Vicky's Children

Meet Thandile. She is thirteen years old and lives with her five siblings in Khayelitsha township on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. She is a quiet, sensitive, loving child who wants to grow up to be a doctor. Thandi's mom, Vicky Ntozini, founded Vicky's Bed and Breakfast, the first business in the townships of Cape Town that sought to make it possible for foreign visitors to experience their culture and rich community spirit.

On my first visit in 2005, I heard Vicky tell the story of watching buses drive through her neighborhood with tourists staring out the windows or snapping pictures, never learning or understanding anything about her, her family and her friends. She had the vision to imagine a business that would not only foster cross-cultural exchange but provide income for her family. From its beginning in 1998, her tiny B&B hosted many visitors from across the globe. It thrived and expanded to two stories, inspiring many other inns and tourist enterprises in the townships of Cape Town. She also raised money from her guests to enrich the lives of the local children by providing outings to places like Robben Island as rewards for doing well in school and to fund small gifts for them at Christmas time.

My son David and his then girlfriend now wife, Katie, decided to spend Christmas at Vicky's in 2003, one of the first years of her celebration for the neighborhood children. Dave was visiting Katie for the holidays while she was in Cape Town on a work assignment. He packed a Santa hat to create some cheer for her and ended up being conscripted to play Father Christmas and distribute Vicky's gifts for the township children. They spent the holidays getting to know Vicky and her family; strong bonds of friendship and mutual inspiration were formed. The photographs from those days show very tall, very white Dave and Katie with small brown bodies in their arms, on their backs, always close. If you blow up the photo above and look closely, you can see that in the picture on my iPad, there is another picture inside the larger one, from that Christmas with Dave holding three-year-old Thandi.

The larger picture on the iPad was taken when I visited Vicky in the fall of 2010. I brought love and financial support from me and my family for Vicky and her family and for the Khayelitsha children she was continuing to mentor. I showed her pictures of Dave, Katie and their two children, and gave her copies of photos Katie had sent along from that Christmas that they still display in their home. She called out to the children playing nearby and they crowded her small living room to see themselves, squealing and laughing, and saying "It's Dave! It's Katie! Hey that's me!" Vicky reciprocated by showing me a framed photo collage on her living room wall that included a picture of Dave in the Santa hat.

Two years later, on November 21, 2012, Vicky was brutally murdered. Allegedly by her husband, in their home. With the children present. The shock waves from this horrific event moved through the family, into the Khayelitsha neighborhood, through the tourism community in Cape Town, and out across the world to Vicky's many friends and former B&B guests. When we heard the news, our family felt deep grief. Dave and Katie had always planned to return to Khayelitsha and bring their children to teach them about that community and the foundation of love on which they were basing their own family. I was planning another visit for this fall, again bringing love and support.

A couple of weeks ago, with a heavy heart, I went to Khayelitsha to see Vicky's kids. How do you express condolences to a family of young people and children, ages 23 to 7, who have experienced that level of tragedy? They lost their mother in the most gruesome way imaginable, in front of their eyes, allegedly at the hands of their father. No family with all the advantages, with every possible benefit of personal and cultural support, could be expected to cope well with that horror. This family has none of those. Leaving aside the fact that they are essentially orphans, they've lost their stable home environment; they've lost their primary income; they've lost their role models and their source of daily support and guidance. I did what I had already planned to do - I brought school supplies, groceries, and money from my family. I brought pictures and a small gift for Thandi. I brought my love and concern and that of my family. It all felt like so little. The gaping maw of their need is enormous and my offerings so tiny.

The people I know in the US and in Cape Town who have been keeping up with how the family is doing have recently been experiencing some communication and cultural barriers with the extended family. It has become difficult to find out what the children need and how to get support to them. Sandy, who is seventeen, the second to oldest and clearly in charge of the household now, efficiently unpacked and stored the groceries. She gently but firmly denied the children's desire to dive into the sweet treats included along with the bags of maize flour, sugar and other staples. I could tell a lot about how Vicky had parented those kids as I saw how the little ones asked only with their eyes and accepted her refusal with uncomplaining obedience. She took some of the money and immediately left to go down the street to pay the electric bill because their lights were about to be turned off.

Roxy, 23, works as a waitress and is supplying some income for the family but she now also has a baby who is living with her grandmother in the Eastern Cape, a rural province far to the east of Cape Town. Malandi, 16, is in high school while also trying to keep the B&B business going, with what I'm guessing is diminishing success. It must be hard for the Cape Town tour operators who used to promote the business to continue to recommend it to their clients when they can't be sure there is food in the house for breakfast. And when the powerful, gracious, charismatic innkeeper is no longer there.

I chatted and laughed with the younger children, drawing them close to me on the couch. Siya, the seven-year-old, has an enormous smile and a small body bursting with energy and eagerness to interact. Lolo is a somewhat solemn boy of 11 who didn't say a lot. He's surrounded by sisters and I wonder how it must be for him without his dad around. I couldn't get enough of touching them and tried to remember they don't really know me. How open and loving they were! They told me about school, their favorite subjects and what they wanted to be when they grew up. With all my heart I want their dreams to come true.

I struggled to find words to convey my feelings for their loss. When I began to ask them how they were, to make space for their sadness, I was surprised to find my own grief for the loss of my friend surging into my throat. I instantly felt the absurdity of my emotion in the face of theirs and managed to keep my composure. They all became solemn right away, giving small nods when Thandi said "It's hard. It's very hard." The enormity of their burden, the horror of their tragedy filled every bit of space in that small room for a long moment. Sandy said they all had to go to court in early November to testify, because they were all witnesses. I looked around at the circle of pairs of huge brown eyes and felt a rush of overwhelming helplessness. I said I couldn't imagine how hard that would be but I knew they would get through it. They would get through it together. I urged them to remember what I thought were the three most important things: to stay together and help each other, to stay in school and get their education, and to remember that there were people like me all over the world who cared about them, that they were not alone. I and my family care and would keep on caring, they had to remember that.

From the moment I left Khayelitsha to today, the memories of those children and that afternoon are never far from the center of my mind and heart. I have thought, talked and dreamt about them. I have grieved for them and, at last, made space for my own grief. Always, I come back to what to do now. I had two intensive conversations with a friend in Cape Town, Lavinia, who is very familiar with the enormous spectrum of South African issues from HIV/AIDS to education to orphans to social justice, you name it. She not only listened with great kindness and generosity but also tried to teach me about the realities of the cultural resources and scarcities. Would they all be better off with their relative in the Eastern Cape? No, the education is abysmal there. What about help from an NGO that serves orphans? Maybe, but there are 2.5 million orphans. Many ideas I thought of depended on the cooperation of the extended family which might prove to be problematic right now. So many dead ends.

There are only a few things I know of so far I can do. I can try to keep up with them via the B&B's email address which the children told me is still working. I can send more money with some friends who will visit Cape Town on the Spring 2014 SAS voyage. I can stay in touch with an American professor who also is working to provide support for the kids and who will be returning with her students to Khayelitsha in June, as she has for years. Lavinia has generously offered to make some inquiries into possible agencies or organizations that might be able to help. Those things are not nothing. But in the face of the enormity of this disaster for these six young people, they feel ridiculously inadequate.

I don't do powerless well. In our conversation, my wise friend Lavinia gave me a gift of compassionate advice. Mother to mother, she reminded me that with our own children, we have had to realize that we can't make the world right for them. We can't fix it so that they don't have pain and hardship, and we have to make our peace with that. Ah, yes, I said, I try to remember but it's hard. She urged me to realize that the same applies to these children. I know Lavinia is right. I can't fix it for them. I can only do the things I can do. And I can hold them in my heart. That's what Vicky did for her children and for the children of Khayelitsha. That's what mothers do for all the world's children. I have to trust that's what she would have wanted me to do for Roxy, Sandy, Malandi, Lolo, Siya and Thandile.

Malandi, 16

Top row L to R: Sandy, 17, Me, Thandili, 13; Bottom row L to R: A cousin, Lolo, 11, Siya, 7

The Secrets of Fishermen and Foodies

Very early in the morning on the best weekends of my childhood, my grandfather would shake my shoulder and when my eyes popped open, his smile told me it was time to go fishing. I would slip out of my snug bunk in our rustic lake house we called "The Camp", being as quiet as a little kid can be so as not to wake my brother and sister. He was dressed in well-worn khakis and a plaid, button up shirt, and had already made and drunk some coffee, the rest of which he poured in a dented green Thermos. I can't remember for sure - I was not then the foodie I am now - but I probably had the kind of breakfast a dad or granddad would make, like butter and jelly on untoasted white bread. We headed down to the boathouse where Robert, my grandfather's guide and fishing buddy, would be loading all the gear into the boat. They were quite the pair, white-headed, compassionate Southern gentleman and African American younger man, passionate about fishing and life. 

Lake Bisteneau, in northwest Louisiana, is man-made and full of trees, mostly cyprus draped with iconic tendrils of Spanish moss overhanging the green water. The waterways are obscure, as were the paths when it was still a forrest I'm sure. Local knowledge was crucial and between my grandfather and Robert, we had a boatload of it. As the aluminum fishing boat skimmed through the slowly evaporating fog hovering over the surface of the water, I was filled with excitement not only for the boat ride but also for the possibilities of the morning. I knew we were in for a special time, just the three of us, and often in a secret place - one of the fishing holes known only to my grandfather and Robert. I can still feel the thrill of knowing I was being let in on a secret spot that would be quickly spoiled if word got out.

Now that I'm grown and a full-fledged foodie, well-kept secrets in the restaurant world have a similar aura. I love helping fellow food enthusiasts enjoy glorious meals around the world by sharing with them my favorite places but I get concerned about restaurants being ruined if they get too popular and a reservation becomes impossible to get. I intentionally avoid any casual restaurant recommended in "Lonely Planet", figuring it has long ago gotten compromised by that kind of fame. Some chefs, as it turns out, are much more forthcoming with their secrets, generously wanting success for their colleagues in the industry and hoping that the favor gets returned for their establishments. And so, with some trepidation, I'm going to share with you my newest foodie find.

Browsing a museum bookstore in Antwerp, I spotted an inches-thick book whose cover proclaimed in large letters "Where Chefs Eat".

Although I'm traveling for four months and acutely conscious of the weight of everything I buy, I seriously considered purchasing it to guide my restaurant choices in the 10 countries left on my itinerary. They were all there! This is not a guide to restaurants in Paris, in France, in Europe or even the Northern Hemisphere. It is a guide to restaurants all over the world - and all over the world is where I travel.

My first inclination was no, no way I'm lugging that thing with me. I'll just jot a few notes about the next couple of cities and buy it after I get home. I stood by the table where it was displayed and scribbled furiously, obviously not intending to buy and ready to stop my research but only if the shopkeeper asked me to. I'm getting better and better at knowing when the "apologizing is better than asking permission" adage makes a lot of sense. I soon realized I wanted to know every single word in that book, even descriptions of restaurants in places like Oman I may never visit. By the way, if you're ever in Muscat, the not-to-be-missed place is simply called The Restaurant. My next thought was maybe it's digital and I can download it to my iPhone. I tried to check but couldn't get service in the shop. I held it in the palm of one hand, slowly bouncing it up and down to get a sense of the weight. I don't know what kind of paper they used, but the publishers clearly had thought of the concerns of a traveller and crafted this book out of some kind of miraculously lightweight paper so it was much lighter than it looked. Still, practicality won out and I decided to trust 21st century technology. I walked away.

As it turns out, there is no ebook version. There's something better: an app! An app complete with maps that, together with my iPhone GPS, show me not only where the place is from where I am but where the other recommended restaurants in the neighborhood are as well. Thousands of restaurants all over the world are written up in categories that include not just "High End" but "Breakfast", "Late Night", "Neighborhood" and "Budget" categories. It also has some more special ones under the headings "Worth the Travel" and my favorite, "Wish I'd Opened". It is compiled by chefs from many nationalities and purports to be where they eat when traveling to many of the places I visit. It's like having a talented and knowledgable friend who knows all the fabulous foodie haunts all over the world! You can search by location, alphabetically and by the particular chef recommending it. Some of the restaurants are annotated which makes the choice particularly appealing; I wish they all were. One I tried was closed, possibly only temporarily, but that's the beauty of the digital version in that it can be updated easily.

This app is my new favorite techno toy. My Irish adventures, in fact, were largely guided by where this new resource suggested I go. First was Farmgate Cafe in the English Market in Cork. My traveling companion, Lucille, and I arrived mid-afternoon after a long drive from Dublin and we were famished. We could only glance quickly at the tantalizing market before heading upstairs to the self-serve cafe that had the advantage of no wait unlike the restaurant. We were assured that the food was the same, directly sourced from the market below. "With an enviably short supply chain, oysters are shucked to order," the app had told me, "one of the staff popping downstairs to the fishmonger Pat O'Connell as the need arises."
We let our eyes overrule even our ravenous bellies and way over-ordered positively yummy food: raw oysters of course, seafood chowders, savory ham and cheese tart served with two salads, chicken sandwich also with salad, hot apple crumble with cream, lemon tart and local hard cider! We settled into the counter at the rail overlooking the market below. Every bite was as good as advertised - and I was hooked. 

We spent the night in Cork at a modest but cheery B&B and enjoyed the good fortune of arriving for Ireland's Culture Night when public buildings are open for free and many music and dance performances are available. We then headed to Kinsale, a charming seaside village with a vibrant arts community and a 17th century fortress. "Where Chefs Eat" contributor Paul Flynn highly recommended Fishy Fishy Cafe and it did not disappoint. The oysters and chowder were so good in Cork we had to have more, just to compare, right? But the best dish was my grilled scallops on risotto with spinach and a fresh tomato salsa, all swimming in a marvelous sauce. All that seafood tasted so fresh it had definitely slept in the sea the night before. Although the patio looked delightful, we sat on the second floor near a balcony with the glass doors open, sunlight and breezes streaming in. The bees were as attracted as we were to our yummy food; Lucille HATES bees, but that was the only downside to our fabulous lunch.

Chef Derry Clarke put Pichet Restaurant in Dublin in the "Wish I'd Opened" category and I can see why. Easily accessible in the center city, you can either eat lunch at the cafe or do as I did on the last day in port and book a reservation in the dining room. My friend Mary Beth heard me touting it and volunteered to accompany me as a break during her self-guided Joycean tour of the city. She had done her dissertation on Joyce and entertained me at lunch with stories of discovering obscure sites important in his life and writings.

Although I was getting sick and feeling definitely below par, I had a delicious lunch of tomato and basil soup and a succulent piece of salmon on top of three fabulous and distinctly flavored and colored sauces, the reliable mark of a great chef in my experience.

My culinary adventures in Lisbon, guided again by "Where Chefs Eat", were somewhat mixed although no fault of the chefs. Chef Henrique Sa Passoa wishes he had opened 1300 Taberna in the LX Factory redevelopment district, calling it an "achingly cool wine bar and restaurant that is as eclectic as they come". The funky decor of chandeliers made of spoons and other repurposed objects is the place for in-the-know residents to enjoy a Saturday lunch. I was on American/ship stomach time and skulked around their doorway until they finally opened at 1:00 pm. I had the place to myself for a good half hour when the aficionados began arriving, upscale local families with babies in highchairs and thirteen-year-olds glued to their iPhone games. Portuguese restaurants charge for pre-meal bread, an unpleasant lesson our students learned, but 1300 Taberna deserves the few Euros for their extraordinary bread basket, distinctive local olive oil and butter infused with herbs and finely minced ripe olives. The beer bread was made from their own beer with a sweet, crunchy crust and interior the consistency of angel food cake. Also in the basket were a moist, savory cheese bread and focaccia so special it needed no dips or spreads. I should have quit there. I ordered the "fresh salmon on crab risotto". I love risotto and thought that sounded yummy. The rice dish tasted like a fish market smells, a fish market uncovered in the midday sun in a small inland village hundreds of kilometers from the nearest ice cube. I would have been okay with just eating the fish had it had any trace of seasoning at all which it sadly didn't. For the first time in my life, when the waiter said "Didn't you enjoy your meal?", I replied "No, actually, I didn't." He shrugged, I chalked it up to "you win some, you lose some" and went immediately next door to Landeau.
The New York Times Travel section, in its "36 Hours in Lisbon" had declared that its chocolate cake was "devilishly good" and so it was. Multi-sourced research wins the day.

My second foray into the Lisbon dining scene was for a late lunch/early dinner the last day in port. It had similar Plan B success. My iPhone GPS led me directly to O Cadete, a "Where Chefs Eat" budget recommendation in the Baixa area of the central city. Unfortunately it was shuttered with construction materials stacked out front. Another day on another trip perhaps. As luck would have it, a tiny sushi restaurant was next door and I had been craving sushi for weeks, along with Everything bagels and Mexican food, my standard list of favorites I miss from home. I struck up a conversation with the Portuguese manager who was minding the store until his Japanese chef and assistant arrived later. I eyed a small quantity of fish in the glass case beyond the high counter and boldly asked if he was sure it was fresh. He smiled wryly at my rudeness and said "Of course, madam. I bought it from the market myself this morning." He said the quantity was low but his colleagues were bringing more soon, which in fact they did. I decided to trust him and that proved to be a wonderful choice. I enjoyed a fabulous salmon roll, an interesting and gracious conversation with someone I had probably offended, then headed off for some dulce de leche gelato before returning to the ship.

My new favorite toy has only one recommendation for Morocco and none for Ghana so I am now deep into researching the 20 suggestions for the Cape Town area. I have five days to enjoy there and some old favorite restaurants to revisit. I now know from experience that the chef contributors to "Where Chefs Eat" will lead me to some glorious food adventures and I can't wait. I'm so glad they decided to share some of their secrets with the rest of us, as my grandfather did with me. I suspect, however, that these chefs saved some back for themselves. He passed away long ago but I know my grandfather took with him a few secret fishing holes shared only with Robert.

Lifelong Learning

I can now state with authority that being a Lifelong Learner on a Semester at Sea voyage is exactly like being a chocoholic in Belgium - so many choices, each one more delectable than the last. When the list of courses offered is published months before a voyage, I spend hours pouring over the syllabi and even the required texts. I look carefully at how a professor presents his or her course in its description, giving bonus points for relevance and an engaging style, and deducting points for dry pedantry. My intellectual curiosity goes wild as I browse among subjects I've always wanted to learn more about -  Anthropology of Food? Media, Religion and Culture? Geohazards and Natural Disasters? I peruse my old favorites like writing and women's studies to see what's a little new or, to be honest, irresistible because it is what it is and I know I'll love it.

I make some preliminary choices, restrained by when they are offered (I've learned that I don't do well with much needed sleep if I take 8:00 classes) and by required field lab schedules. LLLs must officially audit classes now and that means no class or lab time conflicts. I am tempted to take a whole course just because of the opportunity to go on the field experience with the class which is, by careful regulation, closed to the rest of us. If I signed up for Sociology of the Family, I could go with the class to the home of a Moroccan family and talk about courtship, marriage and generational relationships. Who gets to do that? If I took that Anthropology of Food class, I could visit food markets and small farms in Ghana with an award-winning Ghanian agricultural researcher. One course hit my sweet spot of travel writing taught by a professor who really knows how to entice students with her course write-up and syllabus. I got so excited about it that I ordered some of the books on the syllabus and read one cover to cover before I even tried to sign up for the course!

Students are advantaged in this program, as they should be. By the time it comes around to LLL course registration, I run into some snags of scheduling and courses being already full. After a call to the office of the Institute for Shipboard Education, the non-profit that runs Semester at Sea, I decide to leave the final decisions to the drop/add process on the ship. I also know there's no substitute for meeting the professors and getting a feel for their teaching style and passion for their subject. I've been known to take a class in something I'm not initially that interested in because the professor is so magnetic, and I've never regretted that strategy.

So, after all this preparation, I have ended up officially enrolled to audit two courses and participating diligently in three more. Here's the list, along with some tasty truffles of learning I've treated myself to so far:

WORLD GEOGRAPHY taught by John Boyer, aka The Plaid Avenger. Google him if you have any interest in history of the world or world regions. He's one of a kind and not for everyone but I, for one, am learning a ton. Others are put off by his style which makes liberal use of over-the-top dramatics and words that offend some, but his scholarship has been above reproach so far. These are not the ravings of some flaming wing-nut  who just likes to hear himself talk. For me to love a history course, you know it has to be engaging. Today he sparked a fascinating discussion of the difference in intervening in countries where there was a genocide vs. a civil war and what that says about the historic rules for the sovereignty of states. Trust me, I was riveted.

GLOBAL MUSIC, another Lens course. These courses are all open to LLLs to come and go in the old SAS style. There are eight of them across many different disciplines and are designed to replace Global Studies or the Core course. I won't go into the extensive debate that went with the decision to make this change, but I think the LLLs at least are definitely benefiting. In the early classes, I learned a time-honored Western classification system for musical instruments that included membranophones (drums, duh) and idiophones, something that vibrates itself, like a gong. But then fun ones had been more recently added - corpophones and electrophones. Yesterday, Julie Strand, the professor, taught us the difference in the beats of Irish jigs, hornpipes and reels. I actually think I can tell them apart when we land in Dublin tomorrow and go hear some music in a pub.

JOURNALISM HISTORY AND ETHICS I am taking because I guess my heart will always be in the newspaper business. I thought this was a great opportunity to fill in gaps in my historical knowledge and get brought up to date with current issues in the age of social media. Today, the sharp, young professor, Jessica Roberts, was talking about objectivity, what journalists choose to write about and why. I got to offer the illustration of the Shreveport Journal deciding to include news of the African American community for the first time in a daily paper in that community and the consequences of that choice. I'm really looking forward to hearing the students talk more about how they get their news, what they think about bias and what is the role of social vs traditional media for them.

WOMEN'S HEALTH IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES is a course I'm a little ambivalent about so far. The best thing about it is the young women in the class and their knowledge and curiosity about women's health issues. We've been tackling some difficult subjects like sexual abuse and trafficking and so far they have been quite brave about sharing their experiences and discussing very sensitive issues. I learned yesterday that my understanding of sexual harassment, a topic they know a tremendous amount about, was dated. I thought there had to be a power differential for an act to be thought of as harassment and not so much between peers like classmates or coworkers because there couldn't be any real danger in a women objecting. So if a woman could just tell a man to leave her alone and not fear being fired or failing a course, for instance, it wasn't harassment. They set me straight and said any unwanted sexual attention was harassment. I'm still not clear where the legal lines are drawn but they were very clear what the standards were on their campuses. We also heard a guest speaker who was on the ship to help facilitate the visit by a group of students to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva while we were in Antwerp/Le Havre. She has worked for many years in global health and women's rights issues and repeated a quote I love: Whether you live should not be determined by where you live.

TRAVEL WRITING is, of course, my favorite. The course was quickly filled so I am sort of a guest because of my travel writing experience. Sarah Sloane, the professor, is from Colorado State University and is engaging, supportive, funny, talented and an experienced traveler having done a solo around-the-world adventure in 2006-2007. She was very gracious as I unashamedly begged to be in her class and we worked it out. Having never taken a formal, academic course in writing, only audits on SAS voyages, Lighthouse Writers Workshop courses and various other writing workshops and seminars, I find that there are gaping holes in my knowledge of the craft. Every day I seem to learn something new, like the repetition in the beginnings of sentences in the I Have a Dream speech is called an anaphora.  That might be a misleading example but I love vocabulary so it's awesome to know a word like that. The class is certainly not pedantic but actually great fun. I am always delightfully surprised at the talent of these students and look forward each class to reading or hearing their work. Our first writing assignment was to take 15 minutes of the class to go out and about on the ship and closely observe then write about an article that symbolized travel to you. One girl wrote engagingly about her sandals and how they had only walked a few steps around Target and now only one day on the ship but how much of the journey was ahead and what they might look like by the time we were in Cuba. Being around these kids makes me a better observer, a better traveler, a better writer, a better global citizen.  And that's why I'm here.

A Grandmother's Gruel

They ate the wallpaper. The glue had been made from flour and the tiny shreds of paper in the gruel they created were at least plant-based. Nutrition sources had started out better but also got considerably worse. First they ate grass, mushrooms, and leaves from trees. Then came the pets. Neighbors traded their animals with each other so they did not have to eat their own. After that they boiled the soles of shoes and other leather objects to extract any possible sustenance. Next came the wallpaper mush flavored with what little salt or sugar that remained. Eventually their bread was almost entirely sawdust with so little actual flour it barely qualified as bread at all.

Our twenty-something guide Katya's grandmother told her these stories of how their family subsisted during the Siege of Leningrad from 1941 to1944 and she shared them with us. The day had been long and exhausting as we toured room after gilded room in the spectacular Baroque palace of Catherine the Great. We managed to delight in the verdant Lower Gardens of the Peterhof Palace even though it was cluttered with temporary stages and spotlights the size of Volkswagens in preparation for a G20 event to be held there in a few days. Katya was as tired as we were, her "dear guests" as she called us, but she couldn't let the 45 minute ride back to St. Petersburg go by without sharing more about her country. Now that we all knew each other a little better, maybe she felt more comfortable sharing personal stories, stories that made an iconic Russian event come alive.

As I listened I could begin to empathize with the horrors of starvation and get a glimmer of the desperation the residents felt as the German army encircled St. Petersburg, then called Leningrad, completely cutting it off from outside resources, help or support of any kind. The siege lasted 900 days during which the entire city was in survival mode. Cabbage fields replaced the square outside the magnificent St. Isaac's Cathedral. Potatoes were grown a few blocks away near the world-renown Hermitage museum and carrots somewhere else. Root crops that keep well, what few there were, helped tide people over through those long, frigid Russian winters. Between the shelling, the brutal weather, and the starvation, two million residents died. Katya's grandmother survived because she worked in a kitchen but her infant daughter, Katya's aunt, did not.

For four days I walked and rode buses through miles of city streets, and glided in boats through winding canals and rivers, exploring the historic center of St Petersburg, learning about its origins, growth and current life as a proud, vibrant city. We were lucky to enjoy four of the less than thirty days of sunshine the city gets in a year! My curiosity relishes being fed by fresh experiences in any new place but I confess that historical narratives served up for tourists have always evoked in me a "meh" response at best, a mental shrug. But Katya's story felt like a shove against my chest, a pressure on my heart that my shoulders curved around in a reflex of protection. My eyes stung and I had to look out the window at the BMWs and semis on the modern highway to reground myself. Something shifted in me as a traveller and I once again appreciated why I write. It's the transformative power of story. That's what history is or, in this case, what her-story is. I know I won't be able to serve myself a bowl of hot cereal made from 100% oats on the ship's breakfast buffet without remembering Katya and her grandmother, and feeling grateful for all three. 

My 'Best Of' Intentions

Posted on the Semester at Sea Fall 2013 Voyage page on Facebook:

Fall 2013: 50th Anniversary

Voyages › Fall 2013: 50th Anniversary

- See more at: http://www.semesteratsea.org/voyages/fall-2013/#sthash.17NmbN6R.dpuf

It's a week before I fly to London and my To Do list is getting longer instead of shorter every day! Amid all the tasks like finding the perfect travel journal (going for unlined this time to try to encourage more right brain entries) and remembering to pay in advance the teenager next door who will be shoveling my early season snow, I'm trying to take some quiet time to set some intentions for myself for this voyage. What could I promise myself to do consistently along the way that would make me feel at the end that I had truly experienced and grown from this journey? I was thinking what a stubbornly persistent point of view my ethnocentrism is. I've been working on it for years but I keep catching myself behaving and talking like Americans have the best ideas, best cultural practices, best way of solving problems and the rest of the world would be much better off if they just did it our way. I decided I wanted to come home from this voyage with a vibrant list of the Best Of's from each of the countries we visit. I intend to ask locals I meet - taxi driver, guide, host family, woman in the market, anyone with whom I can find an adequate way of communicating - what about their country they think is the very best, that is uniquely theirs that they would like the world to know about and we would all be better, happier for it. I'm a confirmed foodie so which one dish or drink will be one question. I love all the cultural music, dance, crafts and visual arts so I plan to ask the person to pick just one of those. With some people I hope to be able to ask which idea or understanding or community practice is their very best gift to the world. So for America, if a foreign traveler asked me these questions, I might say Southern fried chicken, jazz and freedom of opportunity, supported by all our other freedoms.
As much as I'd like to learn these specific things, my main goal is to change my point of view as I travel. I want to enlist people's help with me seeing their country more through their eyes, from their point of view. Hopefully, they will have the experience of being valued and invited in to a real conversation, instead of feeling I am one more American who believes we have all the answers and all the best ways of doing things.
I'm planning to collect all these answers and share them with all of you, and if you'd like to do it, I'd love to hear what answers you get. There is an intranet on the ship with public folders where you can post all sorts of info for the ship's community, share photos and video, etc. I will be starting a folder maybe called something like "What do they bring to the table?" because I have this fantasy of a huge global dinner party where everyone is feasting on amazing food and drink, enjoying fabulous entertainment and having fascinating, powerful discussions of a wide array of exciting ideas, each the Best Of from each country.
If you'd like to join in, starting with England, try out asking these questions and see what happens. Copy down the answers in your field notebook - you are all bringing a small field notebook to keep with you all the time, right? Use their words when you can and include lots of sensory details you noticed as you were talking with this person - wrinkles in his face, call to prayer in the background, smell of the basil she was selling, starched khaki uniform of the schoolgirl. Photos and video also welcome. If you'd also like to add your Best Of list, from your point of view as a guest, a traveler in their country, please do that as well.
Fall 2013 is a celebration of Semester at Sea's 50th Anniversary and I, for one, am going to do all I can to make it The Best Ever! I absolutely cannot wait to make this voyage with you all! See you soon!