Home from the sea

Words are inadequate for me to describe how glad I am that I got to on the Semester at Sea Voyage.
I was always very busy with classes, pictures, mothering college students, the blog, new friends, fascinating new ports... Never once was I bored; but then, I have never, ever been bored.
None of us on the ship felt that we were on a "a cruise" or a "vacation". We were all learning about the places we visited, the history, geography, geology, languages, culture...We were involved in service projects. I loved working in one of Mother Teresa's orphanages, and another in Cambodia, talking with local people, hearing their stories, and their ancestor's stories. And then there are the markets...I had a ball in markets. I got a little addicted to markets. We paid full price without exception in the Townships near Cape Town where the grinding poverty is apparent every where we looked. In Shanghai, we bargained our heads off and actually gained the respect of the vendors by doing so. They would often grin and shake our hands at the end of negotiations.
Traveling on the MV Explorer put us in a warm, genial society of interesting and intelligent, not to mention well-educated(every professor had to have a terminal degree--mostly Ph.D.s), people. We grew to love one another. I will miss the mealtime conversations that went on far beyond the meal, the classes in which I learned from the world-class professors, and also learned from watching the students learn, and from seeing them grow intellectually. Much of what Rob and have lived through isn't even on the college students' radar as history. They thought we "won" the Viet Nam War. Many thought racism never was much of an issue in the South. Some had never heard of Pol Pot or even Ho Chi Minh, or Mao. By the end, we all knew more. The ports are where we went inland and saw that Man keeps making the same mistakes over and over, that slavery is inexcusable and still going on, that we are using up our resources, ruining our land and seas, that people are as alike as they are different, that great beauty and great kindness still exist along side evidence of man's inhumanity to man...
We came home to the snow storm of the century here in Charlottesville. I am glad we didn't miss it. Our next-door-neighbors, Doug and Allison Woodside, had an impromptu wine and hor s d' oeuvre party and we were all to bring what snack we had to share. Doug and Allison have frequently had spur of the moment neighborhood snow parties to which we all bring what we can find at home to share.The event was a wonderful reminder that our warm an careing ship community is much like the one we left in our very own neighborhood. I still miss the ship and our friends there, but at least I am not blind to the fact that I am part of other communities that are just as warm and careing.
While we were gone I sent my recently widowed Mother a play-by-play report on the trip by sending her letters after every port (15 of them)via e-mail to daughter Hailey who printed each letter as it arrived and mailed it to Mother (who is as computer phobic as a person can be). Then Mother mailed the letters on to her sister Harriet, one-by-one. They enjoyed visiting on the phone about them. Some of those letters are incorporated in this blog. I also sent a packet of photos via Kodak Easy Share to Mother after every port so she could see as well as read about our adventures each country.
Now I am thinking about going through letters to Mother, e-mail messages I sent from the ship, and this blog to put together a much more polished and complete report of our trip around the world on the MV Explorer. I want to tell the stories of some of the people on the ship, such as Milton, who has adopted a school in Ghana, and not only has he had it fixed up with carpentry and paint, and mailed back school supplies, but he has also inspired the students in Rob's non-profit leadership course to set up an actual foundation to support this and other schools in Ghana. As part of their exam, the students set up a very impressive website for Milton's school foundation and a first rate promotional video. They contributed their own money and raised funds for the new foundation. Milton got very sick on the trip with severe intestinal pain and was hospitalized in(I think) India. The condition got worse and Milton had to fly back from Japan to be treated at home. He was very sad to leave. At his last event on board before he had to go off the ship, Milton was cheered, aplauded, and given a standing ovation by the students and by the rest of the ship community. I knew Milton, and about Milton's work with the Ghanan School, but I had no idea that so many others did. He was a very quite hero.