maps), but no, I think they were a group of dolphins, on their way.

 

These days and the time when we return to the ship after Cape Town are mid-term time here, with lots of papers due, lots of exams scheduled, a certain amount of tension all around, the first time on the voyage when the halls of the Explorer have really reminded me of what I know from previous semesters at other schools—with the main difference being our steady swaying and rolling.

Reading the DAILY GRAPHIC

I’m months away, I think, from being able to say anything about Ghana that I’d trust: none of the assumptions that I’m used to relying on about time, about poverty, about religion, about government services, etc. seem to hold in the same ways there, and some of what I saw—at the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and on the half-built highways passing the businesses that some might use to illustrate Ghana’s status as a kind of model of development—so fully dispenses with basic historical narratives I’ve relied on, that I’d need to reconstruct them or assemble news ones before I could begin a sentence with the words “Ghana is….”

 

But there is something I think I can now say about Semester at Sea as a program.  I think my experience during the time the ship was docked at Tema might have been in some ways typical: I went on two SAS-run field trips and made two other trips into Accra, one in a private car and one on the shuttle that SAS had arranged to take people from the dock.  Some students may have made more such trips, but I’d guess that quite a few had approximately the same number I had.  And here’s what I find: having picked up Thursday’s edition of the Daily Graphic, the main newspaper, I have enough knowledge now to understand a bit of the context for the great majority of the stories.  Here on page 1 is something about the government fraud scandal that we were told about by a State Department official who boarded and briefed us the morning we arrived; the lead article is about the ceremonial opening of the “George Walker Bush Motorway,” built with a Millennium grant from the US, which was described by the guide on the bus that took me and others on that highway on our way to the dungeons.  Inside, there is a full page headed “Tamale in Focus,” a set of articles about the place where our Ghanaian interport visitor Sheriff Ghale is from.  And a page of “Regional news” describes a workshop designed “to encourage the use of local languages,” a seminar on “electronic waste,” and a forum on maternal care: each of these relate to topics discussed in particular courses offered on the ship. 

 

Semester at Sea, as a study-abroad program, faces reasonable skepticism about its relatively brief stays in various countries.  But if the quality of the programming is such so that it can render legible the crucial events of the times and places of its visits—even if that is but a passing knowledge, which mightn’t be expected to apply if the same newspaper were picked up a year later—then, as a series of comparative experiences, the knowledge it is offering seems to me to have real traction.  As in any kind of education, the responsibility must ultimately fall upon the student to retain the knowledge and to build upon it: it will be up to our students to extend the ship’s teaching, and their in-port experiences, so that the same set of newspapers (or web sites, or briefing memos) could in fact legible to them some time from now.  But the slice of Ghana’s present to which we were exposed, coming in between similar slices from Manaus and Cape Town, seems to me to have been an extraordinary privilege.  And if my experience was at all typical, the mnemonic force of what we saw, heard, and did seems likely to make a lifetime of building upon the brief visit to Ghana almost unavoidable.

 

We sailed yesterday past the Prime Meridian.  I’m told that the captain and the crew made jokes about making sure none of us would miss the spot—that there is a buoy there, that one can pick up mail at that buoy, etc.  No, it’s not easy to spot these things.  But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t, in some important sense, there.

 

Neptune

The musician and educator Sheriff Ghale’s time on the ship has been a miracle of sorts: he has done more, and done more well, and done more good, than any person could reasonably have been expected to do in the same circumstances.  Having arrived just as seas got rough, he had to contend with the same seasickness as most of the rest of us—which scuttled the first rehearsal of the little faculty band we’d organized for him to use to demonstrate to the rest of us what he was hoping to work on musically during his stay.  But a day later he was up and around and making fine things happen.  He has visited, by my count, twelve different classes, speaking about Ghana in relation to subjects ranging from social media to sexuality to prayer.  And his performances in our big lecture hall, the Union, have been awe-inspiring. 

 

Take this past Wednesday: from 8 to 9 PM he gave a talk on the Ghanaian music industry, drawing on his own experiences to help us understand the cultural and economic differences between Southern Ghana, which has been the focus of most of the country’s population growth and development, and Northern Ghana, where he is from, which has had much less; then from 9 to 10 PM, he offered a musical tribute to Bob Marley (whose birthday had passed on the day of our highest swells) that was beautiful and moving.  I know I’ve never before seen anyone give a compelling lecture and then immediately give an equally compelling concert—it was astonishing, all of it. 

 

Then, the next night, having visited five different classes that day alone, he collaborated with our two Brazilian students, two other students, and our ethnomusicologist, Julie Strand, on a comparison, via performance, between Brazilian and West African music.  He’ll speak tonight on a panel alongside Professor Strand, Professor Chandra Ranade (who has done substantial work for the World Bank in Ghana), and our visiting Ghanaian student, this comprising our usual “cultural pre-port,” letting everyone know what to anticipate by the way of food, opportunities. Everyone on the ship’s quite excited about our arrival in Ghana, not just because of the excitement of the destination but because we’ve been now a long while on the Amazon and the Atlantic.  Yet for all that happy anticipation, we have—or at least I have—been relishing the disorientation or reorientation of being surrounded by nothing but sea all this week.  A few minutes ago I glanced up and saw, for the first time in a week, a passing ship, and I felt mildly offended, as if it had trespassed on the long vista I’d grown accustomed to.

 

Neptune Day has come and gone since my last posting.  The students and many others celebrated it with gusto: as per ‘tradition,’ many submitted themselves to being doused in (faux) fish entrails, and a somewhat smaller number (64, I think I heard, including at least one faculty member) had their heads partly or completely shaved.  (The Spa on board offered to finish the job cleanly for five bucks a pop, and I’m told they had many takers.) Many students, perhaps all of them, posed individually with my fellow dean Bob Vieira in his King Neptune garb—he was very green and carried a trident.  I offered the following ceremonial welcome, which reflects, among other things, how intense are my football loyalties and how limited is my recollection of my high school Latin :

O Deus Neptunes, omnes nobis bowus downus ad tuus, Grandis Kahuna.  Protectamos nos de grandis aqua et maximi swellami; non compelus ad vomitus nos pasta.  Tuus potentia magis grandis sum qui Bob Vieiraus. Non subsudo nos in ignominus disgracis patheticus cum New Englandus Patrioti.  Permitti nos ad cruces vos mari cum securito and felicito et interdum Dies Taco.  Gratitudum accepto di tutti ad Semesterio ad Mario.

 

The hair will grow back before we reach San Diego, but what is even more reassuring about Neptune Day is the way, in spite of its being so atypical, it fit in with the agenda here.  Technically (if that’s ever the right word to apply to this kind of fête), and according to genuine tradition, Neptune Day ought to happen on the day we first cross the Equator: it was delayed to suit the academic schedule.  By the time it was done, students could be found all around the ship settling down to read, and by 4 PM that day they were all in their discussion groups for the Global Studies course, the first of four such sessions on the voyage. I visited quite a few discussions and found them serious, intense, and productive.  And that night we were all in the Union for Sheriff’s double-presentation.  It’s possible to brook, even to encourage, a good bit of the festive here (I will admit that I served the other night on the ‘panel’ for a kind of mock game show, based on distinguishing the real definitions of words from ones we’d made up, called Liars Club, complete with an emcee, loud music, and—for others, anyway—zany garb), because the default seems to be a good level of engagement.  Attendance at optional academic programs in the evenings has been very high—my administrative colleagues who are veterans, between them, of many previous voyages, tell me they’ve never seen it so consistently high; the drop-in writing center, a relatively new part of Semester at Sea, is doing steady and intense business; the students who come to see me about administrative problems are thinking, all the while, about substantive ones. 

 

Last night Prof. Ranade modestly concluded his quite wonderful lecture on recent Ghanaian economic history by saying that the hard work that he and his team of three fellow World Bank economists had done in Ghana over the years could not match what the 750 of us might do by way of observation and analysis when we get there next week.  It was a precise and as a profound account of what this program’s potential as I have yet heard.

 

seasickness after Brazil

We’re on seas rough enough so that even the folks on the faculty and staff who’ve sailed before are faltering: a number of classes and other events were cancelled or postponed yesterday, and there were a lot of empty seats at meals.  I had my worst stretch on Sunday afternoon, but a prescribed patch seemed to restore me; I’ve since continued to find it hard to sit here at my computer and type, and the drowsiness that I thought of as temporarily resulting from sleep lost to the ship’s rocking and vibrating now seems to me a steady side effect of the patch.  People have been good humored about it all, as far as I can tell, and some folks—ranging from very small children, to some students, to the elderly—seem utterly unaffected, aside from everyone’s having to do a more dramatic version of the weaving drunken-looking dance as we move around the ship.  Global Studies, the course all the students are required to take, which meets in the big Union room, was, for the first time, broadcast to the ship’s cabins yesterday out of sympathy to students who weren’t going to get beyond those cabins.  I sat there in person—the class is always interesting, thanks to our splendid instructor for it, Alex Nalbach—and so got to hear it punctuated by an enormous slap each time the front of the hull, right under the Union, slapped down hard after a big wave.  The crew seem entirely unmoved and in control, and they’re nice not to snicker at us.  The ship’s doctor has medicine he can prescribe, and I’m not sure anyone knows for sure, when things get better, whether we’ve found our sea legs or just found the right dose.

 

These inevitable challenges of life at sea follow a wonderful visit to Brazil.  Some folks left for flights to Rio soon after we docked in Manaus; most of the rest of us undertook various sorts of visits to the Amazon—day trips, overnight trips, even evening trips in search of caymans—and explored the astoundingly energetic city.  I’ve never seen a city that was so evidently in the process of being reclaimed by nature: the jungle surges up through streets, wrecking the sidewalk, and seems to begin displacing any building that falls even briefly into disuse. And the teeming jungle is simply astonishing.  Our two days’ sailing back down its brown (or yellow, as folks in Brazil seem to say) waters was more thrilling for the fact of our all having had a closer look at what we could see more distantly from the ship.  Our rocking began almost immediately upon those waters’ turning dark blue again, the sea.

 

We were joined in Manaus by a Ghanain musician, Sheriff Ghale, who is tasked with helping connect Brazil and West Africa for us through performance (and whose first session drew a big and happy overflow crowd into the piano lounge, but who has succumbed a bit to the common illness since), and a Ghanaian student.  Our students continue to get rave reviews from faculty and staff: fewer behavior problems or late arrivals for the ship’s departure, and more attendance at and engagement with academic programs (again, prior to the rocking) than the veteran administrators recall from previous voyages.  Once we get past the worst of this weather, we should be able to take advantage of the long stretch—still most of a week—prior to our arrival in Ghana so that classes can get into their rhythms (not quite established before Brazil, by which time classes had only met three times each, with even those meetings interrupted by our visit to Dominica).

 

I should mention that following upon the example of the Spring ’11 voyage, we had the Super Bowl telecast in the Union and on the ship’s cabins Sunday night.  I watched the first half with my family in our  cabin and the second half in my office.  It was a little strange to see the car ads and such from on the ocean.  There’s a lot that doesn’t count out here, a lot else that does.

 

Victor Luftig, Academic Dean, Spring 2012 Voyage of Semester at Sea

 

arriving in Manaus

We’re just at this moment docking in Manaus: or so I gather by the ship’s becoming still and by the dozens of little boats and big ships passing by us, some waving, others evidently on their way to daily business in the context of which a big ship like ours is either irrelevant or unsurprising.  There’s a quite majestic white bridge in view from my office window, here on the port (left) side, but it’s actually the starboard (right) side that’s pulling up to the dock, so I don’t yet have a view of the city.

 

There’s less for me to say about the ship community as a whole when we get to ports, for all we disperse—if you want to get a sense of where many of us are headed, look at http://www.ise.virginia.edu/field/s12/BRAZIL%20S12%20FINAL.pdf

Last night we had the mandatory pre-port logistical briefing—safety tips from deans and the doc, mostly; logistical information on trips from the field office; good spirits; lots of excited anticipation.  Brazil Day yesterday was splendid—a great session in the morning with the State Dept. delegation, another (on careers) in the afternoon, a wonderful music and dance session at 5 led by our music prof., Julie Strand, and featuring a number of students, including two on board who are from Brazil, and who sang a lovely bossa nova number together.  Also, I noticed as I went by, lots of kids hanging out by the ship’s pool.  And meanwhile the Amazon continued to pass by, amazing at every moment; I’m glad we’ll pass that same way again in a few days on our way to Ghana.

 

(Brazilian television will meet the ship, by the way, to interview the State Dept. folks and the Brazilian students.)

 

A great line, by the way, from John Matel, one of the visiting diplomats, about US efforts to get another nation committed to more energetic peacekeeping efforts: “Now they’re involved, but they’re not committed.  That may not seem like an important distinction to you.  But when you have bacon and eggs in the morning, the pig is committted; the chicken is involved.  We want them to be committed.”  (He says he didn’t make that up, but he’s where I got it, so I’m citing him for it.  Google gives many references to it but doesn’t say who made it up.)

 

This was a part of the voyage I couldn’t really imagine during all the months of preparation.  And now that I am here, I still can’t.

 

 

 

the Amazon

It’s impossible here to keep track of what day of the week it is (because things work not according to a weekdays/weekend schedule but rather an at sea/in port one): we know the days on board by their class designations—yesterday was B3, the third meetings of the classes that meet on the B days.  Today there are no classes, because it’s “Brazil Day,” a day of programming to prepare us for our arrival in Manaus tomorrow.

 

So that it means it was, when?, two nights ago, the night of A3, when two of our faculty members, a biologist from Columbia University named Jenna Lawrence, and an endangered birds expert from Texas-Austin named Robin Doughty, offered an evening session on “What to Look for on the Amazon”: we’d entered the Amazon that afternoon but at a point too wide so that by nightfall one could only see the brown water, nothing on shore.  The presentation was wonderful—all kinds of information on birds from Robin, more on every other kind of creature from Jenna, presented in the most compelling and humorous ways. 

 

We got to put it to work yesterday, as we awoke to a visible shore dense with green, and Robin and another visitors were often on deck pointing out parrots flying high overhead.  Robin said he’d spotted 10 different species.

 

My main work yesterday was hosting three US State Department visitors.  They sat in on classes most of the day and last night gave the “Cultural Pre-Port Briefing” that we’ll have two nights before our arrival in each port.  Today they’ll speak in the morning on Brazilian-American relations, then speak on a careers panel in the afternoon followed by individual meetings with students; at 5 we’ll have a session on Brazilian music and dance, and the mandatory “Logistical Pre-Port Briefing,” to discuss matters of safety (some of which the delegation addressed last night) and practicality.  Those of you who are parents of members of the Ambassadors Club should know that your children acquitted themselves splendidly yesterday both as escorts to delegation members and in a 75-minute private question-and-answer session with the delegation.

 

I introduced the delegation at last night’s briefing, and I’ll include what I said here, both because it gives a little sense of what I do on the ship and a more detailed sense of who they are:

 

A year ago at this time I heard from friends on the Spring ’11 voyage that one of the highlights of the voyage thus far had been visit from a US State Dept delegation; since there is a long history in academia of filching others’ ideas and claiming them as one’s own, I immediately seized upon this as something I wanted to duplicate, and after much correspondence with a very helpful member of last year’s delegation, that fellow into place.

 

Then a couple of months ago I was telling a friend about this, and she said, “Suppose they sent all the interesting State Dept. folks last year and this year you get the boring ones?”

 

I had two reactions to this:

1)      I stopped talking to that friend.

2)      I stopped sleeping or digesting food, and I developed some nervous ticks, which some of you may have noticed.

 

I have really good news.

 

We got great ones.

 

I’ll introduce them now; then we’ll hear from them; and then you can ask questions.  Please do note that you can hear from them again on Brazil and Brazilian-American relations tomorrow morning and on international careers in the afternoon.  The schedule’s in the Dean’s Memo and on the bulletin boards.

 

 

1.       John Matel has a BA in history/anthropology and an MA in ancient history from the University of Wisconsin, an MBA (marketing/marketing research) from the University of Minnesota and he was State Department Fellow at Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy at Tufts.  He is Public Affairs Officer at the U.S. Mission in Brazil, headquartered in Brasilia.  His  twenty-six years of experience as a Foreign Service officer include stints in Brazil, Norway, Poland, and, most recently, Iraq, where he was Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) leader embedded with Marine Combat Regiments in western Al Anbar province in Iraq.   

 

2.       Michael Cavey is a Vice Consul at the U.S. Embassy in Brasilia, Brazil.  His duties include Non-immigrant Visa adjudications and managing the Consular Section’s Fraud Prevention Unit.  In 2013 Michael will serve as a Cultural Affairs Officer in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan.  Prior to joining the Foreign Service, Michael was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan and an English teacher at an orphanage located in a Tibetan autonomous region of China.

 

3.       Aimee Dowl holds a BA in History from Reed college as well as an MLA from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in History from the University of California in Los Angeles.  She is the Assistant Information Officer at the U.S. Embassy in Brasília. She previously worked as a journalist covering travel and tourism in Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, the Guianas, and Tanzania, writing about wrote about these countries and the U.S. for Lonely Planet Publications, The New York Times, BBC’s History, and several other print and online sources. Ms. Dowl has also supervised editing on film and television productions for Digital Media, Inc., and she worked as a secondary History and English teacher for five years.

 

Let me also just call your attention to the two other members of the delegation, whom you’ll hear from tomorrow, Derek Kverno, a teacher and bird expert, and Sha Shin, a teacher, traveler, and mediator with fascinating international experience.

 

Please join me in welcoming John Matel…

 

waves

The sea has been rolling more steadily and more dramatically during the past 24 hours than it had most of the time before.  I heard reports of seasickness on and off yesterday—students who were waiting on line outside my office, to figure out with me how they can best complete their faculty-directed practica (fdp) requirements, sometimes disappeared, and someone else on line would say to me, a little sheepishly, “I don’t think she was feeling well.”  Outside my dean’s office window just now there is a steady run of thick, heavy-looking waves, darker-looking underneath a cloud-filled sky, domineering in appearance because it is only they from here to the horizon.

 

The rougher motion did not seem to prevent Reading Day from being what it was supposed to be yesterday.   Students read.  Oh, they seemed to catch up on sleep too (we lost another hour to another time change after all), and on email, but all around the ship there were students reading their business or conservation biology textbooks or novels.  These non-class days make for an important interruption of a schedule that might seem for all as relentless as the waves.  We’ll have them now and then.

 

Otherwise, the ship, when at sea, operates on an A/B class schedule, some classes meeting on A days, the rest meeting on B days, so that a student will have a given course every other day while at sea.  (Classes don’t meet while we’re in the ports.)  In working with my colleagues at the Institute for Shipboard Education, one of my main goals—happily achieved—was to make all A/B class days adjacent: that is, A3, which is today, immediately precedes B3, without any time in between.  That ensures that classes for which there are two sections, one on the A day and one on the B day—like, for instance, the Global Studies course, in which Alex Nalbach will give the same lecture in our largest classroom, the Union, at 9:20 this morning and then again at the same time tomorrow—are always at the same point, relative to the itinerary, in both sections: one wouldn’t want one section of a course to be anticipating arrival in Brazil while the same class meeting of the second section of the course came after departure from Brazil.  In this way, for all the different things we’re doing, we’re on the same pace.

 

That is not to claim that the pace is entirely smooth, only that it is as well managed as we can make it. Last night Bob Vieira, our Executive Dean, ran a meeting in the Glazer Lounge for the several dozen passengers who still lack India visas.  Students aren’t generally allowed in the 7^th deck faculty/staff lounge; holding the meeting there was a way of sending a signal about the importance of the problem to those of us on the ship—and it touches Bob quite personally, since he, his wife, and his son are among the passengers lacking those visas.  If you don’t know Bob, let me tell you that he’s a gem—and that the intelligence, sincerity, and poise he brings to these matters, and brought to his handling of the meeting last night are of the kind we all want from leaders at the very highest of levels.  A number of the questions he fielded reflected, unsurprisingly, the anxiety and even the anger of folks in the room: folks want this to be settled now, wanted it to be settled weeks ago, and are frustrated that none of us on the ship can settle it instantly, as we’d like to do. 

 

As Bob said, ISE is pursuing a number of different strategies towards a happy resolution, but none can be associated with certainty unless or until we all have visas in hand.  I can’t say that everyone left the room happy, but that wasn’t one of the options for last night.  I can say that everyone who showed that they wanted to be heard was, and that they got responses from the kind of person that any parent or loved one or even just interested spectator would want to see in charge of such a situation.  I assured parents on board before we left that their children would be in good hands, but I was talking about the faculty.  Of that I still feel sure.  But I’ll say it here too about the Executive Dean.  He can’t have all the answers at this stage, but the students and the rest of us here couldn’t have a better advocate in a tough situation.

 

the ocean

It’s tempting to focus on the ports and on what happens there.  But these days at sea are exhilarating.  Well, they’re other things too: the lurching of the ship has its inconveniences, and we all spend all day moving awkwardly out of each other’s way.  Picture, those of you who remember him, a sort of Red Skelton impersonators’ convention.  And there’s of course the s… word, well, a word with four s’s anyway: we’ve got patches and pills and prayers to fend off that form of illness, but some have already succumbed, and my understanding is that coming into or out of Cape Town the majority of us might be expected to struggle.

 

Still, my friends who’ve sailed on Semester at Sea have all said that they liked the time at sea as much as the time in the ports, and while I can’t declare for sure I know whether I am getting used to the endless rocking or getting tired of it, I see their point.  The sea’s incredibly beautiful; the animals and islands we occasionally see seem like miracles; the air’s lovely.

 

And most sea days are class days, and my confidence about what’s going on in our classrooms runs very high.  Yes, there’s some recalibration going on as students and faculty from all over get used to each other. But the ambitions are wonderful; the faculty are immensely talented; and I’ve met dozens of students who’ve impressed me with their smarts and responsiveness.  The central course on the ship, Global Studies, which we all attend, is the best illustration: the quality of Alex Nalbach’s teaching there is second to none but is matched by the quality of the attention in the room.  If you know someone on the voyage, just ask about what the course has already covered: we were all much more ready for Dominica for the sake of those lectures (and Professor Lewis Hinchman’s splendid cultural pre-port briefing, and the absolutely essential logistical pre-port briefing on the night before we arrived) than we otherwise could have been.  Today Alex began readying us for Brazil.

 

We just heard over the speakers the evening announcement.  We get at least two of these a day: at noon we learn how far we’ve sailed and at what average speed; otherwise we mostly get word about behaviors that need correction (two towels flushed down toilets have cost the crew dozens of hours of labor and cost many cabins their water for all that time, and in general we’re consuming more water than we should be) and events that are ahead. Not Red Skelton there but MASH, except that Stuart Saunders, our assistant executive dean, has a voice of pure Texas authority and means what he says.

 

And now I look out again, and dusk approaches, and the sea is getting that “wine-dark” look that the poet talks about.

Roseau, Dominica

The two main sources of anxiety on board have been delays in some passengers’ receiving their needed visas for Brazil, which resulted in a return to the dock in Nassau five hours after the Explorer first left it, and uncertainty about students’ obligation to complete “faculty-directed practica,” which are, in a couple of different ways, essential to the academic program.  The first matter now seems happily resolved: at the mandatory Logistical Pre-Port Briefing, which will occur on the night before we arrive in each port, and which drew, as it should, a capacity crowd to the Union, one of the students whose visa had been delayed received an award for helping to inspire community onboard, and the resulting applause seemed the capper on that matter. 

 

The second matter will be resolved more gradually, as students come to me individually with their concerns so that we can work out appropriate solutions.  Students can’t get out of the requirement, but it seems that we can make it match their other obligations.  The problem has resulted in part from Semester at Sea’s necessarily being a product of its long history: students have heard a lot about the program from past students, and others, who are familiar with earlier times when such requirements weren’t enforced, and communication about the new requirement, as it came into being during the past year, has been difficult to manage.  Students generally appear at my office irritated or upset and leave reassured, and it does mean that I’m going to get to know quite a few of them, and their academic interests, quite well.  They are on the whole a very impressive and appealing group.

 

Aside from these concerns, the first two days of classes went very well: I’m hearing enthusiastic reports from students about faculty and from faculty about students and from the voyage administration about all.  We do have an amazing array of courses: I encourage you to glance at http://www.semesteratsea.org/current-voyage/overview/ and click on “Courses” to get some sense of them, and to click on “Faculty and Staff” to see who’s teaching them.

 

Many of us were outside on deck yesterday watching as we arrived in magnificent Dominica, a spectacular, pristine, heavily forested island.  The ship’s preparation for arrival here points to some of its remarkable strengths: everyone has attended the relevant lecture for the required Global Studies course, where Alex Nalbach, the instructor, did a marvelous job answering (historically, politically, and culturally) the question, “Why is Dominica so pristine?”  Then two nights before we arrived, many passengers—the Union was packed then too—came to the Cultural Pre-Port Briefing (which we’ll have two nights before arrival in each port): here Lewis Hinchman, a political scientist on the faculty, interestingly fleshed out further information on Dominica’s political and cultural history and answered students’ questions about what to do on the island.  This was followed by a panel called “Documenting Your Voyage,” on which the voyage’s videographer, photographer, communications direction, writing center director, and travel writing teacher all offered quick advice: aside from a brief competitive flurry between the photographer and the writing center, competing as to who could offer the best prizes for their student competitions (I’m saying the writing center director won that round, but I’m biased), that went splendidly too.

 

The island’s astonishing, with soaring cliffs and abundant natural beauty.  Passengers fanned out yesterday for all kinds of various field experiences: my family went on the whale watch (and observed many spotted dolphins and about seven sperm whales, amazing) and then hiked to the top of Roseau’s botanic gardens for views of the port; I’m hearing similarly enthusiastic responses from those who went snorkeling or who took the aerial tram ride through the rain forest, and there are many other such activities, some organized by Semester at Sea (whose field office has been doing amazing work), some undertaken by students independently.

 

We leave for Brazil tomorrow.

Orientation, Ft Lauderdale and Nassau

Faculty and staff orientation began with a reception on Monday in Ft. Lauderdale, a working meeting there the next morning (to prepare for today’s discussions of Jamaica Kincade’s A Small Place and for arrival in the first port for which we’ll be able to prepare students, Dominica), and then a full day on the ship on Wednesday here in Nassau.  Most of the students arrived yesterday, bringing an enormous surge of energy.  They whooped and hollered through last night’s opening session, though things were more sober through most of the Captain’s comments (on safety) and during reference to the group of passengers who are still lacking one of the required visas and so yet haven’t been able to join the ship—the reason for its delayed departure from Nassau, which is now due for mid-day today.  Today is the full day of student orientation—they’ll have meetings from early morning to late afternoon—and classes begin tomorrow.

 

My family and I managed a couple of hours off the ship yesterday morning: the sea here is an astonishing light blue, and I had a splendid fish stew and a johnnycake for breakfast.  Our MV Explorer sits in the water next to enormous pleasure ships from Carnival and Norwegian: their vast water slides on top and glowing casinos below mark their difference from ours, a place meant for learning.

 

Leaving

Today my family and I will fly from Dulles Airport, near Washington, DC, to Fort Lauderdale.  Tomorrow we'll shop--as I gather faculty and staff customarily do at the port of departure--for items we want to have with us on the voyage but don't want to bring on the plane: toiletries, snacks, etc.  I'm very much hoping that we'll also have a moment to visit what sounds like an extraordinary exhibition of works from the Uffizi in Florence--http://www.moafl.org/exhibits/botticelli.html 
Tomorrow night there's a reception at a hotel not far from the ship: there faculty and staff will meet for the first time.

Then on Tuesday morning we'll get to work.  We'll have a session to prepare everyone for leading and participating in discussions of the assigned "common reading," Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and then a second session in which we'll discuss preparations for Dominica, the first port that will be a subject of lectures in Global Studies, of faculty-directed practica, of pre-port briefings--that is, of many of the academic resources we can bring to bear on our travels.  These opening sessions are a bit more specific--a bit more content-driven--than I gather these typical orientation sessions usually are.  I'm betting that by getting to work on genuine and challenging activities we'll come together more productively than if we undertook 'team-building' exercises independent of our coming tasks.  We'll see.

Tuesday around mid-day we'll begin heading for the ship.  There will be some time to unpack before faculty/staff orientation continues with further sessions.

One key focus of faculty/staff orientation is to get the two entities--the academic side and the student life side, in particular--to think of their work as closely connected.  I think if we can persuade students that their learning and their social lives on the voyage can be tightly and happily interwoven, we'll have gone a long way towards making the voyage a success.  That message can only be communicated persuasively if it is enacted by those of us who are responsible for it.

I hear a sound of a Wii from down the hall, the last time, I think, I'll hear that sound for some time.