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.