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.