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.