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.