From off the coast of West Africa

Ship life takes over once we leave the ports. Everyone heads back to classes and all of the activities resume. Each member of the faculty, staff and lifelong learners attends one Captain's Dinner during the voyage--and Steve and I attended a few nights ago. The food was excellent and it was interesting to talk with our Croatian captain, who has headed the ship for many years. After dinner, I stopped for a photo with Audrey, a wonderful lifelong learner who is in one of my classes.

The weather has been heating up again so the kids are enjoying rec and the daily swimming is in full swing again.

For each port, the kids watch a video from the Families Around the World series. Today we watched Families of Ghana and saw how two different families live, one from a rural area and one from the city of Accra. In our post-film discussion, the parents in the room noted how hard the kids worked at their chores each day! The kids remembered other things from the movie!

The astronomy professor on board held another stargazing evening for the southern hemisphere sky a couple nights ago. We saw the Southern Cross and Alpha Centauri, the star closest to the sun. The professor has taught about these stars for decades, but has never seen them in person until this voyage. Last night, we crossed the equator again with a big bump. (Just a little shipboard humor.) Tomorrow in Ghana, we'll still be near the equator and will be able to see the northern and southern hemispheres simulataneously.

I'm teaching two courses on the ship: one is a World Theatre in Performance course that focuses on the historical and contemporary theatre practices of each country we visit. We read about the different practices from a large reading packet I compiled last year. In addition, I have some DVDs of performances that we watch and we are lucky to have interport lecturers and students come to class to tell us about the theatre-related traditions in their country. The interport lecturers and students typically get on the ship a port or two early and stay until we reach their home country.

The other class I teach is a Human Voice in Performance course based on the Linklater voice technique I teach at home. For this class, we utilize poems from each of the countries we visit and we also spend time in discussion (and in the papers students write) analyzing the different voices we hear in each port.

Singing is a huge part of African culture, and so for Global Studies, the course that everyone on the ship takes, my students and I led the students in an African-inspired round. There are 600 students on the ship, so we led the song for both the morning and afternoon sessions. Everyone had a good time--and we actually sounded better than my videos indicate! At any rate, everyone seemed to enjoy getting on their feet and singing and dancing during class.

Here are snippets from the morning and afternoon Global Studies renditions of "Bellymamba":