Part 10: Drama: And Not the Cool Theatre Kind…

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That being said, for you theatre people, this is a picture of two students, Jason and Medea. eating lunch with them was awkward to say the least :) :) :)




The night before our one-day stop in Mauritius, I cried until 3 in the morning. Despite this ship being like home, and despite having finally found a family, and despite finally feeling both physically and emotionally secure, this trip is the hardest thing I have ever done. From where the ship is on the map right now, I am literally the farthest from home that I will ever be, or could ever be short of getting in a spaceship. If the laws of the universe were suddenly to fail and I were to fall through the Earth to the exact other side, I would land somewhere in California. The strange thing is, it looks exactly the same here. Same ocean, same trees, same sky and moon. Even though there are over 900 people on this ship with me, and when I speak about this experience I use the pronoun “we,’ this is a solitary voyage. Everyone is making this journey for themselves, and despite the packs we travel in, by themselves. I went on this trip for a whole host of reasons, but in the top three was to meet amazing people that I will have in my life until I die. Everyone I spoke to who has done this before talks about the relationships that form, and how close they are, and how important they become when you are back in the US and no one else understands the change in you. I’ve had to work much harder than I expected to find people who can keep up with me intellectually and who share my sense of humor. The ones I have found I can count on one hand.

After observing the social circles on the ship, I came up with a categorical system to drop people into. The people who don’t fit any one category are the ones I know I will probably like.

Here is the system: there are the cabin people. These are the ones who don’t seem to need sun or care that there might be dolphins outside. They are either sleeping all day, over-dedicated to their work, or attached by the fingers to their email. Then there are the deck 5 people, which can also be seen as a subcategory. These people hang out on deck 5 because that is where the smokers deck is. They go back and forth between the deck 5 dining hall, and the smokers deck, and they are the ones I see around the ship sometimes and think to myself, “Who are you? Have you really been here the whole time?” Another group, and I count myself as one of these, is the deck 6 people. These are the ones who eat in the deck 6 dining hall because it means you can eat outside. It is for the people who like to do their work and socialize at the same time, either in the piano bar or the garden lounge. At night, they play games or music in those locations. The last group is the deck 7 group. Deck 7 is the pool deck and it has the grill and the lounge chairs. It also has the weight lifting equipment. The people who hang out on deck 7 are the ones who maybe squeeze in some reading while they lay out and tan, but more often they treat everyday as a Saturday in the summer. Deck 7 people have a hard time keeping their clothes on and complain loudly and often about the lack on alcohol on board. 90% of the people who get dock time for coming back to the ship drunk or late, are deck 7 people. Professors are never seen up there. These categories are stricter than you might think, if you are somewhere you don’t belong, you know it. One day I wanted to lay out by the pool so I went early and took a lounge chair on deck 7. All morning I got weird looks and was asked to move my chair over to make room for people’s friends so many times that after 2 hours I was squished into a corner. No one spoke to me. The system has caught on and is quite useful in describing people. “Who is your roommate?” you might ask Ilana. “Meredith” she might reply, “she is a hard-core deck 7er.”

When leaving port, deck 7 becomes open to everyone, even faculty. We all like to watch the port cities disappear. Usually most people stay and watch for half an hour or so, while others stay 45 minutes. Last night I stayed the whole time, about 2 hours for a place as small as Mauritius. I watched Mauritius turn from buildings into a cluster of lights, then a single light that went out 10 minutes later as we got too far away to see anything at all. It was very surreal.

This is my "Extended Family." Its an organization on the ship that most people sign up for. Mine is unusually small, on my right is Father Dustin, and on my left are my brother and sister.

 

 Mauritius was a good day, but it will seem like a blip as soon as anything else happens. “India-lite” is how it was described to us. It was home to the dodo bird before it became extinct and has rainbow sand beaches, which we unfortunately did not have time for. It looks like what would happen if you took a lot of Indian people and mixed them in with a bunch of African people and then put them in Costa Rica. It was a beautiful place, but it did have a familiar landscape. It was very much like being back the in the Bahamas. The people there speak French but we were able to get by on our English. We treated our 8 hours there as our first weekend since leaving the US. There are no real weekends on this program. You are either at sea which means you are in class, or you are in port, which means running around trying to squeeze a month’s worth of activity into a single week. In port there may be some sleeping, but there is no resting. You sleep just enough to be able to maintain a functioning level of energy. Mauritius however is not a place with a culture we felt we needed to absorb so we took a cab across the island to the beach described to us as “the prettiest beach in the Indian ocean.”  It took 3 taxis to get there, one of which was a water taxi, but it was worth it. The water is warm and almost hot in shallow parts. We spent most of our time sitting in wave-less waist-deep crystal-clear water drinking the local beer and chatting with some locals who arrived on a wooden pirate-ship looking boat. We met another American, one of two in the area. We had heard a rumor that there was a SAS student some years ago that was kicked off the boat in Mauritius and never went home, and we thought that maybe it was this girl, but turns out it wasn’t. The taxi ride home was terrifying but we made it alive and more importantly, on time. The line to get on the ship was very long and there was more drama in that line than I have seen in any of the others combined. It was a circus. At least half the students were drunk (btw the Mauritian government wont let us stay overnight anymore because we party too hard). Some were so drunk they couldn’t stand up alone. Everyone, including me, had sunburns so intense that they couldn’t be touched. The girl behind me was crying, a boy ahead of me fell and made his head bleed, the women searching our bags fainted from the heat and the clinic was overflowing with dehydrated and intoxicated students. Worst of all was Dylan. No one really knows what happened to him. I was back on the ship before he arrived, but I got the story. He was on a SAS trip that had spent their last hour on the beach where he must have had too much to drink too quickly. On the bus ride back to the ship he passed out and it was all they could do to keep him breathing. They tried pouring water down his throat but he didn’t even gag on it. The people who were in line when he arrived said that he looked dead. He was gray and unable to even sit upright in a wheelchair. They rushed him to the hospital within seconds of his second fall out of the chair and we had to leave him there with the embassy taking care of him. He was ok in the end. According to our medical staff he came as close to death as a person can while still being alive. The reasons for this were explained to us last night in a community meeting. The other students involved made the right decision to not try and hide him. He was on a SAS bus, with a dean who knew what to do and an LLC who know who to call. Our ship doctor was in the right place at the right time and made the right judgment call to drive him to the hospital and those things combined saved his life. Dean Dan told us that most fatalities occur right after near-miss accidents, and he informed to that we have just had out near-miss accident and urged us to be careful.

The week’s drama did not end there. I woke up the middle of the night a few days later to find the ship zooming along at top speed. All four engines are never on at the same time, so I knew something was up. My first thought was pirates, and I got really excited. At 8am the next morning we were stopped out a at sea, in a harbor of a tiny military island so top secret that it did not turn up on our GoogleEarth satellite tracker. The captain came over the intercom and told us that we had had a medical emergency in the middle of the night and had needed to rush for the nearest land. He informed us that the island we had arrived at, called Diego Garcia, was so politically sensitive that we could not take pictures of it. The army men who live there were not hesitating to take pictures of us, the only faces other than their own that they have seen in a long time. Our stop there was so unusual for them that they used us to run a safety drill. They surrounded our ship in a tight circle and men came onboard with guns. As Alec said, “Well, we may not have been chased by pirates like you’d wanted, but we ARE in lockdown in a top secret US military base.” We watched from the side decks as three people disembarked. One was a crew member (who we later found out had a detached retina), one was a student who just walked off, and the other was another student who was carried off on a stretcher covered in blankets. The student who walked off had a blood disease that needed to be checked out and she was just getting off because we were stopping for the other student, a friend of mine from Cambodia, who had developed a dangerous infection. This girl, named Mimosa, survived a horrific incident during her childhood and subsequently is covered head to toe in healed burns. She does not have functional hands and was not expected to live at all, let alone walk or talk, both of which she can do. Her infection was spreading rapidly because of her condition and Ilana overheard the captain and the doctor talking about how the hospital in Singapore that she was airlifted to told them that they had made the right call by heading straight for land. Another near-miss.

Being on the Indian Ocean is like being back on the Amazon. This morning at breakfast Sara was looking out the window and said, “The Ocean is so calm it could be in a calm ocean commercial.” We saw dolphins yesterday, a huge pod of them, and more flying fish.