Assumptions

When I first established this blog site, I made several assumptions. The first assumption was of the technical nature, that I would be able to access the internet easily, without waiting and at any time of the day. Why not? This is how things work at home. The second assumption was that I would have enormous free-time, able to reflect and write aimlessly about my musings and experiences.  After all, how busy could a job as a glorified Resident Assistant actually be? The third assumption, is that I would be able to make sense of what I was experiencing and then write philosophically about all I was seeing and doing.

However, by the third day of this voyage somewhere upon our arrival in Dominica. I discovered what reality onboard the MV Explorer would mean.  It meant that only 50 individuals were allowed to access to the internet at a given moment. That internet service aboard a large ship was spotty at best and dependent on weather, the roughness/calmness of the sea, the number of students doing research, the hour of the day and the condition of our equipment.

 Assumption number two was put to the test as well. Within the first few days we learned that being a “LLC” meant many things including mom, security guard, detective, problem-solver, programmer, secretary, big sister and on call 24 hours a day. Within the first month, I had organized and arranged three major events that on land would have been months of work, that on a ship transpire over the course of a few days and at times hours.  I found that the first two and a half months were much busier than I thought they would be. The pace has settled out and now we seem to have more balance between our time, student time and work time. 

Perhaps of all my assumptions, assumption number three was the biggest. I did not anticipate how hard it would be to find the words to describe my experiences.  Originally, I had thought a blog would be a linear process.  Experience a country, write about a country, answer a few questions about country, go to a new country, repeat the process. But in Ghana I found myself in standing in the dungeons of the Cape Coast Slave Castle standing in the door of no return. Where slaves were divided from family members, stripped of their identity, put on ships not as humans but rather as a commodity to be sold.  In that moment, I had and have no idea how to explain what that experience was like for me. To stand in the doorway of no return as a white person, with a camera and the resources to be at the castle of my own freewill was surreal at best. To experience, the darkness of the dungeons, imagine walking through a pitch-black corridor in shackles, to walk through this doorway in the middle of the night. Walk over uneven rocks, reefs and terrain without any knowledge of where you were going. Get on a ship, where you had to lie down on your back and wait. Wait for the boat to move, for someone to tell you your fate. I am not sure how to make sense of this cruelty. And to know, that this cruelty happened because of the greed, power and beliefs of some countries and explorers and the greed of some Africans. And to know, that while I stand in the doorway of past slavery, Ghana remains one of the largest users of child slavery in the production of cocoa. In fact, to this day children are taken from neighboring countries brought to Ghana for the sole purpose of harvesting cocoa beans for sale to large chocolate companies like Hershey’s. 

The nature of this trip is that you have experiences that shake the core of what you believe or know and then you have these other experiences such as sleeping on a luxury ship while someone you just met sleeps in their dirt floor and corrugated tin home. Quite honestly, it’s just a bit to get your head around much less write about.

So for the last 5 weeks, I’ll post as I can access the intranet and make sense of things. Take Care - Julie