DEAN "DAD"

Okay so this is going to be one of my shorter entries but I wanted to update you all on the last two days. The stretch on the ship on the way to South Africa is a total of 6 days. Originally I thought these six days would be filled with schoolwork and nothing interesting at all, but I have been proven wrong hence why I am updating my blog before South Africa. The first fun thing that has occurred is Samantha’s 21st Birthday!!! On the 12th, Samantha and I and 12 of our closet friends on the ship went to a formal dinner for her birthday. The ship provides a 5-course meal for $35 every so often that you can sign up for, so we obviously decided that would be a fun idea to do for her birthday. We all got dressed up which was a nice change to the usual no makeup, sweats and a T-shirt state that I have been in lately. I though it was humorous how many compliments I got on how I looked that night because back at NAU that is how I put myself together all the time. I think if I showed up to my merchandising classes back at school looking the way I do here, I would be immediately asked to leave. Haha ;) The next day I was planning on hiding Samantha’s 21 presents from Kathy all around the boat and given her clues, send her on a scavenger hunt; however, it failed due to the fact that people would jack the presents laying around the ship. Instead I gave her a few presents every few hours, it was still fun because she didn’t know when they were going to stop coming. It was a fun day and I believe she had a very fun 21st birthday, I mean as good as it gets in the middle of the ocean ☺

Now time for the story that really matters, this is the reason why I decided to update my blog. Sunday night while I was quietly studying in the piano lounge, my extended family dad, “THE DEAN”, came up to me and told me that he was giving a lecture in the room that I was in. I originally was going to leave so I could complete my homework but Samantha and I decided to stay because the topic of the lecture sounded quite interesting. The lecture was on experiential learning, which obviously relates to semester at sea, because that is exactly what the students on this trip do. I had only heard Dean Dan speak in our family setting prior to this lecture, but I had heard from many people that he was one of the most inspirational people they had heard speak. He began his speech with a question…”How many of you feel confident that you have mastered something in life, and what is that thing that you have mastered?” Everyone proceeded to answer out loud and as everyone was doing so, he interrupted, and said, “Okay, and how did you master that?” The answer was obvious…EXPERINECE. I am not going to write you guys the entire speech but I will sum up what this all meant to me.

As I told you in my previous blog entry, the cultural immersion I went on in Ghana was beyond overwhelming. Dean Dan has done research on experiential learning of SAS students before this voyage and found that students on this trip either process their experiences in healthy and moral ways and move forward from it, or they regress in their thinking and mind in order to understand what they have been experiencing on a simpler level. He asked aloud if anyone feels like they are one of those that are regressing through the experiences they have been through so far. I found myself raising my hand, and of course he called on me because he knows me. I told the group about my cultural immersion and how I found myself uncomfortable and crying and upset but I didn’t know what that all meant, and how when I wrote in my blog that I couldn’t find the words to describe what I was going through. Before this speech I didn’t know what all this meant, I felt lost and emotionless because I couldn’t really piece it together.

It sounds bad, regression, but Dean Dan explained that regression is sometimes the only way to understand experiences like these. Some students come into this program knowing what to expect in these countries. Some students come in with and open mind, some closed. Some students don’t know what to expect and when they see it they are so in shock they can’t find the words (like me). And some never find the connection, they stay overwhelmed until it is all over and they piece it together as simply as possible and move on. Dean Dan said something that seems so simple but really hit home, “We are all bozo’s on the bus of life.” I am a BOZO…I can’t seem to understand what I learned from that home stay, but I know that it made me miss home. I couldn’t believe that these families were as happy as they were, but I know that when I played volleyball with the kids their smiles were radiating. I don’t know how this will affect me in the future but I do know that I am regressing in order to make some sort of sense of all of this, and I’m okay with that. I am not one of those people that came into the program prepared to see all of this and process it easily, I am going to have to process this all slowly and I probably won’t figure out what it all means but at least I am learning EXPERIENTIALLY and putting myself out in this world that I know nothing about but am prepared to try and learn about.

Something to leave you with, Dean Dan said America is, “informationally rich and experientially poor.” He made it very clear that the reason why so many students at home universities leave a class at the end of a semester without any new knowledge is because they are learning through experience. The information from the teachers not so cool PowerPoint goes in one ear and out the other, students cram for tests, get their A, and forget what they learned the next day. This is no way to learn. The world is our campus and we have to think globally and act locally. I hope I explained well enough how enriching and how eye opening this lecture was for me. Tonight I have a family dinner and I cant wait to talk to Dean DAD ha more about this lecture and what it meant to me. Love you all at home and thank you mom, dad, grandma, grandpa, and everyone else for letting me share this experience with you.

p.s. this didn’t end up being short, my bad
xoxo
-me-