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