Part Six: A Philosophy Minute

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Some Random Thoughts…

By the way, I know 6 comes before 7, so don't worry.

Anyway, every day we have a "Geology Minute" where we spend the first part of class talking about where in the world we are and what that means in relation to everything else. Ill spare you the science and leave you with the few thoughts I've collected from being at sea for the past week. Enjoy my "philosophy minute":

Yesterday I sitting out in the sun and said to Alec, “I really wish I had my sunglasses, I should go get them. They’re just so far away!” Alec said, “You know what’s really far away? Land.” We then got to talking about how the closest land to us, is actually beneath us. We are literally thousands of miles from any continent, which isn’t freaking me out as much as it could be.

My list of places I want to visit keeps getting longer instead of shorter. The other day I was walking down the stairs and I thought to myself, “I want to see Croatia.” The ship goes there and many other amazing places on its other trips and I was trying to figure out how I could come back for another go round.

I realized the other day that within 6 months time I have traveled to both the highest and lowest places on Earth. When I was in Israel we went to the Dead Sea, which is the farthest from the sun a person can be. Even though I haven’t climbed any tall mountains our trip down the Amazon was literally right along the equator, the part of the Earth that sticks out the farthest towards the sun. Pretty weird.

crossing 0/0 the prime meridian

Last night we broke up into small groups to discuss our Brazil experience. It was wild hearing about some of the situations other people found themselves in. It was inspirational, it made me want to take more risks and spend more nights away from the ship. One boy found himself barefoot and shirtless walking through the pitch-black amazon at night for hours to deliver food with a guide who had only been employed for a week. His group slept in hammocks up a tree and monkeys stole from them. We discussed how the way children live here would probably be considered illegal in the US. The kids are often pulled out of school (the schools are a 2.5 hour boat trip away by the way) to work 8 hours a day at home. They carry heavy buckets of water and work with knives and go hunting. Here, not only is that not considered child labor, but it is necessary for survival. The families need every set of hands they can get. One group of SASers visited a village that had never had foreign visitors before. Ever. Those Americans were the first that had ever gone there. How crazy is that? Many of the places we visited, including the village I want to after dolphins, just recently got electricity. It’s not all good. The leisure time the men have from not needing to fish every day because they have refrigerators is spent drinking. Technology is bringing problems even as it solves them.

don't we look alike? this is ana, my friend from venezuela

One of the most surprising things about Brazil was how dirty it was, and the norm seemed to be to drop trash on the street instead of into trashcans. I watched at the end of the day how the street cleaners would sweep the piles of trash into the gutter, which presumably leads to the river. As we pulled away from the dock, we could see an enormous amount of trash floating in the water. During our discussion we talked about how “green living” is a luxury of the privileged. Taking care of the environment is low on the list of problems in South America. It doesn’t matter that they live on one of the most ecologically important places on Earth, to them other things must take precedence. They do not see the link between clean water and health, maybe if they did that would motivate them to think about drinking from a bottle instead of from the river that is also their toilet.

Every night that I can I go to sign language class on the smokers deck after dinner. Terril, the interpreter, holds very informal classes there every night we are at sea. A group of us stand around with her and Cherie, the deaf student, and try to learn words and sentences in sign language while simultaneously try to avoid being dive bombed by the huge beetles that live there. They fly into our clothes and our hair and make loud buzzing sounds when they are stuck. Yesterday was Cherie’s birthday and I proudly “sang” to her in ASL.

cherie and tarril

Funny story, everyday there are three sets of announcements that happen. One in the morning, one at lunch, and one at dinner that remind us to take our malaria pills, get our forms in, tell us what is going on that day etc…we call the giver of these announcements “the voice.” Today, the voice was replaced by the captain who was giving instructions to the crew who were running an evacuation drill. The captain has a fabulously classic British accent. He said, “Will all crew please simulate the evacuation of passengers to their muster stations. Please report in when all of your passengers are mustered.” The whole ship starting laughing. I’m still laughing.

Now that it is calm, I’m finally appreciating the beauty of the ocean. At dinner last night, we saw schools of flying fish. Huge schools of several hundred foot-long silver fish jumping around on the top of the water in unison. That water too, at certain times of the day from certain angles, looks silver. It’s like a giant pot of sloshing liquid metal. After the Amazon our water de-salinizer/purifier thing broke, and we had two days of water that tasted like chlorinated salt liquid. It was so bad I couldn’t even brush my teeth. Its back to normal now but my water bottle still smells.

I learned that with the invention of doors, spousal and child abuse was born. Before then, no one was surreptitiously violent because everyone else in the community would know about it and intervene. With the invention of doors came the invention of privacy. I’m not sure if it’s categorically true, but it’s interesting to think about.

The Voice called a huge group of people down to the medical clinic the other day because it turns out that one of the monkeys they played with in Brazil (and got bitten and scratched by) had rabies. I was talking to Sarah about the ship and how there must be a jail somewhere. Sarah said, “There IS a jail, there is also a morgue.”

I’m finding that I like best the things that upset me. I feel like I want to see the worst parts of the places we are going. I want to go to the red light districts, I want to tour the favelas, I want to get lost and get into trouble and be scared. I want to have stories to tell, I want my life to change every day. I feel completely comfortable with controversy. I like it when classes or movies make me angry, any and everything else just feels like a waste of time.  

I spend a lot of time looking at the water and thinking. I do my homework next to this floor to ceiling window and watch the horizon rise and fall. I found myself thinking about what it must have been like to be sailing out with no destination in mind, just looking for new land, not even knowing if it exists. And I think about what it would be like to be in steerage for weeks on end on a ship with no stabilizers and how I’m here because of those voyages. I think about how excited I get when we see land or reach a port and how magnified that would be if it were the statue of liberty on the horizon.

A professor the other day called what we are doing on this trip “poverty tourism.” This particular professor has traveled to over 100 countries and taken groups of students all around the world. He gave us some advice, but made it seem as though he wasn’t. He said, “Although I appreciate the doctor’s warning on foods to avoid, I hope that when you get off the boat in San Diego you have more to say than ‘I didn’t get sick.’”