India

Louise with Sara and Dana, two students.

Thirty of us went right from the ship to Mother Theresa’s home for “unadoptable girls” in Chennai. Going right to Mother Theresa’s might have made for a fairly rough landing in India. Other students had left for the airport, to see the Taj Mahal, or the ghats of Varanasi, but the kids who sign up for the service projects at Semester at Sea are quite remarkable, and sturdy. The truth is you need to be sturdy to go into Mother Theresa’s.

Traffic in Chennai.

The first floor housed about 20 profoundly retarded girls (and a few boys) who were curled up in their metal cribs, blind, deaf; limbs locked, many of them not in any kind of recognizable human form. To me they seemed to be in a profound dream state. All had been abandoned on the streets of Chennai. The nuns had picked them up and now care for them with great love and affection. The second floor had about thirty girls and young women with varying degrees of retardation, but they were conscious, curious and ready to play. They sang. We sang. We taught them clapping games, tossed balloons and blew bubbles, played Duck Duck, Goose Goose, a game I will never understand. I sat in a plastic chair and watched it all from the corner. A little girl with a sloping head sidled up her chair next to me, and fell asleep on my lap while I petted her back like a kitten. We also met two individuals who were not retarded, but who were severely disabled, one a ten year old boy with a cleff palate and no arms and legs, but with a devilish sense of humor, and the other a 36 year old woman, also missing limbs. But she had a fine mind, was conversant in English, although she told me that she preferred to read in Tamil. She slept on a small mat on the concrete floor among the profoundly retarded. She was safe, clean, and had made a life for herself among the sisters. It was a day to count one’s fingers and toes, one’s blessings, and to have the utmost respect for those nuns.

The next day, I took Jo and her friend Erin to Pondicherry, a city about two hours south of Chennai on the coast. Pondicherry is an interesting amalgam of French colonialism, southern Indian culture, and an overlay of western hippies and utopian idealists. Pondicherry was one of the few French forays into colonialism on the Indian subcontinent, and if you judge the success of a colony by longevity, it failed. On the other hand, if you judge it by influence, it did not. The French are still a vital force in Pondicherry. I’m not sure why, but a substantial number of French still live there, and there is an active Alliance Francais for those on the subcontinent who want to learn French language and culture. We stayed on the third floor of a heritage hotel in a room with twenty foot ceilings, its own balcony, marble floors, and carved wooden platform beds that stood waist high. The building itself looked like it belonged in the French quarter of New Orleans.

Our street in Pondicherry.

Pondicherry has a big university, and hosts a lot of foreign exchange students, so it feels very much like a college town, with bookstores, cheap eateries and coffee shops, and young people buzzing around recklessly on small motor bikes. It’s on the sea, and there’s a glorious Promenade that you can stroll up and down, watching India at play---there was surf, kites, kids, cotton candy, music, weird whirly things that glow in the dark. I could easily live in Pondicherry. Jo kept spotting aging hippies on the streets of Pondicherry, saying, “Look, Mom, there’s a friend for you.” One of the things I hate about getting older: I am not going to have the time to lead all the lives I want to lead. It’s a good thing I believe in reincarnation. It takes some of the pressure off.

Selling scarves at the sea.

Election propaganda.

The food in Pondicherry was outstanding. Every meal had three or four orders of buttered nan and Indian yoghurt, and the main meals were often curries, usually very spicy. One night the food was so hot we simply could not consume our main dishes. I have a Flip Video of poor Erin weeping over dinner, complete with nose running and steam coming out of her ears. We went twice to a place called the Rise Inn, a small family owned restaurant, and for dessert, we feasted on crepes with butter and honey and lemon. Fresh, hot crescents were part of every breakfast.

Jo and Erin at the Rise Inn.

On our way out of Pondicherry, we stopped at Auroville, the utopian community begun in 1968 by the “Mother,” one of the disciples of the famous Sri Aurobondo who founded the ashram in Pondicherry. It remains a thriving, sustainable, international community of several thousand people, and while we didn’t have time to do the tour of the remarkable looking temple, we spent a hour or so, just walking around, and sitting under the trees. Auroville was green, beautifully landscaped, spotlessly clean, and apparently thriving. I wished we could have stayed longer.

Auroville.

On our last day, we went to Kanchipuram and Mamalapuram. In Kanchipuram we went to a 16th century Hindu temple and were lucky enough to have visited on an auspicious day yielding great celebrations of music, with horns blowing, drums beating, incense swinging, chanting of priests, and transportation of large, wooden painted gods and goddesses throughout the dark temple chambers. It was electrifying. In Mamalapuram, we saw the amazing rock carvings and Shiva temples of the Pallava dynasty, including one huge rock carving called Arjuna’s Penance that had families of elephants, and flying goddesses, and snakes, and flowing rivers and tricky cats and---you name it. The rock carvings were so beautiful, all from the sixth century, some Buddhist imagery, some Hindu, but so different from later Indian temple art that tends to be repetitive, and stylized. The animals in these carvings were so naturalistic, so individualized, and the subjects were all captured in quiet moments of intimacy, young girls fixing their hair in a mirror, cows being milked, baby elephants hiding shyly under their mother’s massive weight. I had a lot of fun in Pondicherry, but if you asked me: what was the most remarkable thing you saw in India? It would be the temples and rock sculptures in Mamalapuram. I would travel far to see such a thing. Indeed, I did. LH

Kanchipuram.

Arjuna's Penance.

Shiva Temple, Pallava Dynasty.

Cape Town/Cognitive Dissonance

It has taken me almost a week to process our stop in Cape Town, South Africa. For me, it was the most emotionally draining of all our ports so far. Cape Town put me into a state of profound cognitive dissonance.

No other port has been so beautiful. The way the city wraps around a set of knock-out, rugged mountains, its aqua blue waters, its bright colors, its almost Manhattan-like glitter and pace---with African music being performed on the streets everywhere. The ship squeezed into a stunning harbor, and nuzzled right up to a five-star hotel, a tastefully designed four-story mall, and block upon block of enticing restaurants, coffee shops, clubs, bars, expensive gift stores, and an array of outdoor activities such as shark diving, surfing, sand-boarding, windsurfing, kite surfing, one-day safaris---you name it, with enough cash, you can do it in Cape Town.

The Waterfront at night.

I was not immune to these pleasures. I loved leaving the ship every day to go to a coffee shop named Melissa’s, to sit in an elegant, soothing public space, alone and in silence, to read a newspaper, to listen to jazz, and linger over a wonderful café au lait and a piece of outstanding ginger biscotti. There were at least three bookstores at the Waterfront to poke around, and it made me realize how much I have missed some of these simple, creature pleasures. My Starbucks, my Barnes & Noble.

It also made me realize how much I have missed being alone. Ship life is intensely communal, and the community is wonderful. My fellow faculty are across the board engaged, interesting, adventurous, fun, funny, irreverent, a little fractious at times, but overall, they’re great. How could they not be? They’ve all struggled to put their lives on hold for five months, to make almost no money so they could sail around the world, teaching and traveling with a shipload of young people. It’s been such a treat to make so many new friends. But truth to tell, I need a lot of solitude, and South Africa gave me that. Jo had a stomach virus through part of the port stay, and was out with friends at other times. Almost everyone in the program was off on an expensive Safari. Only a handful of us were left in Cape Town so I enjoyed the city on my own.

Our first day though was a trip to Simon’s Town with two other faculty families to see the colony of 3,000 African penguins who hang out at Boulder’s Beach. Simon’s Town is one of the Victorian villages that hugs the coastal strip of the Cape Peninsula around False Bay. At Boulder’s Beach they have constructed a board walk that winds around the colony, so it is possible to walk out among the birds without disturbing them. I have a real weakness for penguins, so I loved it. Truth to tell, they didn’t do much but stand facing the sun, like small, formal statues, all dressed up in their tuxedos with no place to go. They were also a bit redolent of guano and penguin body odor, I have to presume. Not a smell I was familiar with, but birdy, and definitely not subtle. For lunch, we had wonderful fish and chips, dipped in beer batter, right on the bay in Simon’s Town, drank fresh lemonade, listened to a group of African singers who sounded like Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s band, and looked out at the beach, the incredible shades of blue water and the rugged rocks of False Bay. It was a crisp, bright, sun blasting day, and except for those who served us, or sang for us, I only saw white faces.

Simon's Town.

Then we had to head back to Cape Town, dropping off a mathematician and his family at the airport, and that detour took us through the townships in the Cape Town Flats where people of color were forced to live during Apartheid until 1994 and where the majority of them still live today. The townships go on forever, mile after mile of abject poverty, with most people living in tin shacks lacking electricity, water, and sanitation. Then the next day, Jo and I did a service project with an N.G.O., Operation Hunger arranged by Semester at Sea in two different townships. Our busload of forty college kids was given the task of rounding up, weighing and measuring every child in a certain area of the township. (Operation Hunger is monitoring the levels of malnutrition.) Jo and I hung out mostly in the crèche where the little kids were being cared for. Some had parents who were working, even though the unemployment rate in the township was over 80%; other children were “unknowns,” toddlers who had just drifted into the crèche because ostensibly no one was taking care of them. Almost all of them were without shoes; some were without names.

The Semester at Sea kids were great; they dug right into the project, and within four hours, we had measured and weighed probably over fifty black kids, all of whom spoke only Xhosa, one of the “clicking” languages. We noticed they had no toys to play with, so we took up a collection on the bus, raised $250, and then Jo, and another faculty member and I went toy shopping to send toys, primarily legos, blocks, and trucks, for the next day’s service visit.

Weighing children in the township.

Our second stop of the day was at a soup kitchen in a colored area where our kids bought the bread at a grocery on the way, and helped to serve the long line of people who came for a free, hot meal. Once again, our kids jumped right in, and because many of the colored, which includes people of mixed race (many of Indian descent, some Muslim) had some English, we could communicate. Alcoholism, astronomical rates of AIDS (almost one in five South Africans is infected with HIV), unemployment, malnutrition, total lack of infrastructure, no medical or dental care, little in the way of schools---the situation is bleak, and unfortunately, the politicos in the African National Congress, Jacob Zuma and his crew, just sold their own people down the river in a series of scandals and a spate of corruption. There is currently little hope in sight, although elections are in April.

The soup kitchen in the township.

On the other end of the spectrum, my friend Dee who had lived in South Africa for years, spent her four days being wined and dined by old friends, and the buzz among the white elite is: how do we get out of South Africa? The main reason for the white flight is violence. South Africa has one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world, with over 50 killings a day. Car jackings and muggings are common, and some 800,000 whites have left out of a total population of 4 million since 1995. Anyone who has spent even one day in the townships, however, doesn’t find this crime rate remarkable. When there is such a gap between those who have so much and those who have so little, violence can be anticipated. Even understood.

And so, coming back from measuring black children who were remarkably small for their ages, if indeed anyone had a clue when they were born, the café au lait, the ginger biscotti at Melissa’s, the windsurfing and the stores in the malls selling high-end Africana, even the cable car ride up to Table Mountain, all seemed bizarre and unreal. What is remarkable about Cape Town is that inside the bubble of beauty and white affluence of the Waterfront and the City Bowl, there is no hint of the miles upon miles of desperate poverty laying just a few miles outside in the townships. No hint at all. It seems to be a conspiracy of silence. A commitment to remain delusional, and to turn their backs on it all. The whole thing made me unutterably sad and anxious.

On our way to India, we stopped for a day on the island of Mauritius to refuel, and for the kids to go to the beach and blow off some steam. Mauritius was a surprise and a delight. It was just like being in India, with so many people of Indian descent having come many generations back as indentured servants. All the sounds and smells and sights on the streets were South Asian in nature, and familiar to me. We felt at home. After buying some Dodo paraphernalia---Mauritius is where the large pigeon, the Dodo, was rendered extinct within thirty years of sailor poaching---Jo and I spent most of the afternoon in the Port Louis Botanical Gardens, sitting in our own private thatch-roofed gazebo in the middle of a banyan tree forest. Except for the very rare, amorous couple, we were completely alone. Rain threatened. The air was perfectly still. A calico cat came to visit. After so many days of yang energy in Cape Town, and on the ship, with bright, hot sun, high winds, and the dazzling, sparkling surface of the testy sea, it was a relief to spend an afternoon enveloped in yin energy. All the colors that afternoon were saturated. We lolled on the benches of the shady gazebo, gossiped about people on the program, and ruminated about what the sisters were up to. For awhile, nothing moved. We didn’t move. The banyan trees didn’t move. Time didn’t move. Even the calico cat, once she settled in, didn’t move. It was very peaceful. Very yin.

Jo in the botanical gardens of Port Louis.

We’re in the Indian Ocean right now in the Horse Latitudes. That means we are cutting a swathe through a smooth, opalescent sea. The air is still, the waves are almost nonexistent---I can see why the sail boats dependent on the wind had to throw the horses over. In five days, we’ll be in India. LH