It’s not been easy to come home. After nearly three weeks at home—during which time I struggle mightily to write this Afterword until I get going on it and then can’t do anything else because it so enthralls me to recall—I realize that there’s history at home and a sense of place that is a part of me that will often be at odds with what I experienced on this voyage for a long time to come. For over four months while at sea it is exhilarating to learn new history and geography and “drop in” on people and places as a visitor—an observer deeply impressed and frequently overwhelmed by cultural and economic differences but a visitor nonetheless. When I come back, those differences come into even sharper relief and smack up against the easy comfort and familiarity of home.
The theme of the Spring 2010 voyage of Semester at Sea is Sustainability. That means we spend months studying the many serious issues related to climate change, energy, waste, environment and development. I feel like a bear when I first come home so I try to keep my claws sheathed with family because I know I must seem very grim. But the contrast between all we have in our country and how little others have is so great that it is hard not to react to almost every occasion as another lesson in feast or famine and wonder why we can’t do more to distribute those more fairly. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer so my frustration is less with everyone else than with myself.
When I greet people on my return they ask variations on the same two questions: “Did you have a good time?” “Did you enjoy your cruise?” [Whatever it was, I can assure everyone it was not a cruise.] Frequently, there are corollaries: “What was your favorite country?” “What was best?” These seem like the obvious questions anyone could be expected to ask but they prove very difficult to answer after a long voyage around the world. Instead, I wind up answering that my clearest sense is only how lucky and spoiled we are in the United States, how embarrassing it is to realize how much of the world’s resources we take up as our own, and how much more I now worry that we be fit and fair stewards of all this fortune.
That sense of fortune-cum-burden is underlined by how we feel when we re-enter the USA: The port of Fort Lauderdale in Florida in early May is not yet in the grip of tropic heat, there’s a lovely breeze on the beautiful day, and there are a mere two plastic bottles bobbing in the harbor as far as the eye can see about the ship. (Plastic of every kind becomes a major issue in traveling because it pollutes so widely everywhere. I actually haul every plastic bag handed to me all the way back home in my luggage. After what I see, I’m unwilling to discard a single one anywhere along the way.) On the other hand, we are reminded how little we’ve done to wean our nation off dependence on oil when we hear news about an underwater oil rig disaster in the Gulf of Mexico and wonder if it will be worse than the Exxon Valdese. At the same time, it is impossible not to be deeply affected by the tearful reception that awaits the students—their families hold signs of welcome in parking lots outside the terminal throughout the several hours it takes the 1,000+ people on our ship to clear customs and collect luggage. But I also recall all the orphaned children we’ve met in the course of our journey—most of them orphaned under horrific circumstances of disease and war—and how they may never meet with such a welcome anywhere by anyone.
I am fortunate to catch up with extended family and friends in Coral Gables and Miami for a few days after disembarking. There are so many choices at the first deli my sister takes me to on Miracle Mile in the Gables, a place I once knew well, that I am paralyzed with indecision. (Language is the factor of indecision in foreign countries but sheer number of choices is what does you in when you return. Two leaves of lettuce or three?)
Miami looks much improved from the days when I was a student at the University of Miami, with much of the urban sprawl now filled-in and looking more like a city and less like a collection of suburbs. I visit Fairchild Gardens, recovered beautifully after its last hurricane battering, with an old friend who is partly responsible for that coherence and vibrancy since he worked for many years as the city planner. He’s also full of news about a big gathering of Irish family that will take place back home at the Cathedral in Armagh for the wedding of a niece. I know them all but will not be able to go. Still, I can virtually see that gathering as he talks and I’ll be there in spirit for sure. Another friend will soon be installed as the new Archbishop of Miami, a challenging post he’ll do well; I hope Miami realizes it is lucky to have him. I am honored by a lunch at the restaurant of a Cuban family that is as much a part of my personal history as my American, French, Canadian and Irish families and I eat my fill of my favorite Cuban foods while we talk for hours into the afternoon. They play one of my organ CDs in the background which is pretty amazing but Cubans’ joie de vivre can stand up to the music of a grand pipe organ better than almost any other people I can think of. Finally, I speak at length with friends involved in the Haitian relief effort. Their discussions are like listening out loud to what I’ve usually been unable or unwilling to express about suffering and deprivation at its most extreme during our trip. What they say is both surprising and discouraging for the “fix it” Americans we are, but is unavoidable from both my experiences on this voyage and their many work trips abroad: We can help with building capacity but we cannot fix at one fell swoop. So what does that mean for how we help in emergencies, and in the longer run as well? Perhaps it means that we do even more to train people in appropriate technology who will go back to their countries to help and not just we in their stead. In the other direction, US students need to spend “gap” years in service abroad like so many Canadian and European students do in order to learn more about the developing world. On the other hand, sometimes being told we do relief work badly—and should leave everything to the people in the countries we assist—is not entirely convincing. Some of our students learn an important lesson when they go on their own to a remote area and hear diametrically opposed stories of needs from a tribal leader in Ghana and his people—and that is after being cautioned by a distinguished lecturer from Ghana that we Westerners should not superimpose our cultural ways on theirs. But “cultural ways” is sometimes a euphemism for prevailing practices that take advantage of tradition for less than felicitous ends and that shut out entire classes of people. The tribal leader wants money that he says is critical to help his people; but his people tell the students that they need not money but specific tools, material and knowledge and that they will never see the money from their tribal leader. Paternalistic authorities may sincerely believe that they know best—and, certainly, they may—but they may also not be sharing resources and opportunities with their people because of enduring, elitist entitlement. Not an easy nut to crack, this.
I get sick with a cold for the first time in my entire voyage—in Miami—and I have to wonder whether we don’t now have American superbugs that penetrate natural immunity far more readily than what most of the rest of the world’s population shares. Of course, our ship doctor and nurse practitioners do a stellar job of teaching us how to stay healthy in all kinds of conditions. But I still get sick at home. Oh, well.
If you can’t actually travel to learn how the rest of the world lives, an excellent way is to read the world’s literature. After all, it is how we try to understand the people and places of our own country. All through the course of this journey I read as much of a country’s creative writing as I can. In most cases those works of literature help me understand in a much more fulsome and thoughtful way—albeit indirectly—what all our experiences and lectures cannot do alone. (I also discover just how much of the world’s best literature is not even translated into English—a fact that says much about all of us while it is truly a loss for all of us.) When you travel with over 1,000 people to visit billions more people, you quickly realize that each person has a story to tell. Best would be to live a life listening to each one. Second best is to read and view those stories in a country’s literature and arts.
But I’m always getting ahead of my story: When I arrive back in Knoxville it is as though Tennessee wants to show me just how beautiful it can be at its very best. (I am one of those people who always has it in the back of their mind that they’re going to have to move to another country if we can’t make our American society a more humane and sustainable one, and certainly so as I become old and older. Having time at sea to think about this attitude, though, it becomes clearer that instead of running away I should just do more to change this state of affairs. As one writer has put it in the research I’ve begun to read, perhaps it is the latest mission of many bequeathed to boomers that they should also undertake to civilize the suburbs so that older people can live in their own homes throughout their old age while also ameliorating isolation and finding better occasion to live in community with neighbors, family and friends.) Where I live now, in Lakemoor Hills, is a good place to consider this because time and time again we see a property deteriorate while an elderly resident becomes more isolated by frailty and the loss of friends and family until one day they remove into a nursing home. Before the recent poor economy, houses in our old neighborhood turned over quickly but that is no longer the case and homes can sit empty for a long time while an elderly person makes the transition to assisted living far away from their home. That is not a good end for either the old person or for our neighborhood.
At any rate, leaving my home in this gorgeous, verdant countryside hardly seems possible to contemplate in mid-May 0f 2010. Perhaps because I fly directly from Fort Lauderdale instead of connecting through Atlanta, the plane comes in over the Smoky Mountains on a clear day and they appear in the early evening light as green as Ireland. I can’t remember anything that resembles this approach on arrival in Knoxville but maybe I’m just paying better attention on this flight. There have been abundant rains all winter and spring long, with no late freeze, so everything is lush and in luxuriant bloom. Temperatures are cool and not rushing to heat as spring can often do in East Tennessee. Roses and French hydrangeas, in particular, are superb in our garden, called Blue Notes, and the air is fragrant with blossoms and freshness. Only one dead tree outside (looks as though it may have sat in water too long during a downpour when a gutter wasn’t cleaned quickly enough) and one nearly-gone, forgotten, tender Soeur Therese hydrangea in the garage that revives with a bit of care. The phoebes and flickers that nest every year in our very tall trees in Blue Notes are out on fledgling runs with their young swooping in flight from one high branch to the next. The frogs are in full throat symphony along with the birds.
It is better not to say much about the first 15 hours of cleaning I do when I arrive home. It has, after all, been over four months that I’ve been away and after being tempted to run about and scream like a banshee I decide instead that it could be worse. Friends tell me my standards for housekeeping are too high and maybe they’re right. I blame it on the Irish washerwomen who must lurk somewhere far back in my mother’s genetic makeup. (I know, I know … I should just savor this back-home experience just like any other overseas. Not many people get to see all of their dishes in a kitchen sink completely enshrouded by spider webs.) In any event, I no longer have a cabin steward so I just get on with it.
While cleaning is underway, our cat Coco alerts me to a baby raccoon high up in the huge beech that shelters our home.
My compulsion for cleanliness and tidiness is likely worse for the experience of watching the ship’s crew for months on end repeatedly and fastidiously straighten, clean and polish every minute of the night and day. In fact, I do most of my practicing on one or other of the ship’s three grand pianos in the wee hours of the night when the students finally retire off the instruments. And most of the time I realize a crew nearby is working in time to the music. Occasionally they even take up a tune and sing without missing a beat or a stroke of the duster or broom. Nice. I become really accomplished at a concert version of “It’s a grand night for singing” although I have no clue what the words are that they’re singing since they can be in many languages far removed from the ones I know. I get the feeling they make many of the lyrics up, though, since sometimes they’ll break out in muted laughter afterwards. (The captain runs a very disciplined ship so the crew is always mostly seen and not heard.) I don’t take any of it personally even if the tune is very serious dead-white-men classical.
Our young cat, Coco Chanel, is immediately put on a diet along with dog Daisy, my mother’s old Jack Russell terrier and now Kenneth’s bosom buddy who rides shotgun in his truck. With the best of intentions, Kenneth has gradually overfed both animals and let go of their schedules. We return to portions and schedules pretty quickly and the animals, at least, adapt readily. Kenneth has to think about it and weigh in the balance the value of order and regular meals.
The housekeeping isn’t only a matter of cleaning and organizing in my own fashion, it’s that I need order because I otherwise can’t find anything. A small cabin on a ship has the clear advantage of ready access to almost everything, no matter how lost in that small space. For the first few days at home I nearly drive myself mad wandering the house looking for things I need to work with. Other colleagues and friends from the ship note the same phenomenon when they arrive home.
One of my first trips in the car—it has been such a treat not to drive for so long although watching crazy taxicab drivers around the world has its moments of terror—is out to Lanntair Farm to visit Bilbo’s gravesite. My old horse, Bilbo Baggins, died at the age of 32 the month before I left. A friend had given me some daffodil bulbs in late December to mark his grave; Kenneth was kind to plant those for me after I left and he reported that they bloomed in early spring. I also check on our ancient barn cat, Tibet, who is even more vocal than usual because she’s very old and her sister, Egypt, has died in the last year.
There are surprises at home, especially the news that Lanntair Farm will be sold again. This is a momentous development because Kenneth has continued to rent the barns there since we sold it the first time in 1999. With the 15 years he was in the barns while we were owners—added to the 11 years since we sold the farm—the storage amounts to an accumulation of 26 years in 5,000 square feet. Those of you who know Kenneth know what this conglomeration looks like. Lanntair’s current owners are two doctors who, like us previously, have come to the realization that even a 17-acre farm is a lot of work in a society where it is almost impossible to find farm workers to help. They put the farm on the market and it sells almost immediately to a wealthy corporate executive and his foreign-born wife who find it to be a unique combination of pastoral and private. Can’t argue with that. I’ve missed it for years. I will always miss Lanntair Farm.
The loss of the barns for storage sets in motion a lot of examining of alternatives—especially vis a vis the rental property and close-in vacant lot we own in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The advantage there is that Asheville is a much better market for Kenneth’s large stock of antiquarian holdings, when and if he will part with them. When we go over to look at an alternative piece of property that might be an option for relocating Kenneth’s business and collections to Hot Springs, it is another moment when my voyage pops up in how I view where I am now. As we drive up to the simple chained and locked farm gate to a stunningly beautiful, wide open, piece of riverfront property, I wonder whether the property will ever be “razor wired” as so much that is beautiful or historic or private is fenced in other countries of the world. People in those countries often tell us that not so long ago nothing was brutally secured in their homeland. A friend of mine reacts to my telling about this by mentioning the phrase “banana republic” but the truth of the matter is that the old “banana” autocracies were benign in comparison to the kind of severe extremes of wealth and poverty that broken glass, pikes, barbed wire, electric fencing and razor wire now represent. Will American society also wind up that way?
Intellectually, I understand the arguments in favor of globalization, but so far it is not helping the peoples of a great many poor countries in the world. Vast expanses of plastic waste, pollution and ubiquitous cell phones constitute the veneer of modern development superimposed on patterns of relationships, economy and culture that date back a couple of centuries or more. That is, a farmer still farming as his ancestors would have done in the 1700s now has a cell phone in his pocket, if little more. It can be a peculiarly devastating combination. Some societies will work their way through, in American fashion, beyond the more obvious signs of waste and pollution just as we’ve got beyond throwing away quite so much out our car windows as we tool down highways. But in more substantive terms it is hard to get around the thought that there are likely to be many violent confrontations on the road to more progressive societies and more sustainable futures.
The word we hear the most on our voyage is flexibility. It is a handy attitude when nothing goes according to plan on land, however much it may on the ship, where control is the ultimate watchword for safety. Back home, I now think about the flexibility of an individual in their own journey of life and work because it is impossible to know what the future holds for any of us. Some of us have more of a gift for rolling with the swells than others and you quickly size-up people while traveling for that element in their character. But societies also can be inflexible such that they make it almost impossible for people to make better or different choices for themselves and their families. Tea Party angst wants to return the United States to romantic notions of our past minus the inconveniences of the past and with what seems an even stranger narrow-mindedness when you return to the States laden with the positive notions that constitute the bigger part of the constellation of dreams about the United States in the rest of the world: That we are a diverse, deliberative people, educated, fit, generous, tolerant, hopeful, fearless, hard working and deeply compassionate.
I have real hope that we will manage to uphold those dreams if we can get past the willful ignorance, the calculated cynicism, the arrogant greed and the entrenched interests of money. (Everywhere we travel people mention Obama as a totem or talisman, really, for this hope. Often his name is the only word they know in English.) Many students on our voyage are amazing young people. Easy money and non-stop media has spoiled them for the harsh future they seem to be in for, in my view. But even if I always think that we adults could be doing much more to give them better tools and prepare them for a complex and hard world, they can be remarkably capable. On a front closer to home, when I go to Hot Springs just after returning and prepare a short show-and-tell for the students at the Hot Springs Elementary School who have been following me around the world, I can readily see evidence of very young students who are engaged, smart and quick to draw inferences from what they know, despite the fact that they all live in a relatively isolated, small rural community in western North Carolina. They have first-rate teachers who really care how they turn out. Like my husband, who is also from the area, many will be the first in their generation to attend college, if they can. Even though most have never traveled any distance at all, let alone to a foreign country, they put together in their brains and imaginations answers for the many questions I ask them while I tell the story of my journey within the context of other people’s lives in foreign lands. And they answer correctly probably the most essential point of information for any traveler: “What is the single most important word to know how to say well in advance in the language of the country you are visiting?” [Answer: See the final page of this Afterword.] In the fall I’ll prepare additional short modules on geography and history for them and I look forward to that.
But back to those questions . . .
I had a “good time” all of the time in the sense that I felt adventurous, safe and enlightened most of the time. For that the shipboard community owes a great deal to the knowledgeable, experienced, disciplined crew and leadership of our ship and Semester at Sea. When one moves over to the question variation as to whether I enjoyed myself, that becomes more difficult. Especially after the first three months, I begin to miss family, Kenneth and our animals terribly and—while miraculous to have at all in many instances—slow and cumbersome Internet access drives me to distraction and frustration a lot of the time. On the other hand, I am a minimalist and—although I’d love to have my Steinway piano and my book library somewhere with me—I am perfectly happy in a small cabin with housekeeping and regular meals provided by very capable and caring staff. Working many hours and attending additional seminars and meetings still left chunks of time with no other ordinary obligation and I could read and write all the hours I could spare from sleep. Writing a journal and sharing those chapters with good friends and family back home made me feel much less alone throughout the journey. And, of course, I went on the voyage with longtime friends and made many new friendships that will, I am sure, last a lifetime.
If you stretch the meaning of the phrase “to enjoy” to include the opportunity to constantly reassess what one thought one knew to be the facts and the truth, this voyage was supremely enjoyable at the same time as it was disconcerting. Regardless, it is truly a gift to be able to suspend the job of living for the self for a while, without the usual obligations of self-absorption that home life expects, and to have the time to think and make connections that are both bizarre and meaningful. In Cambodia, it is a tradition for men in their fifth decade of life to leave family and work and enter the monastery for a year. Reportedly, they return to both at the end of the year, often with a much different attitude and set of priorities for how to finish the end of their lives. (One hopes that that includes giving their wives a year off, too. But it likely doesn’t. The summary world statistic that can really turn you into a feminist after observing how hard women work—and how often men stand around or just roam about freely with friends—is that women do two-thirds of the world’s work for one tenth the compensation while owning a mere one one-hundredth of the means of production.)
Back to those questions . . .
The most disturbing countries to visit were India and Ghana in terms of the sheer scale of the destitution, corruption and lack of infrastructure. Brazil and South Africa have far more in the way of resources and infrastructure but continue to deal with enduring problems of the past—especially the history of slavery and apartheid—as well as the tensions of being strung between small, insecure classes of wealth and enormous, insecure masses in abject poverty. China, Vietnam and Cambodia have people who work so hard without complaint that it can be difficult to know exactly what their lives are really like but they give off the undeniable intention that their lives tomorrow, and especially of their children, will be better.
Mauritius is my favorite country, hands down. Firstly for its beauty, which is astounding, and secondly for its society, which is comprised of countless races, nationalities and cultures—all of whom work and live in relative harmony in a progressive social order that cares for both people and environment without the extremes of poverty and extravagant wealth we see in so many places hard up against each other. Mauritius is the only place in all our travels where while hiking friends and I see volunteers picking up trash in a national park reserve and it reminds me of what I do in our neighborhood at home all the time. The less trash any visitor sees the less trash there will be because people most freely throw down when they see trash already there—zero tolerance where it works best. Mauritius seems to have learned these lessons and others far in advance of many other countries.
My next favorite country is Japan, also for its beauty and for its exquisite care as well as its discipline, enterprise and community of shared values. Quite simply, there is no trash in Japan. But there are widespread practices put into place due to sustainability considerations and always exactingly arranged that Americans are not accustomed to and might find incongruous. Examples: The Japanese garden in the tiniest spots imaginable, even in plots alongside busy thoroughfares where no passerby disturbs them. Wash freshly laundered hangs on back balconies and porches to dry. And solar hot water heaters rest on nearly every rooftop. Whatever it is, it is far tidier than anything anywhere else in the world. And, suddenly, I realize how messy my exuberant garden back home must seem to the Japanese graduate student in music who lives with us—especially when I don’t get those falling leaves off our walkways quickly enough.
I am a walker—who feels particularly penned-in on the ship because it is not possible to walk all around it and I don’t like the routine of exercise equipment—so my assessment of our ports and countries is heavily influenced by whether or not we can safely walk and find our way about. On that score, Hong Kong is at the top of my list. When I come home, it seems the most luxurious thing to walk out the door and walk.
But beyond the country visits, what I think most of us on this journey value the most about our experience is the shipboard community we live among. Almost never in our modern lives do we have the chance to live with the same set of 1,000 people for an extended period of time in a large but relatively confined space. Four months is enough time to learn to respect and even admire someone who, on first meeting, you think you won’t care for or can’t stand at all. It’s enough time to discover the person—and learn the back stories of many people—well enough to begin to understand that judging quickly and superficially is not good.
Repeated encounters with people struggling everyday to come to terms with new ideas and experiences—along with their quirks, distinctive bags of tricks and life wisdom—mean that the discussions range wide and deep and they can continue over the course of many weeks, especially during the many meals shared on board and in port. One of the most thought-provoking notions I heard expressed in what turned out to be many ongoing discussions originates with one of the economists on board who suggests that it will be vitally important for a sustainable future to “get the price right.” In other words, that so much of what we think we need is not priced accurately, so that when we try to cut budgets or prioritize or cap-and-trade we are not yet working with real numbers but with subsidized figures that don’t take into account their total cost. I find it interesting because it also helps address issues related to the entitlement that seems increasingly to permeate all levels of our society—far beyond the most disadvantaged and deserving.
Far better than my comments here, my friend, Warner, the University of Virginia librarian and longtime friend I assist on this voyage, eloquently expresses how much the people we travel with come to mean to us when he gives the final address in the last Global Studies class of the semester onboard. We all know how many months—nay, years—the deans of the voyage have spent to assemble a college of faculty and staff who are up to the challenge of an instant campus at sea. We are all—faculty, staff, students, crew—the beneficiaries of this lasting community and leaving at its end is hard.
As for what I cared for the least: It has to be the suffering, grinding poverty and exploitation of people with no other choices—especially women, children, and the disabled. But what I detest even more has to be the self-serving, self-satisfied rationale I hear too frequently from all kinds of people that the poorest nations are also the happiest because they have souls and spirits we material creatures can only dream of. Well, I don’t either buy that or believe that.
There is, believe it or not, an Index of Happiness—discussed at length in a most entertaining way by Eric Weiner in The Geography of Bliss—but it paints a much more complicated picture of those who are happiest as those who live without extreme wealth or extreme poverty in their countries. There is also what is known as a Gini coefficient that weights the levels of difference between wealth and poverty in a society. Many of the happier countries lie in the middle of that spread and, as one might expect, at neither extreme of rapacious greed or utter deprivation. Above all, the happier countries appear to be those that value a greater good and a common goal and not merely material riches for their own sake. Happiness for people in many countries is having a job that provides for their family and gives them hope that their children will have a better life. Many of us get to know crew members on the ship and we invariably tell them at some point how sorry we are that they have to go nine months or more at a time without seeing their families. But they tell us that they feel they’re lucky to be working a good job with good co-workers. For sheer happiness, one of the “happiest” days I spend on the whole trip is in a Brazilian guesthouse on the beach listening to a small group of staff working in the kitchen after a holiday. They are regaling each other with tales of what they and their families did the day before. They are laughing hysterically and I find myself laughing out loud along with them while I read in a hammock from a balcony above them even though I have only the barest clues of what they’re saying in Portuguese.
Finally, what troubled me the most on this journey is how concerned the peoples of the world are that the United States be genuinely good and great—and that our students be the next generation of Americans to do its best to be smart, capable, fair and generous in a world imperiled by so many problems and conflicts. People genuinely want the USA to lead by example. Given all the damage of the last few years internationally, we were surprised countless times by how welcome we felt as Americans—even by people who had a great deal of cause to not care for us after what we had done, or not done, in their homeland. Time and time again, a local person disturbed by the levels of corruption in their own society would tell us how inspiring it was that there was no corruption in America. To which we would rejoin: Well, there is, in the indirect form of political systems and elections that are awash in money and overwhelmed by the influence and special interests of those with expensive stakes in the status quo. It is a problem that we must come to grips with or our entire society will only reward those with money and position—and not those with talent, drive, and new ideas to change our economy and society for the better. We need to do better. We have a lot to live up to.
And I need to wrap this journal up. Stop the sermonizing and move on to actually doing some of what I’ve thought about doing in the last few months. This journal’s Prologue based on Peterman catalog copy—there are days when even I think I read too widely—was right on: Being at sea for a long time does make you think about what you do when you get back home on land, if only because there’s always a thought in the back of your mind that you may not get back across that immense expanse of water. While busy with work on this voyage, I got my share of time to sit and watch the magnificent seas we traveled through. Perhaps only the highest mountains of the earth give you the same perspective on how enormous is our responsibility for stewardship of the earth at the same time as you feel so small and inadequate to the task.
A journal is a good habit to get into so I will be trying to continue and I recommend it at every turn to all my busiest family members and friends. If you need inspiration, read one or two of the many excellent memoirs that have been written in recent years, or even classics like Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory or William Zinsser’s Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir. Two volumes of memoir written by Zimbabwe’s Peter Godwin—Mukiwa: A White Boy in Africa and When a Crocodile Eats the Sun—are among the best books I’ve ever read. Those who are more visual will be spurred on by the recent When Wanderers Cease to Roam: A Traveler’s Journal of Staying Put by Vivian Swift. After all, as one of my shipboard friends says: If you’ve nothing to write about at the end of the day maybe you should have spent the day differently. There is so much to be grateful for in our rich and bountiful American lives and so many ways to waste our time on earth. Writing is thinking and there’s no cost or waste in that.
To all of you who made it possible for me to make this incredible voyage—and to all those I learned from all along the way—I can only say:
Gracias
Mahalo
Domo Arigato
Xie Xie
Mh Goi
Cam O’n
Ar Kun
Shukriya/Vandri
Merci
Dankie/Aise/Asante/Enkosi/Ngiyabonga
Ogiwadong
Obrigado/Obrigada
About a week before arriving in Salvador, it occurs to a couple of us that we live far from the beach at home and it might be a good idea to try to find a reasonably-priced guesthouse on one of the famous beaches of Itapoa for our last three days before the final stretch of on-ship days back to the States. We find a good one in the Pousada Encanto de Itapoan and Jill, a nurse practitioner on the ship, and I make reservations to do just that. (I don’t know exactly why, but two of my closest friends on the ship are the two nurse practitioners—perhaps because we all work a fair amount of the time.)
In the morning Jill has to finish-up some on-call duty but then we also visit both the Cidade Baixa (Lower City) and the Cidade Alta (Upper City) of Pelourinho again to see more of the historic structures restored as part of Unesco’s World Heritage Fund program. We find out that the Cidade Baixa has many attractions even though it is more commercial and is deserted at night because there are no residents. (We learn from a knowledgeable cab driver that getting people to come back as residents in the city—and not merely as workplace—is seen as the way to also make the entire city safer. That is a realization Americans have also been slow to come to but when it happens it does seem to make a huge difference.) It is tough to find but there is a particularly nice crafts cooperative—Espaco Solidario–near the base of the funicular that takes workers to and fro the two levels of the city. (The other major way to travel from one level to the other is by an outdoor art deco public elevator known as Lacerda Elevator.) Both the elevator and the funicular—and taxis at night—are the only safe ways to get up to the central historic district. The steep streets known as ladeiros are not safe for anyone to walk through although, again, our taxi driver reports that there are efforts to bring all of those back to life.
I want Jill to have the chance to visit the beautifully restored hospital but it is closed for the day so we plan to come back to see it on Sunday and attend the Cathedral Sunday mass, which is reputed to have very fine music.
The Pousada up near the Farol (Lighthouse) de Itapoa turns out to be a good choice, close enough to the beach to have steady breezes but far enough to be quiet. The taxi cab ride to get there is not terrifying and it is reasonably priced. And the driver seems to understand my Portuguese. How much more can we ask for? We get a lot more: Some of the most beautiful beaches and surf you have ever seen. There are also exceptional restaurants and bakeries within walking distance. Breakfast is exceptional and hearty enough for us to skip lunch. All along the beach are small food kiosks and groups of musicians playing the distinctive sounds and rhythms of Bahian music. Children and adults play volleyball and soccer. There is fishing of all types with amazing hauls of large and small fish.
The Pousada calls the same taxi cab driver for us and he picks us up for the return drive back to town on Sunday. Once again, he gives us explicit instructions on how to stay safe and then he is off to the beach himself, followed by plans to attend one of the most important soccer matches in Brazil that same evening—the one between Bahia and Vitorio that will determine which team goes to the upcoming World Cup finals in South Africa. The soccer game starts at 10pm when it is cooler and everyone’s had a good day at the beach and dinner. Beaches, soccer, food, the arts and music are the top priorities in Brazil and they are of the highest and most vibrant quality.
When we get back to Pelourinho late Sunday morning we discover that the Cathedral does not have a Sunday service because of renovations. We are sorry to miss the music but we learn that the cardinal is celebrating in the hospital chapel so we go there in order for Jill to see the beautifully restored chapel. It is the Sunday of the Good Shepherd and it is possible to understand enough similar words in Portuguese to hear the cardinal talk about the historic renovations as only the first step in bringing back the center of the city to life. Every one of the many churches in the Centro Historico is packed with people. Perhaps the Church in Salvador really is a pastor of its people as surely as it has been a steward of its churches and there really will be a new era for the people here.
After the service, the midday sun is hot so we head back for the ship intending to go out again after a quick lunch. But, instead, there is news of many students sick with food poisoning on the flights back from the Amazon so Jill needs to stay to help treat them when they arrive back. The onboard clinic is quickly inundated and it’s back to work for her.
I decide to stay and start to pack because the next few, last days will be busy with closing down the library and completing other chores. We depart the harbor in the evening on the last leg of our journey—over 3,000 miles to Fort Lauderdale.
It is time to begin to say goodbye to our fellow travelers and to plan our return to family and friends and work at home. As we speak with each other about what this once-in-a-lifetime voyage has meant, it becomes readily apparent that, even though we’ve all been on the same ship, we all have had different journeys. Every one of us has a story to tell, just as we’ve learned that every person we meet has a story worth listening to. Those stories are life.
On the second day in Salvador, I take a trip with friends over to the Island of Itaparica in the Bay of All Saints, which turns out to be both pretty and pretty quiet during what is the off season. In summer (November through February down here) many people have second homes on the large island and it is a bustling community. It’s also got a lot of capital construction projects underway renovating historic buildings and squares. Like much of Brazil, they seem to be taking seriously the Olympics in 2016.
One of our friends brings a kite and sails it off the stern of the ferry boat. It is amazing how flying a kite can make you feel at least forty years younger. I got to take a turn on the line. It is the first time I ever got a chance to fly a kite—let alone do it in Itaparica.
A couple of people decide it’s too desolate for them so they go back across the brilliant blue bay in short order. But Karen, one of the nurse practitioners on the ship, and I stay and do a good amount of walking. We find many worthwhile sights and can recommend it in any season although the long taxi cab drive back across the island to the ferry boat launch in Mar Grande is a little strange. Or we are so ready for something bad to happen that we read too much into an ordinary attempt to get the best deal on the trip in a taxi whose doors only open and close with wrenches from the outside. Anyway, we make it to the pier safely and for the agreed amount of fare.
After four months of travel in taxis from ports and through cities we do not know, either well or at all, I can honestly say that one of the hardest things to judge on the front end is a good taxi ride. It is constantly a precarious decision. Only occasionally do we find a good, honest, dependable driver; when we do, we make every effort to use them for everything and refer them to other people. We’re also ready to pay them almost anything they want. Some of the better off students have figured this out and they engage driver/guide services before they even get into port. It costs more but it seems to be worth it.
There are many scenic views on the island—looking towards both Salvador to the west and mountains to the north—and what must be vibrant shops to serve summer visitors.
As we head back to Salvador the skies turn dark with rain clouds and a rainbow breaks out directly over our ship in the harbor. (People frequently ask me for photos of the ship but it is very difficult to capture its entire length. Being out on the ferry coming back in gives me a chance to try. On the other hand, it is dwarfed by the large cruise ships that sometimes dock with us in the harbors. An enormous ship comes in late in the night and we ask our crew how many people are likely on it. They tell us that the way to calculate the total number of passengers and crew is to count the number of lifeboats. They count enough for 3,000, compared to our near-1,000.)
Later that night Karen and I take a taxi, again, to go a mere two blocks to attend a concert of Mozart and Beethoven symphonies by the Orquestra Sinfonica Da Bahia under the conductor Rodrigo Blumenstock. The music is first rate with both conductor and players quite young. The perfect venue is in the Lower City (Cidade Baixa) in the historic Igreja da Conceicao da Praia. Built 1739-1765 and featuring the Portuguese pedra de lioz, a marble-like stone brought in the trans-Atlantic sailing ships as ballast. It is a baroque feast for the eyes and senses—particularly beautiful in candle and gaslight. Both the famous trompe-l’oeil ceiling and acoustics are superb.
It’s a holiday in Salvador on the day we arrive in port. No one seems to know what holiday it is but many of the streets are deserted and, partly as a consequence, several of the students are mugged within a short time of our arrival. Beggars and street urchins stand directly outside the one or two ATMs that all of the students are lined-up for, awaiting a handout or an opportunity to yank a chain off or lift a handbag and make a run for it. The armed guards at every street corner don’t seem to make much of a difference. Later, many people find that there’s been additional fraud perpetrated on their debit and credit card accounts. Not nice.
Despite precautions and warnings, and the armed military police, the muggings in the historic district of Pelourinho (or Terreiro de Jesus), the first stop for many of us in Brazil, set the tone for our visit—one where we are all enormously impressed by the country, its history and its people, but defensive in the extreme because of the crime and personal insecurity. The most frequently asked question is: “Is it safe?” The first three students to get robbed are a group of three male students accosted by a group of four males, who make off with all of their cash, watches and Blackberries a mere half block away from the main center square. This does not exactly inspire confidence in the far greater number of women on our ship.
In our studies of the current Brazil society and economy, we learn that inequality exists here in the extreme and crime of all types is a blatant manifestation of the severity of the problem. Whereas in the United States, a country with growing inequality between rich and poor that is far more unequal than European countries, the top 10% of the rich make over 16 times what the bottom 10% make, in Brazil the top 10% make 60 times what the bottom 10% make. Recently, the government has changed to a more social democratic regime, following upon many years of elite and military rule, and there is growing investment in infrastructure and education, but it is going to take many years to redress the balance in the society and give hope to the masses of slum dwellers in the favelas. The situation seems hopeless to us as visitors but a couple of us one evening are treated to a detailed lesson in both safety and hope by a taxi driver who urges us to be careful, with very specific instructions of where we should and should not walk, together with a case for those areas to get much better in the near future. We can only hope he is as right as he is passionate about his city and country.
In the meantime, because conditions will not improve in the next four days we are in port, all of us wind up leaving everything on the ship and only carrying the barest amount of money and identification. It is a great shame because it means that we will not support as tourists the investment that the city has made in massive programs of restoring the amazing architectural treasures of Salvador’s 400 years of history. We also take away only a few photographs of a very beautiful place because it is so chancy to carry a camera—although it is certainly not a bad thing just to experience a place and people and not record on film. In the evening of our first day, despite all of the discouraging and disturbing mishaps, a large film crew arrives to film a commercial for the World Cup and a veritable street party happens with music and dance. A large number of our students join in the fun and wind up being included in the filming of the commercial.
The city’s history is a rich and tragic one, beginning with Dutch colonialists who initiated the slave trade from Africa to the New World in the 16th century until the Portuguese succeeded them. Over the course of four centuries an estimated 6 million slaves—plus many more without number lost at sea—were brought to Salvador under horrific conditions. For many years, Salvador was the capital of Brazil. Today, 70% of the population is of African descent although there has also been an enormous amount of intermarriage with people of native Indian and European ancestry. Because Portuguese Catholicism did not seek to deprive either Africans or Indians of their native beliefs and customs, much of Brazilian culture and religion is a rich meld that includes spiritual candomble and dance capoeira as two of its most colorful elements.
The churches and museums are stunning and magnificent colonial buildings with baroque ornamentation and acres of gold leaf. We visit far too many to even mention in this journal. Two are particularly impressive: an outstanding early colonial structure dating back to the 16th century and housing the first hospital in Brazil (Museu de Misericordia); and the Museu Afro-Brasileiro built upon the 15th century foundations of the original Jesuit College.
Since the only thing we had that rainy morning of our first day was a couple of cups of the exceptional Brazilian coffee, Warner and Nancy and I have a mid afternoon lunch in a wonderful small restaurant in Pelourinho, taking shelter from a downpour. Warner and Nancy turn in early back at the ship because they will take off by plane for a trip in the Amazon the next day. I join a group of friends on a taxi ride to a restaurant three blocks away—alas, it is not safe to walk at all at night in the port area. The food is Bahian (the adjective derived from the name of the state that Salvador is in) and it is very good.
I get back early enough from dinner to finish reading a Dickensian novel by Brazil’s—and Salvador’s—most famous writer, Jorge Amado: Gabriela Clove and Cinnamon and start in on another of his massive novels Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. Both of them are a great help in appreciating the society and culture. I ask a friend back at the university to advise me on Brazilian literature and am chagrined to learn how many works of outstanding Brazilian authors are not available in English translations. She jokes I will learn to read Brazilian Portuguese easily enough. But while it is true that there are similarities with Spanish there are also substantial differences. I feel lucky to know enough Spanish—and to be able to hear the differences in speech—to get by in conversations with people in the shops and taxi cab drivers.
Living in rocky, hilly terrain on a heavily-wooded lot in Knoxville’s Lakemoor Hills, I don’t get to see many sunsets. When we lived at Lanntair Farm there were far more chances to watch the sun go down because our lakeside pasture looked directly to the west and barn chores were often at just the right time for the show. On this voyage, however, the ship affords unparalleled opportunities to see sunsets over the oceans from an exceptional vantage point and so I suspect that I have reached my lifetime limit on this trip.
As we approach the last port of our voyage, it occurs to many of us that there are many other lifetime limits we need to appreciate in these last few days. One especially: The last chance to spend so much time with the same group of people, many of whom have become lasting friends. We know friends and family at home over the course of many years but nowhere else than a voyage around the world over the course of such a long time as four months can we really get the chance to get to know the same people in an intensive way at just the same time we are travelling to visit many new people in many different cultures.
It has been, indeed, the chance of a lifetime.
While most of us will likely never be able to do this again, some on the ship are already planning to come back again.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who serves on the board of directors of Semester at Sea and its parent institution the Institute for Shipboard Education, will be guest lecturer on the next voyage around the world in Fall 2010. One of the lifelong learners has calculated that it costs her nearly as much to live at home as onboard so she has already registered. There are some real advantages to three meals a day and all housekeeping done by a highly competent cabin steward.
For those who can mainly attend courses, it is a great life. For those of us who must work, it is still a very good life despite all the frustrations of working with limited space and tools.
Many of us discuss how perfectly natural it has become to live in a cabin space of less than 200 sq ft. A number of us do almost all of our own laundry by hand and find it an easy chore to keep up with. Although I am not sure how cost efficient shipboard education really is, there is no question but that being in relatively tight quarters encourages a sustainable approach to many aspects of life.
I don’t miss housekeeping, but I do miss cooking terribly—to the point where I’ve started (quietly) working with one or two of the chefs onboard although I’m sure they’d just as soon I leave the cooking to them.
Almost everyone’s biggest complaint is how slow the ship’s satellite Internet access is and how inadequate is the total available bandwidth, particularly when all of the students are in the midst of researching and completing their final papers and exams. On the other hand, there are plenty of occasions when being able to contact family and friends back home by email feels like an absolute miracle under the conditions of rough seas in the middle of a very big ocean where no land is in sight for many miles and the stars seem closer than anything else on earth.
Today I help lead a service project to the Osu Children’s Home, an orphanage that provides shelter for approximately 250 children up to the age of 18. Established in 1949 by private agencies, it is now funded by the Department of Social Welfare as well as private donations and sponsored scholarships. There is a preschool in the walled compound but most students go to public schools offsite. A number of students are more severely disabled and are cared for in a separate unit.
We are welcomed in a large group that includes student nurses in the Public Health School. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be adequate planning for all 75 of us to volunteer at the same time that day. There is only enough work planned for about 15 nurses and 15 students. I take a group of 15 or so of our students and approach a mother-auntie group sitting outside in the shade of a large tree with a large number of babies and toddlers, the ages 0-3 unit. I ask if they would like additional hands to hold the babies and play with the toddlers. We join two students from Denmark and Finland—Katya and Kristina—who are there as volunteers in their service year away from school. The students wish to take photos but it is not allowed and I can’t say I blame the orphanage for that policy.
The children suffer from a lack of attention and touch. There are nowhere near enough hands to take care of all of them. It takes a lot to get the little ones to smile but the students give it their best try. Some are AIDS babies, others cry much of the time from causes that no one can tell us about, and others are developmentally delayed. One or two seem fine. We help with the routine of getting them in for baths, feeding and nap time.
Orphanage visits are awkward and painful but they are also a good way for our students to see the great difficulty that many people have from the very start of their young lives as children. I certainly wish there was a mandatory program in the USA like the national service programs of Canada and Europe that require all post-secondary (or post-third form) students to give one year of volunteer service in societies much less well off than their own. After a mere four hours with such needy children it can be very difficult to leave them but we must.
In the evening, the ship departs the inner harbor late because yet another trip has been delayed on the poor roads from the interior of the country. It then needs to bunker for fuel which means it rocks pretty wildly through much of the night until we finally pull away from land. If it has to rock, being in bed is the better time so we do not complain. We just pick up everything that’s slid on to the floor overnight and start classes up the next day.
The next and final port is the historic city of Salvador in Brazil, over 2,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean, following the same sea lane of the three centuries of slave trade from Africa to America.
The Royal Poinciana which grows just as beautifully in Ghana as it does in our final destination of Florida.
I lead a full day trip to a tropical forest reserve on land owned high up in the scenic mountains above Accra by our inter port lecturer Professor Kofi Asare Opoku where we volunteer to plant tree seedlings. The comparatively good road rises steeply up through the villages of Kitase, Ahwerase, Obosomase, Tutu and Mompong. The reserve contains a variety of fruit trees and is open to local people to take food for their needs. There are also very large specimens of protected, indigenous silver-cotton trees. Professor Kofi takes us on an extended tour of the reserve, much of which is truly a jungle of vegetation. (I would have advised that he get some work out of all of us before he traipses us all over the mountain side but that is apparently not in the playbook of hospitality. Many of the adults, in particular, are wilting by the minute in the heat and humidity. Later I wonder why we don’t see more wildlife, although we see a lot of domestic fowl and hear a peacock on a neighboring farm, but perhaps they know better than to be about in the heat of the day. We do see some huge spiders and their webs—appropriate since the reserve’s name is Ananse Kwae meaning “spider forest.”) He has quite a number of friends and workers at the site so our efforts are largely ceremonial but he turns the event into an opportunity to show how his tribesmen and culture welcome visitors on to its lands and homes.
It is a very hot—did I mention how hot it is, yet?—and a very full itinerary, but it also proves to be an extraordinary trip. Two additional professors from African University accompany us and we are also joined by six of their students. I’ve wondered why we haven’t had students from local universities on more of our field trips. It is such a great way for the students to get the chance to have extended conversations about the countries they are visiting that go a long way past the exchanges they have in shopping at vendors’ stalls.
On the trip up to the reserve the students are excited to see a fenced-in compound along the highway of Bob Marley’s recording studio, where his widow lives part of every year with a retinue of 34 relatives and friends. Presumably, Marley’s royalties are enough to transport that many people back and forth across the Atlantic!
Professor Kofi takes us on to two additional side trips—one to the Aburi Botanical Gardens and another to Tetteh Quanshie’s Cocoa Farm, the oldest in Ghana, dating back to 1879. Ghana is one of the world’s leading suppliers of cocoa beans for chocolate. Later, on the way back to the ship, our guide points out the immense silos near the Tema port where the cocoa beans are fermented and dried prior to export.
Students at a public elementary school we pass as we leave the cocoa farm.
But an even bigger surprise is lunch. It is at the mountain retreat of the former Ambassador to the United States and his wife, Kwame and Gladys Adusei-Poku. An enormous variety of Ghanaian dishes is on the buffet in a garden built to routinely welcome many visitors. The Ambassador is a great host and we feel honored to be so generously welcomed. Entertainment is provided by the Dza Nyonmo Dance Ensemble, a group that includes at least a dozen drummers who are far better than any I have ever heard. I get one of their cards at the end of the afternoon and give it to the music professor on the ship with the recommendation that we contact the group the next time Semester at Sea comes to Ghana.
By late afternoon we make tracks to get back down from the mountains and across the city to the port. We are in good time but at least two of the other field trips are very late. Like I said, many of the roads need a lot of work. A motor trip that would take two hours in the US takes fifteen or more here and there do not appear to be any alternatives by air.
For the first time in this entire voyage, I stay on the ship for a complete day in port to get caught up on some work and—it must be admitted—to avoid the heat, which is overwhelming. Favourite Foods Restaurant had provided a mildly-air-conditioned respite for our long lunch of yesterday with ‘Michael’ Fifi Quansah. It was a great gift for him to spend so many hours of his Sunday afternoon with us and to tell us so much about his country. We come back to the ship at the end of the day armed with all of his contacts so that we can recommend that the Semester at Sea people consider him for a post as inter port student in a future voyage. He’s not sure what his future plans for higher education are but for now is working in a business that provides services to international conferences visiting the country. I recommend to him the School of Sustainable Development and Tourism in Mauritius, some of whose graduates I spoke with while we were in that country. They all had an exceptional appreciation for the value of tourism but also its costs and the need for a country to ensure a positive balance between those in safeguarding its people, culture and environment.
The luxury of our situation as Americans is that we can come back to the ship and take a quick shower after the hot day but this seems a guilty pleasure when I think of all the people in this country who have no access to running water other than what they haul by buckets atop their heads.
A dead tree at the Aburi Botanical Garden in the process of being carved in the traditional Ghanaian manner by a local artisan.
Tema, the main port of Ghana, is located 19 miles south of the capital city of Accra. As one of our guides reminds us, it is in nearly the middle of the world, lying very close to both the prime meridian (0 degrees longitude—otherwise known as the GMT or Greenwich Mean Time) and the equator (0 degrees latitude).
Just like the ports of India, we can smell Tema a long time before we dock. Later we find out that that is because, in part, and just as in India, much of the rest of the developed world ships its electronic and other waste to Ghana for recycling. Europeans who think they are doing a good deed, individually, to pay 50 Euros to have a computer or other electronic device recycled responsibly are actually paying 49 Euros to profiteers to ship those items for 1 Euro to Ghana where some of the components are recycled but far more is burnt—at tremendous cost to both the environment and the health of workers, some as young as five years old—to recover metals as cheaply as possible. One of our professors takes an environmental risk class to visit one of these waste fields where over 60,000 families live in slums with no schools, no clinics, no power, no piped water or sanitation of any kind. Just open ditches and a road coming in and going back out. Despite the deplorable conditions, the community’s leaders are concerned that the class’s visit and associated publicity may harm the pipeline of waste without which its people have no livelihood.
And people even in this “wasteland” are still amazingly kind to us as visitors. When a student slips and falls into one of the many black pools of sludge in the narrow lanes of the squalid slum, all of us laugh—faculty, students and slum dwellers. The student is not happy, obviously, but what really shocks him is how quickly people haul small buckets of water from their shacks and bring rags to help clean the filth off him. It is a moment in one of the many lessons we learn about how hospitable people in grinding poverty still try to be.
Recently named the “Second Least Failed State” in Africa, after Mauritius, the country of Ghana is basically a success, no matter how much of a Third World country it looks to visitors. And that may mostly be a testament to an exceptional, charismatic, far-seeing leader who fought for independence from the British in 1957 in a largely peaceful campaign and yet who is now pretty much forgotten outside of Africa—Kwame Nkrumah. Born in the Gold Coast area that would later become Ghana and educated in Britain and the US in the 1930s, he is remembered as the first African to lead his nation to statehood. Today he is revered alongside Nelson Mandela as sub-Sahara Africa’s greatest leaders. In addition to articulating a compelling vision for Ghana that pulled together the many tribes in the country—in stark contrast to what is happening in so many African countries with ethnic violence—Nkrumah also sought to advance the cause of peaceful cooperation in pan-African unity. But a military coup in his own country removed him from power in the 1960s, apartheid forestalled a more gradual integration of blacks and mixed races in South Africa and Zimbabwe (previously Rhodesia), and the political elite in Ghana accelerated a course of rewarding itself that has now become a system of endemic corruption not unlike that of India.
In my reading I learn that the presence of malarial mosquitoes in the several countries of the Gold and Ivory coastline in West Africa helped prevent white settlers from coming in and claiming large tracts of land. The heat and malaria both meant that resources and labor were contracted through local tribal leaders. That made the drive for independence and its aftermath much less difficult because—in contrast to South Africa and Zimbabwe—there were not large numbers of prosperous white farmers or miners in residence. Basically, the British colonial administrators were relieved to leave the country.
Sorry for the history lesson but I learn a good deal about West Africa because I am asked to work with both the inter port lecturer and inter port students from Ghana who join us in South Africa for the days of class at sea coming to West Africa. The inter port lecturer is a well-educated and respected member of Ghana’s African University faculty and it quickly becomes apparent that the two students consider it disrespectful to disagree with any of the older gentleman’s views. They stick to non-controversial facts about the country and he speaks about proverbs, widespread tribal and ethnic harmony, progressive social programs and the need for Ghanaians to mostly work on restoring their cultural heritage and self confidence. I don’t get anywhere in trying to get them to address the tough issues of tribal/ethnic strife, child labor, and inadequate public infrastructure.
Later we hear a different story and get a much more complete picture when we speak to a young Ghanaian, ‘Michael’ Fifi Quansah, a former student who has worked with Warner while studying at the University of Virginia (both pictured above in front of Favourite Fast Foods). He fills us in on the considerable ethnic conflict and widespread corruption. He and other young people, educated in both Ghana and abroad, would like to be active and involved in a more progressive government but their participation is discouraged by the older political elite. The latter want the younger generation to serve their dues for many more years. Meanwhile, a wide gulf of inequality in the society persists as the elite and civil servants reward themselves and corruption becomes institutionalized—again much like India.
Having said all of this, the economic situation in Ghana is gradually improving and has reportedly come a long way in the last 10 years. But it seems to have a long way to go in our eyes. Again, like India but not quite so badly, the infrastructure is a patchwork and roads are clogged with vehicles in bogged-down traffic. Expensive gated communities are surrounded by shacks in slums which, in turn, are ringed-round with even more gated communities and busy dirt roads and highways. On-site, handmade concrete blocks are the building material of choice, so the McMansions here take a long time to complete. We learn that interest rates are exorbitant—25% or more—so most do not borrow but build very incrementally.
A surprising fact we learn about Ghana—as well as much of Africa—is the astounding growth of Christian churches on the continent, especially in the sub-Sahara, with one professor predicting that the next heads of both Catholicism and Anglicanism could well be from either Africa or South America. Many of us on the ship have spirited discussions about what this means for the future of these countries, still deeply entrenched in poverty and corruption that forestalls a much wider sharing of the very real and rich resources they contain. Billions of dollars of wealth have been extracted for many decades but are clearly not being used to benefit the society at large. Could African Christianity really make the difference in a peaceful transfer of more resources to the poor while they are alive, or will it go the way of colonial Christian models that put off any social justice to the afterlife?
To go the 19 miles from Tema to Accra is a big deal, at least an hour each way and far more in a jam, so going out to travel the country is not a decision made lightly. On the first day in port, Warner, Nancy and I hop the very first shuttle out and are deposited in Osu, a part of Accra where governmental offices and shops are located. It’s a rude first landing because we can’t match up our map with the streets or landmarks and for a good while dozens of us pass each other going in circles. We have a lunch meeting at the Favourite Foods Restaurant with Warner’s student, who now lives back home in Accra, but we can find no one who can tell us how to get to it. After much walking and a couple of taxi drives in misguided goose chases through the city, we finally find a policeman who knows where it is. That turns out to be within two blocks of where we started when the shuttle dropped us off next to a garish purple and pink, high rise night club. (Taxi drivers in many of the cities we visit on this voyage often don’t know the town they’re driving in. They are often from another country. It can make it very hard to choose a good one or feel confident they’ll get there.)
In the midst of all the running around, I am glad to get the chance to make a quick visit to the tomb and memorial park of Kwame Nkrumah near Independence Square.