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…