Intersection

A guided meditation is not what anyone is expecting during an orientation meeting for the Short-Term 2012 voyage of Semester at Sea. The faculty and staff are introduced, of course. The Drop/Add process is explained and a presentation is given about the 9,000 volume library, which happens to be the largest afloat but mostly foreign territory to this generation of Google-dependent college students. The UVA Honor Code is passionately defended as the students are told how living under it is actually quite liberating. The Captain tries to present the very real safety concerns at sea without terrifying the students or putting them to sleep. Closing the program is Academic Dean Rosalyn Berne, whose enthusiastic urgings finally got me to sign up for this voyage over a year ago. How could you not want to sail under the leadership of a person whose bio states that her research "focuses on the ethical, cultural, and societal implications of the emergence and convergence of nanotechnology, bio-technology, information technology and cognitive sciences...She has published widely on nanotechnology ethics."? I am proud to call a nanotechnology ethicist my friend.


Rosalyn plants her feet center stage and takes a deliberate breath as she turns her head slowly around the room. Her engaging face is surrounded by a thick mass of curls, halfway between an Afro and loose dreadlocks, a style that suggests a winsome combination of ethnic pride and personal laissez-faire.

"I want you to go with me for a little while. Get comfortable. Feel your feet planted on the floor, feel your legs, buns, body, arms and hands. Take a few breaths and watch how the air goes in and out of your body." She pauses. "Now imagine you are walking down the gangway with some friends and venturing out into port for the first time."

She asks us to picture walking into a crowded town with pungent smells from the food vending stalls, overwhelming heat penetrating the skin on our arms, and the cacophony of traffic snarled by cars, motorcycles and animals. "Somehow you get separated from your friends and end up in a park. Across the sidewalk is a stall piled with coconuts. You've had coconut milk from a can at home but always wanted to try it fresh. You bargain a little on price then the vendor chops off the top with a machete and puts a straw into the coconut. As you walk away, you take welcome sips of the refreshing liquid."

"OK, open your eyes. Put that scene away." She pauses once more. "Close your eyes again as we go to another place. You are waking up. The room is still dark and the air close. You put your feet onto the packed dirt floor and begin your morning routine. Yesterday's leftover beans and rice are mixed together for breakfast. Children are dressed in their school uniform, blue shirt, khaki pants. You wait for your ride to the town square. The coconuts have been delivered to your small stall and you arrange them neatly as you think about the ship that arrived in port this morning. It has been many days since a ship has come and you're excited about the possibilities of making the money your family needs today. You have to pay $5 for the stall rental and the money to the grower who brought the coconuts but if you can get $2 for them and business is good, you should finally be able to bring some money home."

"A person in t-shirt and shorts with a small backpack and camera walks up to your stall. The person speaks to you with strange words that sound vaguely like Spanish and seems to want to know the price of a coconut. You say 'Two dollars' and your customer says 'How about one dollar?' You nod, pick up your machete, chop off the top, put in a straw and hand it over."

"OK, open your eyes. What are some of the ways you think these two people are the same?" Students speak out with a variety of answers but the one that draws Rosalyn's biggest smile is "They are both hopeful". She ends the exercise in a few more sentences, without much elaboration, no neatly tied up lessons for this roomful of neophyte travelers. We are left with the beautiful sound of her voice deep in our heads and with the felt experience of two lives intersecting.

As a bonus, I am left with one answer to a question I often think about: What is it that makes the Semester at Sea experience so transformative? How exactly does the magic happen? I am clearer now than ever before that this program sets students up from the very beginning for meeting and exceeding the enormous expectations we have of them. Through the lives as well as the words of the compassionate, brilliant, and gifted people who lead this voyage, the students are taught what it means to be a global citizen. Because Semester at Sea consistently succeeds at its mission and because I am fortunate enough to be a part of it, I too am infused with hopefulness, for my own life and for our world.