Ship to Shore Letter
A staff member's view: Scott MacLeod began the voyage working as an assistant field office coordinator, then filled in for three weeks on the resident staff when one staff member had to go home for a family emergency, and will soon return to the field office for the remainder of the voyage.
Warm greetings from the Red Sea about two days away from Semester at Sea's visit to Egypt and the Suez canal.
The first six weeks of this round the world voyage in the field office were extraordinarily busy. The hard working field office staff (Yea Karen Burns, Rain Banbury and Scott MacLeod) managed to organize and produce field trip tickets and overnight arrangements for 750 people choosing among about 30 trips in each port for 10 different ports. We fielded questions from most SAS participants, prepared and distributed travel information for each port, and saw off trips. Our work study students, D'one Brende, Shawna Miller and Graseilah Moreno, were invaluable. I'd like to nominate the field office for the ship's hardest working award.
In Malaysia, one of the resident staff members had a family emergency and returned to the U.S. The field office had just completed Sale 2, the last field trip sale of the voyage so the field office's work load was slightly less. Asked to fill in as a resident staff member, I moved my things three decks up from my Hollywood cabin to Upper Deck and began to work with the 90 students on Mediterranean Sea. Besides fielding students' concerns and problems when traveling around the world, the very team-oriented resident staff get to work out logistical problems such as overheated cabins, mind the student union and alcohol consumption, develop a students' of service program, organize the Olympics (which was very successful this year), work on judicial problems, the ambassador's club, and create recreational opportunities. By and large, the students have been wonderful on this voyage. I enjoyed working as a resident staff member the team is great and because it offered a new way of getting to know students and learning about life on board the ship.
In contrast to the field office team and resident staffs' tasks on board, time in the ports is dedicated to travel, exploration and learning. Seeing different culture's magnificent creations like the Forbidden City in Beijing with golden light on the roofs and Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the glorious Hindu/Buddhist temple, where our tour guide was sheltered and protected from nearby bombing for two years, is wonderful.
Best of all for me and many of the participants I talked with, however, is meeting families and people and beginning to see the world from their perspective, learning about different ways of thinking, living closely and talking with them. I spent 2 days and a night on a home stay field trip in Kobe where we shared a potluck, visited intensely with each other, and dressed up in Kimonos. I had a wonderful reunion with a friend in Kuala Lumpur who I knew from boarding school in Scotland 23 years ago and hadn't seen in the interim. Chennai's smoggy, chaotic streets became much more interesting as I came to know one of the Indian interport students, Gayatri, and her family and got to see this busy Tamil city from the inside out.