In-between

This is an essay about some of my experiences in Ghana that I wrote for my lit class. I thought that it doubled as a blog post as well...so here it is! 

In-between

 

            I have never been present for a birth before. I have seen them on T.V., I have read about them in books, but I have no memories to claim for my own. After all, our own birth does not count. Walking through the hospital in Ghana, I see birth all around me. More than that, I feel birth. The woman with the extended pregnant stomach walking around. The man with his head in his hands sitting down. Waiting, perhaps? I wonder if this is his first birth, as well. He sits and waits. I stand and watch.

            I am standing in a hospital. I have only been in the hospital awaiting for the news of death, never birth. For a minute I wonder if I am going to hear the screams of new life. But I don't. Silence—the overwhelming sound of nothing. The lady is talking about midwives, and I find myself wondering how many births she has seen. Too many to count? Or does she remember them all?

            I walk into a room filled with women on the verge of giving birth. I wonder if this is the day where I will experience my first birth—the first breath of new life. I worry that I am not supposed to be here, this is not my place. I have yet to know the pains of giving birth and the love for a child. I worry that my eyes will wander too much, that my smile will not seem genuine, that the women will despise my presence. I turn my foot, my head follows, and I am ready to leave. My eyes glance at the room one more time, and in the corner there is a woman who is awake. Her eyes wander to me, her smile is genuine, and she does not seem to mind my presence. I smile in return. Genuine.

            We walk further into the hospital, and I pass the man who is waiting. Has he held his child, or is he waiting for his child? There is a backpack in front of him…has he been here long? I walk past him and stand still. Nobody is moving, but I hear Angelina say that there is a woman in the room next door who is in fetal distress. Is this the mans wife? We continue to walk, and through the window I see a woman in pain—a pain of which I know nothing about. This reminds me that with the beauty of life comes the pain of giving life.

            I see people in front of me turn to go into another room. I worry about feeling out of place again, and as I enter the room, I see women. I am told that these women have just given birth. Some of them are sitting up. I see one nursing a baby. Angelina picks up a newborn baby and places it into the arms of the person standing next to me. Birth. New life. I glance down at the baby, the angle is awkward and I can only see the forehead and fluttering eyelashes. A newborn baby. I blink and find that my eyes are watering. Never before have I been so close to a new life. I feel the beauty of birth—this baby who is in a strangers arms, and is unaware of the past and future.

 

Life is beautiful.

Life is ugly.

            I arrive at Cape Coast Castle, and the first thing that strikes me is how impervious nature can be to human suffering. Blue water crashes onto the sand, there is a soft hot breeze, and I am struck by the contrast of the beauty of this place compared with the surrounding town. It is beautiful, but there is no beauty here. I walk through the entrance, pay my camera fee, and our tour begins.

            Twenty of us walk into a room where two hundred people used to stand. The first thing I notice is the smell. Centuries and generations have passed, but I can still smell the indescribable scent of pain and humiliation and defecation. Someone says that it smells like their gerbils cage, and while I want to laugh, I am struck by how accurate that is and how sad it is that it is accurate.

            The heat, I notice the heat. I feel tired, I am sweaty, and our tour guide leads us into the Female Slave Dungeon. The last person walks through, the door is shut, and we are in the darkness. I can still smell it—that smell. The ugly one that I want to forget but know I never will. I stand there, in the dark, and for a second I am scared. I know that this darkness will end in thirty seconds, but I am still scared. I wonder how the other people dealt with their fear, knowing that the darkness would not end anytime soon, and when it did, the light of the sun would not bring promises of a better future. I am not scared of the dark, but I am scared of this darkness. The door opens, light streams in, and within minutes the beating heat of the sun makes me wish for shade, but not darkness. 

            We walk down the hill, duck our heads as we pass through a door, and then we are in darkness again. There is a door in front of me. The door of no return. I step closer, and my foot is on the threshold. I lean in closer, past the point of no return for people standing here in the past, but I am able to return. I rejoin the group and we walk away. We were able to walk away.

            I walk all the way back to the entrance, past the kids selling water and the men with the bracelets. I walk all the way back to our bus, I take a step in and feel cold air. And just like that I am far from darkness and heat. I am far from birth and away from death.

 

In-between

            I am twenty years old. Never before have I been so close to birth. Never before have I been so close to death. The gift of life, the curse of death, and the ability to feel both without experiencing either. Two polar experiences, but together they meet in the middle—where I am, where I usually can be found, far from a Ghanaian maternity ward and slave dungeon.

The almost tears from seeing a newborn baby, the sweat rolling into my eyes as I enter the slave dungeon—both are forever a part of me, a piece of my identification and what I am able to identify with from now on.

I email my mom about my experiences. She says that it was a gift to experience all stages of life in such an intimate way. I think about this. I am still thinking about this. Humanity is able to bring new souls into this world, but humanity also has the capacity to destroy human souls. Humanity is in-between. I am in-between.

           

 

  

Easter, Vampires, and Princes...oh my!

Lively India

As I type this, my henna is wearing off. There are traces of it left on my right hand, but they're only noticeable if you bother to take a second look. 

We are currently on day 5 of 6 on our way to Mauritius, and as I sit here I realize that I'm over the half way mark in every way possible. I have more countries behind me than in front of me. There are more days behind me than in front of me. There are more class days behind me than in front of me. 

Where did time go?

I know I have not been the best blog updater, and I haven't updated in awhile, but I think it's important that I talk a little bit about Burma and India. (I am also procrastinating) 

Recently my social psych professor said that we shouldn't try to qualify our time in each of these ports. If we try to explain why we loved a place, or why we loved a certain experience, we often cannot put into words what we truly feel. Either we don't know what we're feeling or we don't know why we feel the way we do. If we try to use words to explain, we use words that can't properly state how we're feeling. Why did I love Burma so much? Why did l love India so much?

I have this thing where I'm trying think of a word that describes my time in each country, and I feel like it is a good compromise between trying to share how I feel without ruining my experience by trying too hard to explain how I feel. For Burma, my word is serene. I spent most of my time in Inle Lake, and the entire time I just felt a sense of peace. For India, my word is lively. The crazy tuk tuk driving, the crowds, the yelling, the colors...everything just screamed alive. And although Burma has a place in my heart forever, India got it beating like no other place has.

We have this thing where after each port there is a "post port" reflection. I've been to almost every single one, and each time I leave slightly frustrated but also enlightened. Frustrated because people seem to complain if things don't go their way. Enlightened because it often makes me realize how I feel. 

I didn't even want to go to the "post port" for India--I didn't want to hear anything bad that people had to say. But of course I went anyway. People complained about the trash. People complained about not getting things for as cheap as they wanted to. People complained about the fact that people were overcharging them because they were "white Americans who are wealthy". And the entire time I felt so frustrated. How can people feel this way after leaving a place so alive? How?

We come to these places expecting to get things for dirt cheap. And sometimes we do. But when we don't, we think we're getting ripped off or cheated. 

What we don't think about is that these people we are buying things from have a life to live as well. They're trying to make ends meet. They're trying to feed their children or keep their shop open. They're not here to please us at all costs. We're the ones who are guests, and bargaining with them is a social interaction that we signed up for. And when you decided that yelling over 50 rupees (1 dollar) is a good idea, you've lost what you've come here for--learning, interacting, socializing, being outside of your comfort zone, compromising, laughing, loving. 

There was a time when I referred to myself as getting "ripped off". A tuk tuk driver who had been with us all day told us he would charge us $10 each for the day and decided at the end of the night to ask for $80 all together. It was just another girl and I, and we decided that since it was nightime, and no one else was around, we would just pay the money to get out of the situation. And I was mad. This was money that I could've spent on something else. 

While at post port, a professor said something that really stuck me him. He said "How much does it cost us to go to the movies? To drive to the theater, to buy the tickets, to buy our favorite snacks and a drink. How much does it cost?" In my head I'm trying to do the math. Well, if I go with both my parents that's automatically $30 for just our tickets. Driving there? Well, it takes about 30 minutes to get to the nearest movie theater, so there's that cost. What if I want popcorn? Another $7 or so. And a drinks for all of us? Add $20. Licorice? $5. Right there thats nearly $70, and that was just a leisure activity. 

So yes, I paid more than I originally thought we had agreed on. But I could spend the same amount on a piece of jewelry and not really think twice about it, or be angry about it. This guy had been with us all day, he had driven us all around (even to places we didn't ask to go), and I think he was generally concerned with whether or not we were having a good time. He had a house, two kids, and a wife to look out for. So the $40 I contributed to the $80 "tuk tuk fund" really was not worth getting angry over. It happened. And he can do a lot more with that money than I can. 

One of our Dean's said something on the first day, and I constantly think about it. He said that "One percent of the world gets a college education. One percent of the world gets to travel. And you are doing both." So even though Semester at Sea has been years in the making for me, and we have taken out a loan to pay for this journey, I am already wealthier and luckier than a significant population of this world. Yes we are all on budgets and don't have money to "blow" in all of these countries, but we're here. And just by being here we're extremely fortunate. 

As I travel around the world I'm learning lessons that I didn't know I would learn. Friends and I have been talking a lot about going home lately, and what that will be like. I think that's when the biggest change will come--right now everything is normal. All 1000 of us on this ship are going through the same thing. But back at home I'll be leaving this ship of comfort, this place that has become "normal". 

So when I come back, what I'm asking for is patience. Sometimes I may not be able to describe what I'm feeling and at other times I may tell the same story over and over again. There are going to be pictures that seem insignificant to you, but will probably be my screensaver for the next couple of months. There are inside jokes that I may blurt out thinking someone will understand, but no one will. Laugh anyway. 

To all my friends who have studied abroad. I promise you the same. I promise to listen to your stories and look at your pictures and not roll my eyes when you tell me the same story I know I've heard before. I promise to ask questions and to genuinely care. Because our adventures are our adventures for a reason. They make us who we are and who we are becoming. 

I also promise to try to blog more, but this six day stretch in between India and Mauritius is going by way too fast. I haven't caught up on my journal, I have a paper due, I have a midterm, and that's just tomorrow. 

Sometimes it's easy to forget that this is school as well. 

Shipboard Life

Traveling is a huge component of Semester at Sea. Within a couple of months I have visited and will visit Japan, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, Burma, India, Mauritius, South Africa, Ghana, Morocco, and Spain. When people ask to hear stories, they'll expect to hear about what I did in country--the story of the snake around my neck in Vietnam, our lost in translation moments in Japan, the hypothetical beach day in Mauritius, my homestays in South Africa and Morocco. 

And these will be wonderful stories to tell.

But what get's overlooked a lot of the time is the journey--the days we spend getting from one place to another. It's hard to believe that I've been on the M.V Explorer for nearly 2 months (!!!!!!). It feels so much shorter and longer at the same time. Shorter because time is flying, but longer because the people who have become my friends feel like friends that I've had for years, not a couple of months. 

So what I'm going to tell you about to day is a normal day on the M.V Explorer--my home. 

It's common to say good morning to Arch (as in Desmond Tutu) every morning. I'll go to breakfast around 8am with my roommate, we'll meet up with our usual crowd of friends (Michela, Wendy, Kaitlyn, Cali, Emily), and we'll talk about anything and everything. Sometimes we wonder what we're missing back home, if there's a song equivalent to Call Me Maybe out right now and we're just blissfully unaware. Sometimes we'll talk about the paper that's due that we should be writing, or a test that snuck up on us. Sometimes we'll lookout for the new cereal that is being put out and whether or not there was any pineapple leftover in the fruit selection. Sometimes we'll talk about what we did in past countries and what we're doing in future countries. 

This has become normal. 

What astounds me is that we're able to say "Oh, I need to finish this paper before India", or "I can't believe I have a midterm right after Burma", or "What are your plans for Ghana?". Referring to countries instead of days has become the way that we keep time. When everybody around you is going through the same thing you are, it's easy to forget that this isn't a common journey that we're on. 

Sometimes we'll sing Taylor Swift songs as we're walking up the stairs, or we'll meander from one side of the hallway to the other due to a wave. The day goes by in a blur of errands and conversations...visits to the field office trying to figure what to do in a country, talking to Unreasonable people in line during lunch, taking malaria pills, and sanitizing hands "or risk pooping" (so threatens our Dean). 

There's usually a lot that goes on at night--we go to Zumba, go to the gym together, eat dinner, hang out in the Piano Lounge. Around 8pm (or 2000) there is usually some sort of preport that goes on in the Union where we learn about the country that we're heading to. These usually go on every night, but the one that happens the day before we get into port is mandatory. The doctor tells us about all the diseases we could contract, how to avoid travelers diarrhea (whoops), what foods to avoid, all that fun stuff. The Dean will tell us statistics from the last port (ex: 29 stolen iPhones in Vietnam), a couple credit card frauds, etc. The head of the Field Office will come and tell us about all the amazing things to do, and interport students will chime in with things to add to our to do list and helpful phrases. For example, last night at the cultural preport for India a interport student taught us how to say "yes, spice" and "no, spice". 

A day in the life.

Usually there will be other things going on after the Explorer Seminar/Preport. Last night there was a panel discussion on "How to Change the World" with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Tori Hogan, and Ken Banks. The people on this ship just astound me. Ken Banks has been acknowledged by National Geographic, Tori is barely 30 and she's written a book (check it out, it's called Beyond Good Intentions), and I don't think I have to list anything about Desmond Tutu. 

But by far what astounds me the most is the fact that this ship has become home. It is literally the place that is taking me to all these countries. I open my cabin door in the morning, I walk up the stairs, I reach the sixth deck and then I have the option of turning right or left, both will take me around the same circle above Tymitz Square, through the piano lounge, and into the Garden Lounge, which is one of the decks where meals are served. I know how long it takes for me to get to each class from where I am (tops 2 minutes), and I have become a pro at using the demonic ice dispenser on the 6th deck. My twin size bed and small cabin are welcome sites when I return from a country where I have left the city where the ship is. Getting back on the ship feels like coming home, even if it's just at the end of a very long day. 

The community that has been built on this ship deserves a whole blog post of its own, but to put into words what it actually is isn't possible. As my psych prof told me, sometimes trying to put things into words just messes up the experience in the first place. So picture this: a place where you feel absolutely comfortable and satisfied. The minute closet space and 3 drawers that you own you know by heart. Should I mention that someone cleans your room every other day? The showers are nothing special but they are your shower. You wake up in the morning, see somebody you've never even talked to, and you acknowledge eachother for no other reason than the fact that you are on a ship, in the middle of an ocean, going on this incredible journey together. 

We are all in this together. 

I hope that I've managed to convey (at least a little bit) what makes Semester at Sea so special. All the youtube videos I've watched, emails I've sent to alumni, pictures I've seen online...this is now my life. I am the "current voyage" on the Semester at Sea website, it's my voyage that is being talked about, my life that is being lived. 

So as I get ready to step foot in India, I want to send out a sincere thanks to all the people who listened to me talk endlessly about SAS, staring my sophomore year of high school. This is everything more than I wished for, and even though I've spent a night in the bathroom losing everything inside me (and more), I currently have a head cold, and I'm pretty sure I'm missing out on one of the sunniest days so far, this is still by far one of the best days of my life...because I am home. 

Tough Days are Good Days

I am currently sitting on my bed in cabin 3037 on the MV Explorer. Vietnam is physically behind us...we are now sailing to Singapore, but the emotional implications of my time in Vietnam is just starting to hit me. I am no longer in intense travel mode (I think I spent 3 hours on the ship aside from sleeping hours), and the dust is beginning to settle. Reflection after Japan was enlightening, reflection after China was awe inspiring, and the reflection that I'm going through after Vietnam is just downright extremely overwhelming.
There's no moment I can point to and say that that's when everything changed. Rather, the accumulation of my six days in Vietnam has all been put into one big pot, molding and melting together to the point where I can't tell what happened on what day. All I know is that it all happened. When thinking of Semester at Sea, I knew that there would be moments where I just wouldn't know what to do with myself, and I think that this is my first moment of the trip. I don't want it to seem as though I'm hating life right now, but I'm definitely feeling my experiences in a way that I haven't in the past.
Water freezes at 32 degrees. There are 12 inches in a foot. My current favorite color is red. Four divided by four is one. I write better on lined paper. Post-its are amazing. Hawaii is a state and DC is a district. Crossing the street in Ho Chi Minh is dangerous. The metro system in Japan is extremely easy to navigate. The Great Wall is everything everybody thinks it is. These are facts. These are things I can explain. These are things that no one will object to. However, what I don't know how to explain are experiences and perspectives. Everybody has a different one. I was with a friend for the entirety of Vietnam, and although we were in the same situations, we have had completely different experiences.
It will be too complicated to go through every single thing I did in Vietnam, so I would rather just talk about some experiences that stood out to me. I did a homestay for 2 nights/3 days on the Mekong in Vietnam. Within my time there, I visited a family owned shop, drank snake rice wine, had a giant boa wrapped around me, ate shrimp with its head and appendages still attached, drank a coconut on a boat floating down the Mekong, hung out in a garden, floated down the river some more, arrived at the village of our home stay, found a lizard in the bathroom, learned how to make traditional Tet cake, ate questionable food, walked around the most serene place I have ever been, fell asleep to the sounds of nature, had a traumatic experience walking through the meat market, got chased around by ladies selling pants in a different market, seen the floating market of the Mekong, and have sweated more than I thought possible.
These are the experiences that I won't forget, that I'll remember to tell people about. However, it's the overwhelming emotions of traveling that often get swept under the rug. The moments when you realize that this is a journey of a life time. The moment I realize that had I been born in Vietnam, I could be eleven year old Nga selling bookmarks and fans to tourists until 1 in the morning. The moment when I'm at a orphanage and realizing that "poverty/orphanage tourism" is a real thing, and I'm witnessing it right now. The moment when I'm in class and the professor asks what "white privilege" is and the fact that none of us can answer that is what "white privilege" is. The moment when you step out of the War Remnants Museum and you wonder if the beggar on the street was affected by agent orange. The wonderful moment when you're walking down the street with your friends and we realize that we're in Vietnam.
There's something to be said for itineraries. There's something to be said for pictures. There's something to be said for sites and good food. But there's also something to be said for putting the map and camera away and just...experiencing. I think I was more aware of that than anything else in Vietnam. And because of that I'm at a loss for words. I'm sorry if this is rambling, or confusing, or if it seems as though I'm being negative. But as this blog post says, tough days are good days. Tough days are good days because that means that I'm experiencing this journey in its entirety. It's been smooth sailing (emotionally speaking), for the past couple of ports, but I think it's just going to continue at this pace for the rest of the time. A journey isn't a journey for its easiness. We don't talk about Marco Polo because he had it easy. Archbishop Desmond Tutu isn't Archbishop Desmond Tutu because his life was simple.

So it's my time for some rough seas...literally and metaphorically.

Japan reflections

My reflection from my time in Japan made it onto the SAS blog! Just thought I'd share it here. I've been reading this blog for YEARS now and it's absolutely astounding to see my name attached to a quote about my time in a country. 

Pictures Tell a Story...

Since I'm not sure when I'll get to my blog about China, I would like to share some pictures. Hopefully these will tell you the story of my incredibly overwhelming, startling, and amazing time in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong.