Academics

To Be Determined

You will notice that your name appears next to a site on the Schedule that we’re going to visit in Rome.  You should prepare a 10 minute presentation that tells a story about that site rather than a series of facts and dates that most of us will forget.  Our Rome Blue Guide can provide more than enough facts and dates so we don’t need that to be the subject of your presentation.  The story should be a story about a significant person, an event–something memorable, infamous, shocking, odd, in other words, something that we’ll remember about the place.  You do not need to tell the history of the whole site, just one or two interesting stories.  Give the site a human face.  You will be giving these presentations while standing in front of or in the site so prepare your presentation on note cards or notes on your phone.  You should prepare this presentation before leaving for Rome.  In addition, it will be interesting to do the research before viewing the site and then documenting how being there adds to your understanding of the setting.  The UW Rome Center does have a library if you need to do further research.  

There are page numbers for reading up in the Blue Guide next to the sites we’re visiting.  If you see a + next to the page number, it means there are several pages devoted to that site.  Please read about each site–if not before we visit, most certainly after we visit.

You will notice each day has a dedicated theme.  This will help you focus on sensory images that help define that daily theme.  For example, the first theme on Day 2 in Rome is “entrances.”  You might want to note in your journals your thoughts about entering Rome from the airport and the first memorable visual images or, as you walk around, during the day, note entrances to buildings or churches or restaurants, both formal and informal portals. You’ll notice some doors in Rome are immense such as the doors to the Pantheon or there are ornate iron gates with beautiful designs.  Or you can focus your camera on visual images that represent the theme for the day.

Under “Daily Blog” you will see a group name–all named after Italian desserts.  That group will be responsible for posting our activities for that particular day, photos, and documenting our site visits.  Please remember these posts are for the general public, family members back at home, and UW audiences so there should be no photos of not-for-public-consumption content.  Think “education in action” photos and content and/or daily Roman life.  We will maintain a daily blog even on free days, so the group responsible for those days should work together in order to write a summary of how students chose to spend their day off.

Daily Blogging Groups

• Panna Cotta: 
• Tiramisu: 
• Cannoli: 
• Bomboloni: 
• Biscotti: 
• Granita: 
• Zabaglione: 

Instructions for Submitting Blog Posts

• Email Julianna: jjohns33@uw.edu
• Include:
  • Title of email – Date of blog post: the title you want to give the post  (e.g. September 2: We’ve arrived in Rome!)
  • Your group’s name + members
  • Blog post text, including all formatting (bold, headers, etc.)
  • Attach 2-3 photos
• Blog posts should be submitted to Julianna 2 days after your assigned day

Ideas of What to Write in Your Journal:

Bring a notebook to write in or buy one in Rome. 

• Giotto, a 14th century painter and architect wrote, “Rome is the city of echoes, the city of illusions, the city of yearning.”  Each day you will see Rome’s unreal or surreal and hallucinatory qualities. There’s a term, folle volo, which translates to “crazy flight” or “crazy journey.”  During your time in Rome, you will witness something that might not happen anywhere else except Rome.  For example, I once witnessed a police car chasing a little Fiat with four criminals in it driving about 10-15 mph trying to evade the police in a bus parking lot.  I also encountered a marching band on the street in full dress uniforms marching and playing as they passed by me and I was the only person on the street.
• Record examples of the daily theme.
• Write down words you see in Italian and translate them later, such as graffiti and posters and signs.  
• Sketch and draw in your journals. Paste ticket stubs and other found text in your journals.
• Postcards
• Take a photo and then write down what isn’t framed in the photo, such as what’s outside the frame, smells, sounds, etc.
• Take two photos a day apart of the same site and write down what’s different about how you observe that site.  Or visit the same site three times, at three different times of the day, such as the Pantheon, and write down your visit as if it were just one visit.
• Write down ideas for the daily blog for whichever group is responsible for the blog.

English 281: Travel Writing for Travelers (Not Tourists)

“Rome: Travel Writing in The Eternal City”

Course Objective:

Whether you’re going on a study abroad trip, preparing for international internships, independent travel, or just imagining the places you will visit, this course will provide you with writing strategies for recording what your camera can’t capture, nor what your brief entry on facebook.com can’t capture. Facts, statistics, dates are quickly forgotten; images are not soon forgotten.  Your job as a traveling writer/student is to collect and record images.  Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story, “A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom.  Truth in a memoir is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.  What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.  For that the power of writing imagination is required.  As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, ‘It’s all in the art.  You get no credit for living.’”

The author Susan Cahill in her book, The Smiles of Rome, states, “Travel and tourism…follow different rhythms.  Travel means finding yourself through a journey, and letting it change you.  Tourism means making a journey with enough cushioning and filtering and microscheduling to assure that it won’t change you.”  In Paul Bowles’ novel, The Sheltering Sky, one character asks another, “Are you a tourist or a traveler?”  One function of travel writing is to record how the experience changes you, the others around you, and your view of the world. In The 3 A.M. Epiphany, author Brian Kiteley writes, “The art of writing…should be a process of figuring out what we know about what we’re writing (or discovering what we’re looking for in a story) rather than trying to convey to someone else what we already know.  In other words, the best [writing] reveals a writer who is learning something rather than trying to teach something.”

Required Texts: 

Rome: The Blue Guide, 12th Edition 

Three other readings are included in the Required Readings section below:  “Attachement A&B” and “To Timbuktu and Back or How I Never Made it to the Fabled City” by Kaia Chessen.

The Book of Questions by Pablo Neruda

Buy any edition of this famous collection of poems by Pablo Neruda.  I use the one published by Copper Canyon Press.  Just find the least expensive.  You can also buy an e-book version.  There’s a new illustrated version, which you shouldn’t buy since it is oversized.  We will be using this collection of poetry as a guide on how to ask questions of Rome, of our visit, and of our experiences in Rome.  I’ve found a way of understanding a city is to understand what questions to ask of it.

What are the course requirements?

• Complete all the written and reading assignments listed in the Writing Assignments section below.
• Complete the reading assignments by the dates shown on the schedule.
• Participate in discussion and show up to class.
• Participate in peer review groups.

How am I graded in the course?

You will receive a grade of “complete” or “incomplete” for each writing assignment.  Assignments are not graded on a 4.0 scale or assigned points.

• Sentence structure needs improvement
• Misspellings, typos, or other grammatical errors
• Essay needs better organization
• Revision is recommended for incomplete assignments

A single grade is given out at the end of the class based on the following percentages:

• 60%:  Completion of all the written and reading assignments
• 20%:  Participation in class discussion and in all Rome field trips, being on time, and following the rules.
• 20%:  Quality of your writing, including grammar, sentence structure, revision, and editing of first drafts and any revisions

How do I grade myself during the course?

• Am I a better writer at the end of the course?
• Did I make substantive revisions to early drafts?
• Were the assignments I gave myself harder than the assignments required for the course?  In other words, did I challenge myself to be a better writer?
• Did I write everyday?
• Did I proofread my work before turning it in?

How and when do I turn in assignments?

• Submit your exercises as a Word .docx on course Canvas site (available once Autumn Quarter starts) and label it as follows:  your name & assignment number (joe husky_2.doc).  Do not use pages, Google docs, etc.

• On the first page of your assignment, include your name and assignment number.

• Submit all assignments in 12-point type and double-spaced.  Insert page numbers.

• See below for due dates for assignments (all dates are after we return to campus).

Help on your writing at the UW:

• You can get help on your writing assignments at the Odegaard Writing & Research Center: http://depts.washington.edu/owrc/
• If you need to practice deficiencies in your writing, grammar, and/or usage, try “Grammar Bytes” at: http://www.chompchomp.com
• You can also get help on-line at: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/

Seattle Classes

Class meeting time will be announced after polling students to see if there’s a common time we can meet, perhaps after 3:30 on Tuesdays.  If not, we will schedule a virtual and/or hybrid class that will meet once a week for 50 minutes.

Below are all the writing assignments.  While traveling in Rome and when taking notes in Rome, keep these assignments in mind.  You can work on them at any time and turn them in prior to the due dates listed.  There’s a grace period of seven days following the due date for each assignment.  If you turn in assignments later than the grace period, it will affect your grade .1 of a grade point (4.0 scale) per day that it’s late.  You will be able to turn them in on our course Canvas site once Autumn Quarter starts.  

Writing Assignments: Structure 

Assignment #1:

Write a brief autobiographical story or fragment about Rome in which you use alternating objective and/or subjective personal sentences.  One sentence should set down relatively objective, factual details, focused and clearheaded, without bias or interpretation.  The next sentence should be personal opinion; it should reveal feeling—deep or shallow; it should respond to the factual sentence but not respond directly. Vary the length of your sentences–some very short and others much longer.  Alternate like this for a total of twenty to thirty sentences. Due 10/14. 

Writing Assignments: Itinerary

Assignment #2:

Using one or two places we visited in Rome, write an itinerary in narrative form about your visit to those two sites.  Pretend that you traveled there alone (or revisit the site by yourself while in Rome.)  The essay should say something about how you view the world through your ideas about what you learned about yourself from your visit.  500-700 words.  Due 10/28.

Assignment #3:

Write about a series of arrivals or departures, but not both, with no other explanation of how you got there (or why you are leaving).  This is an essay about adjusting to the unknown, losing ourselves in the present, or what the last moments are like before leaving a place.  500-700 words. Due 11/4.

Writing Assignment: Image

Assignment #4:

Gather together on your desk four objects that mean something special to you about travel to Rome—things that have an emotional history to them or represent some other significance to you.  These objects can be simple, ordinary objects that may have no obvious significance, but have deep meaning to you.  Incorporate these objects into a story about travel without detailing too much of the history of each object, rather just insert them into the story.  Ask questions of the objects like Pablo Neruda. 700-900 words. Due 11/11.

Assignment #5:

Write a story based on a Rome photograph taken by someone else, but you’ve been there where the photograph was taken.  It might be a photo taken by a friend or a photograph taken in the distant past, but you recognize the place.  Describe what is not in photo and/or just outside the frame or your experience decades later after the photo was taken—something impossible for a camera to capture.  500-700 words.  Due 11/18.

Writing Assignment: Your UW Journey

Assignment #6:

Write a letter to yourself from Rome to that person you’re going to be when you graduate four years from now.  How does your time in Rome and where you’ve traveled to before inform who you are four years from now?  Imagine that you’ve traveled to other places while a student at the UW (other study abroad, etc.) and how those programs make up your sense of self.  Following graduation where do you see yourself going to next in terms of your career, your travels, your relationships, anything forward thinking.  500-700 words.  Due 11/30.

 

 

Attachment A

Kathleen Belew was a UW Honors student traveling throughout Latin America on a four month Bonderman Travel Fellowship.

Kathleen started her trip through Latin America in Mexico:

[April 8, 2005, Belize] The difference between Mexico and Belize is immediate and dramatic. I arrived last week off a thirteen-hour night bus from San Cristobal to Chetumal, through the treacherous mountain roads of Chiapas (“Paving 2 Kilometers a Week! Working for You!” says the government sign). Went snorkeling off a sailboat and swam in eerie proximity to huge rays, sharks and fish. We saw a sea turtle from the boat. Saw coral, trumpet fish, and small, iridescent schools of what must have been sardines.

On the last night in Caye Caulker, we take flashlights out to the end of the dock and shone them into the water that by day looked clear and empty. An enormous ray comes up off the floor of the ocean and swims under the dock. Another ray, even larger, flies through the murky, swirling waters, propelled by a slight motion at the tip of each of its wings. Above us, the moon shines the dock to silky silver, corrugated satiny wood, soft corduroy beneath the sand-calloused balls of our bare feet.

Belize City is a slap in the face after Caye Caulker. On the cayes it’s pot, in Belize City it’s crack. It’s hot and dirty. Men with dilated eyes place their fists within centimeters of your face. Women stumble into your path and ask for money, unable to stand still, haunted through the veins even as they beg. People return to their homes before dark and shut the windows at night and lock them despite the boiling heat. We can’t see straight, dehydrated, the lines of mad mirage evaporating from the blacktop.  So I head south again to Placencia, where I will catch a small ferry to Honduras. The buses are recycled in Belize; this one used to belong to the New York Port Authority and we exceed its strictly posted seating limits. Before long, I tell myself, I will be back among ruins in a jungle cloudforest.

A week later, Kathleen is in Honduras:

[April 15, 2005] In dusty Honduras, I board a decrepit school bus in the velvet darkness of the early morning. Darker than night, somehow, purple instead of black. We edge up the hills slowly, the driver waiting for the gears to kick in; we go down the steep dirt roads with the hiss of the air brake and the slight smell of burning rubber. As dawn approaches, the edges of the road come into view, the pine trunks and boulders, the intermittent houses. We fly through the towns and the driver honks the horn, which from overuse is low and melodic, reminiscent of a train’s whistle.

By now we have climbed high into the mountains, variants of the same color like tissue paper layered upon itself. These mountains are nowhere, on the strip of land that is neither Honduras nor El Salvador. The immigration officials recognize the exit from the former, but not the entry into the latter. But El Salvador it is, the pine forested hills miraculous in still being there in the most-deforested country of Central America. Not to mention that the hills have repaired themselves with new growth. It looks full, peaceful and blue. Sunrise lasts a long time here, the light divided, muted by the air that is neither cloud nor fog and yet is thicker somehow. I am covered with a fine, red silt–the dust of the road. The bus passes through the terraced, softly verdant coffee fincas plantations and passes the men going to work. They carry machetes in their hands, except for the richer ones who carry them in fringed leather cases, on the belt and nearly touching the road or over the shoulder. On their backs are hollowed gourds full of water, slouched forward on their heads are worn-out cowboy hats over tied kerchiefs.  The women going to work are mostly passengers at this early hour. They have large plastic buckets full of food to sell, wrapped tightly in clean sheets. They wear towels folded over their heads, tucked under their chins.

It doesn’t look like the war zone, but Morazán saw some of the most prolonged and violent conflict during El Salvador’s civil war in the eighties. Perquín has become the seat of that memory. It perches on a hill, two divergent roads with a few blocks of town between them. A park, a basketball court.  A church with badly faded murals and war-chipped walls beneath its beautiful, Moorish dome.

I visit the museum of the revolution—“Living Testimony to a Collective Memory,” says my ticket stub. Former guerrillas give tours. Mostly photographs and media. Why did the war happen, asks one exhibit, which shows a photo of a man reading a newspaper with a banner headline in fifty-something point font “More Than Half of El Salvadorans Live in Misery.” There wasn’t enough food. There wasn’t enough medicine. The oppressive dictatorship did nothing. People rose up.

The museum is full of the pictures of martyrs–the slain, the disappeared. Women fought alongside the men; the commanding general was a woman, Commandante Clelia. They put up a good fight. They eventually prevailed in a treaty signed with the government in 1992, after more than a decade of homemade land-mines, bombs improvised from available materials, frightening field medicine.  Constant fear of death squads.

Exactly one month after I was born on December 11, 1981, the government’s Atlacatl Battalion exterminated 900 citizens not far from Perquín at El Mozote. Exhumations of the site have recently resumed, after being started and stopped over and over again by the passage and overturn of war crimes amnesty laws. Of some 145 people exhumed thus far, 135 were children. The Atlacatl Battalion was trained by the U.S. Army. In fact, the United States, knowingly or not (some of the money came from Iran-Contra) funded the government through much of the civil war, prolonging it after the military was corrupt and moribund.

There are the posters in one room of the museum from countries all over the world. Keep the U.S. Out of El Salvador, circa 1980. Then there is Stop Bombing El Salvador, Help for the Displaced of El Salvador. Eventually there is Release Balloons Sunday for the Slain in El Salvador. The death toll would rise to some 75,000 men, women and children, with hundreds of thousands more displaced.

I stare at the mangled body of the helicopter the revolutionaries brought down in flames as it carried the notorious commander of the Atlacatl Battalion. How could I live in the world and not know that this happened, I wonder? I am shamed. I have come here from the country that was responsible for a good part of their misery, and I have come ignorant. The back of my throat stings and my vision becomes hazy as I leave the museum and stumble down the hill.

But as I walk, one after another, people try to talk to me in their few words of English. ‘Allo,’ they say. Some call out random phrases like ‘thank you very much,’ or just ‘very.’ One kid walks with me awhile, and we chat a little. They are open and kind.

At least you’re here, they seem to say. At least you’re learning.

On May 5, 2005, Kathleen sent this message:

GRANADA – Protests lasted all last week in Managua. By the time the government settled it at last on Friday, granting a temporary subsidy to guarantee urban bus fares, hundreds had been arrested, some 30 injured, and one journalist killed in the crossfire.  Among the injured was the adult son of President Bolaños, who was struck on the head with a rock after walking with his father into the midst of the mob. Mortars, rocks, obscenities and bags of water rained down upon them.  The injured included scores of protesters, and rumor has it that the Police wouldn’t let the ambulances get to them for hours at a time. Four policemen were injured from bombs and grenades homemade from cardboard, string and gunpowder. One cop lost an eye.  All this, again, was over a proposed hike in bus fares from 2.50 to 3.00 córdobas. That’s about three cents. That’s how poor it is here, that three cents is too much money, so much money that there must be a riot.

Last week I stayed with a family in Granada, the conservative stronghold of the country. The protests spread to the nearest town, Masaya, as well as Estelí and León, but didn’t come to Granada.  The house is painted bright turquoise, on a pedestrian alley off the dusty square expanse of the Plazita de Xalteva. Ana, my host mother, is in her late forties with a two-month-old baby boy. Her five children come from different relationships, and although Ana is devoutly Catholic, I don’t think she was married all of those times in the church. The father has moved recently to Miami, and the baby is chronically ill with gastric problems. Every night he cries or vomits and there are deep circles under Ana’s eyes. In the day he stares, unseeing, miserable.

Also living there are Ana’s niece Kari and her husband Sergio, my age, with their two-year-old boy Sergito. Kari sits most of the day watching Sergito with Ana’s unhappy baby propped in the crook of her crossed leg. Sergio makes furniture and asks me what buyers in the States mean when they write to him to ask that he ‘tweak’ the traditional Nicaraguan designs to make them more marketable.

Ana’s oldest son, Carlos, is in his thirties and is gaunt and wiry. He stands in front of the mirror singing reggaeton songs, looking at himself. He graduated with a degree in agronomic engineering. But there are no jobs. He wakes every day at two a.m., across the sheet that divides his mattress on the floor from my rickety metal single bed. He gets on his bike and then on a bus, traveling through the burning, barren fields where there is no water nor hope of fertility. He traverses the fields he could be healing and goes toward the smog of the burning tires generated by the Managua protests. There, he spends the day in the city, selling and distributing chicken. Sometimes his workday lasts until well into the evening.

On Sunday, Ana invites me to join them at a memorial mass commemorating the death of her mother, Doña Olga, who passed away six years ago. The family descends on the house Saturday night, some fifty people or so (this, they tell me, is only the immediate family; during Holy Week the gathering is three times as big in this tiny house). I help them make papas españoles, French fries made into a batter with spicy salsa fresca and egg and then fried again. I brush the silky floss hair of three or four fidgeting little girls, plaiting French braids and making parts even. I sit with them at Iglesia Xalteva for the first mass in which their priest says the words ‘Pope Benedicto,’ and go with them to the graveyard to lay chrysanthemums and mil-flores on the tomb.  There, the girls pick up and eat the mangoes that have fallen from the trees that grow among the graves. Their mangoes fall on the tombs, on the big mausoleums of stone and the communal mausoleums of graves like long shelves and the poor mausoleums with names written in marker instead of carved or sometimes naked and unmarked entirely. These trees in this ancient cemetery illustrate a common expression in Granada’s Spanish, raíz-profunda. Deep-rooted. Like all things here, from problems to families. Each generation growing from the bodies of the passed.

When we return from the cemetery, we eat all afternoon. At night, the family leaves reluctantly, back to other cities and other houses.  Sergito will ask for them all week, not understanding where they have gone. Meanwhile Anaand Kari try to keep the rats out of the house as the dusk thickens. We bar all the windows as night falls, against the thieves who scale walls. A bat flies in a circle around the peaked space in the eaves of the house’s second story, over the sheets and partitions that make three rooms of one. I fall asleep in the gentle swathe of mosquito net, listening to the sounds of the house’s living walls.

Just when I think the image of mangoes falling on top of graves and mausoleums will stay with me forever, I received the following from Claire Suni in Cameroon:

Life in Gwarkang is once again full-wonder…I have found my calling in the village: reading aloud. Many of the adolescents are at school in the city, and their letters home are printed in English and French, though few of the mothers can read. Some of them have a backlog of 20 or 30 unread letters, sent over the years by varying children.  Everyone assembles around me in a tight circle, and I read slow and loud. Then I attempt, pitifully, to translate and/or mime the letters out. Sometimes I read pamphlets on AIDS, which leads to such interesting questions as: “But Soo-nii this is my name), what is the meaning of “discharge?” Try pantomiming that one out for someone you call Grandmother.

At one point there was the sacrifice of a cow, a most festive occasion indeed. To my extreme horror, the esteemed village elders leaned into the still-steaming carcass and cut free the intestines, which they ate raw. Right there. Just ate them. The intestines. Raw. My compound father, who is a well-respected traditional leader, attempted to gift me a huge, dripping hunk of this beef, which he held out for me in both hands. “Thank you,” I said, pale-faced, “but father, I wish to give my meat to you.” At this his face lit up. He reached down and unzipped his leather messenger bag, dropping the meat directly inside. Just like that, just dropped it inside his bag to be cooked later. It still upsets me.

Day to day I research like a madwoman, gossiping (err, I mean interviewing) left and right and then taking long hikes through the hills when I need to clear my head. Since people keep asking, I’m doing “Medical Anthropology” under a grant from the Lindenberg Center for Humanitarian Affairs, International Development, and Global Citizenship.  For the sake of brevity I’ll generalize tragically, but here is my basic gist:  Men own land, women farm. There are less than 150 people in Ndzeen proper, (the actual village part of the district of Gwarkang) so women come from the surrounding areas to basically rent the land. Because there is no binding contract, or rather because the contracts are susceptible to jealousy and greed, they may kick the women off the land at any point, leaving their families to literally starve. As such, many women enter into sexual contracts with the Ngwerong Society, the political henchmen, for protection. Or they offer up their female children. If you want to be simplistic about it—it’s prostitution. But it’s something else too—I’ll spare you my whole theoretical discussion–but in this I can explore the women’s manipulation of the male political system via their sexuality, as well as the role of human rights for the little girls, the implications of AIDS (which is rampant), and the morality preached by the Catholic Church (also rampant). Also many of the women are married, and you know I love the element of scandal. This is not a traditionalist-up. Interesting stuff, huh? I think so.

Before I go on, let it be known that I love it here. It’s so fabulous–it blows my mind. I spend entire days chasing butterflies or picking guavas or smoking bees from their hive in order to suck huge pieces of honeycomb, dripping golden sugar sweet slow down my face. I am in a perpetual state of fascination. But perhaps I was getting cocky, forgetting to show respect for a continent that does indeed have the power to flatten me. Perhaps I am living out some past karma. Maybe I’m just reckless. Whatever the reason, I will forever remember this as That Time I Was Thrown From a Speeding Motorcycle, Bitten by a Monkey, Stung by a Bee, and Then Hospitalized for Contracting Malaria. In one week.  To borrow a phrase from Norman Rush, malaria is “like being stabbed to death with a butter knife by a weakling.”

Just a week ago, Kathleen wrote from the Pacuar River, Costa Rica:

[June 3, 2005] The smell of turtle eggs just laid, just exhumed from the sand is like chalk between my fingers; it comes from the nest full and pungent, like cinnamon and sweat and tobacco and the sea. It’s pouring, and I’m trying to keep a tally of softball-sized, round white soft eggs as Juan Luis pulls them out of the clutch and sets them in a plastic bag. My pencil drags, tearing the soggy page.  When we have 86 fertile eggs and 28 infertiles, we get ready to go back to the hatchery. There, we will bury the eggs in a nest the same size and shape as the turtle dug out with her back flippers a few minutes ago (showering us with wet sand). The eggs will be shaded, their sand loosened, and checked every thirty minutes until they hatch in a few months. There will be a tall chicken-wire fence between them and the poachers that until this year had all but eradicated new turtle life on the island separated from the Costa Rican mainland by the Pacuar River and a series of canals and backwaters.

At the edge of the water on the narrow beach, an enormous leatherback sea turtle is returning to the sea. She trundles her enormous front flippers in tandem, dragging herself in short straight spurts — her movements are the same as a baby turtle we released to the waves a few days ago. I’ve been walking in sand for

the last several hours (drifting sand, hard packed sand, sucking sandy tidal flats pulling at my boots) and when the first waves hits her I salivate in sympathy. She moves forward again, exhausted, and waits. Two waves break deliciously cool over her back and the third takes her back out into the Caribbean. In a few months, she might swim as far as Australia…

A leatherback turtle once swam from French Guinea to Newfoundland in 128 days. As the saltwater begins to buoy her up, I whisper ‘Newfoundland’ to her disappearing form, letting my rambling spirit settle into the ridged skin that acts as her shell.

La Tortuga Feliz is one of those places people go to help the countries they’re traveling through, to stay somewhere more than a few nights and make real connections with the locals. Every night, the volunteers walk up and down a 6km beach, looking for nests so that their eggs can be moved protected. Leatherbacks can’t be eaten because their diet of jellyfish poisons the meat, and they have no shell, so poachers only want the eggs. The turtles mate for three days, so the eggs are considered aphrodisiac and are sold illegally in bars, as shots, for men coming-of-age. Before the project, which is in its first year, no one had seen baby turtles near the Pacuar in several years.

The island is home to about 30 people, a mix of native-born islanders who farm the land for the coconut and its husk, and people who have run away from other places. There are many Costa Ricans here dodging alimony or child support payments, or who are otherwise wanted by the law. There are a few who came for the environmental jobs, like 20-year-old Juan Luis and his family. La Tortuga Feliz is the island’s primary employer, and has recruited several poachers to be guides instead. There are usually between three and 20 foreign volunteers. There are four or five Cost Guard officers, in matching T-shirts and camouflage pants, guns of various kinds in visible holsters.

Once in awhile, someone who lives on the island takes a clutch of turtle eggs to feed his or her family. The project endorses this.  It’s the outside poachers, the big money, for-profit poachers that we watch out for. They sometimes slit a leatherback open up the middle because they don’t want to wait for it to lay its eggs. They come back for the beach’s other three turtles (Caray, Green and Hawksbill, all of which lay in other seasons) and leave behind the bodies. One night we walk the beach and find a nest already emptied of its eggs. In the trees, the patch of dense dark above the beach, I see the occasional burning ember of a cigarette amid the fireflies.

The beach is drastically different every time I walk its length, long expanses of tidal flats giving way to a narrow, wood-strewn strip at high tide. Some nights are so dark I trip over the trails the turtles have made between nest and water. Others are illuminated by the crescent moon, the surf like a stripe on a black-light painting next to the black sand beach. We walk first toward the Big Dipper (tilted at this latitude and pouring all its milky contents into the sea) and then toward the moon. When it’s clear out, the beach is the border between the cool breezes that come off of the ocean and the obscene, hot exhalations of the jungle. In the backwaters, and in  the lagunas on the beach, are enormous crocodiles. There is often rain, usually in the early hours of the morning. Every night there are shooting stars and relampagos, lightening strikes that illuminate the sky but don’t strike the ground.  In the strobe-like relampagos I watch a young turtle with a narrow shell lay what may be her first clutch of eggs. The flashes illuminate her in pieces, some four meters long and surprisingly narrow and triangular, her square head and shoulders like some majestic and terrifying prehistoric monster. Turtles always return to the beach where they were born to lay their eggs.

…My generation, I think, will be forever altered by travel. Already we have moved from the city in which we were born and in large part we live far from our families. Many of us have begun traveling alone on a larger scale than those who journeyed before us. Many of us have begun something we don’t quite know how to stop, finding ourselves infected with wanderlust. Staring down the barrel of seven years in Connecticut [for graduate school], I wonder how I can even stand to hold still so long.

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Attachment B

Shawn Wong

08/24/2009

Writing Tips From Berlin and Istanbul

1.

Good writing is all about writing about ideas.  So what were some of the ideas or themes for the day?

How about connections lost and re-established?  For example, the bridge, Oberbaumbrucke, has a long history.  During WWII the Nazi’s blew up the bridge to keep the Red Army from advancing, then later access across the bridge was cut off between east and west, streetcar tracks led up onto the bridge, but ended abruptly.  The bridge became, at two points in history, a symbol of the separation of two different global ideologies:  fascism and democracy then communism and democracy.  Today, we just walked across the bridge seeking lunch, but in the past the bridge represented so much more.

Think about things in your life that something like a bridge can represent, you know, connections lost and re-established.  Think about using the bridge as symbol.

Then we went to the Russian War Memorial.  The urban sounds of modern Berlin fade away, the graffiti walls vanish from sight…  2,500 anonymous Russian soldiers are buried in the ground below our feet.  Twenty-five hundred.

One day we’re examining the tiny squares of the “stolpersteiner” (stumble stones) and the next we’re at one of the largest war memorials in the world.  Think about how you might write about the proportions–tiny square brass tiles to memorialize millions and a huge memorial to memorialize 2,500 soldiers.  You know, it all makes sense.  A city of contrasts indeed.

Then there’s the Wall.  How did we approach it?  Was it a surprise?  Behind the wall was a beach.  What the…?  The next time you come back to Berlin the beach will be gone and some huge office building will have replaced it.  Part of what I hope you write about is the impermanence of something like the beach club and other sites in Berlin.

2.

Today’s class was all about memory:

• You might ask yourself why is it important to build the Topography of Terror exhibition over the ruins of the Gestapo headquarters?
• Or, why leave the shrapnel and bullet holes in a building?
• How did the Holocaust Memorial communicate to you?
• What did it communicate?
• When you walked around the maze of stones and uneven cobblestones, what did you do when you encountered a stranger, a fellow classmate?
• Did you lose your classmate in the maze?  Did you find them?  Were you looking for them?  When you bumped into strangers did you look at them in the eye?
• Did the memorial make you remember something or someone from your life?
• The Reichstag building.  The Dome.  It doesn’t matter what the true symbolism of the glass dome means.  How did it communicate to you?  Did it make you look at Berlin through a kind of filter?  Why a circular path?
• What did you see in the mirror?  I know I saw two versions of me.

3. 

I think you should try and spend at least one day, if not more, without your camera.  Take your journal instead.  For example, our visit to Sachsenhausen concentration camp was probably a day when you didn’t need a camera.  Those images are unforgettable, not to mention the vivid images our guide, Adam, painted for us.

I know it’s been a long week, but I would suggest that you start doing things on your own.  Go to museums by yourself.  It’s a whole different experience than going with a group.  Find something in a museum that you connect with even if you don’t know the story about the piece of art or artifact, then later read about it and go see it again.  Use your museum passes; don’t let them go to waste.

As for writing, try to think of one image from your day that you want to remember and write about that first.  It doesn’t matter how small or insignificant it is.  Start there and then move to the next thing.  Tell your story of your day out of chronological order. Write everyday. It’s far easier to write everyday than it is it try and reconstruct your days.

4. 

1. Do the postcard assignment daily.  It gets you in the habit of composing something everyday.  Remember to do the writing on-site rather than after the fact.  I’d rather you not do the assignment if you’re not writing “at the moment” on-site.
2. Spend several hours by yourself without your camera, cell phone.  Sit at a café.  Pretend you’re alone in Berlin.  Write down overheard conversations.  Write down random words in German that sound like a words in English.
3. Follow a tour group for a few minutes.  What are they talking about?
4. Pick a platz.
5. Go to every museum within a 15-minute walk of Humboldt University and “curate” your own exhibition of the most memorable objects, paintings, etc. from each museum.  Curate the things around a central theme.
6. Walk slowly.
7. Go to the same place three times on three different days.
8. “Read” a German newspaper.  If you know German, pick Turkish.  If you know Turkish & German, well then you’re Sally.
9. Shop differently.  Go shopping by walking slowly through Kreuzberg.  Buy one thing from one vendor, another thing from another vendor, etc.
10. Go to the flea market and buy something by bargaining.  When you see something you like, think how much you’d pay for it before you ask what it costs.
11. Find sentences in “The Emigrants” that “speak” to the things we saw and visited in the first week.
12. Describe something annoying about a tour guide.  Be specific.
13. Be an architectural critic.  “Read” a building.
14. One of my students in Rome lost all 1600 of her photos when her computer crashed.  They were never recovered.  The only photos she had were the ones she sent to other people or posted on her facebook.  If that happened to you, what pictures would you want to describe in writing the most?
15. After living in Berlin for a month with nothing more than one suitcase (or two), what can you live without when you get home?  What are you leaving behind?
16. Holocaust Memorial at twilight.
17. The Ishtar Gate to Babylon.  I wonder what’s on the other side after you go through the gate in ancient Babylon?
18. Be a food critic.
19. Why do Germans like David Hasselhof?
20. KaDeWe

5.

You know the visit to Sachsenhausen still stays with me.  I was trying to think about the one thing that will stay with me forever.  I told you about it in an earlier e-mail, but I’ve been thinking about it more.  I read this story in a little plastic display case at Sachsenhausen about an prisoner who was in charge

of handing out bread, but the bread was never cut into equal pieces so he made a little a single die made out of aluminum and rolled it to see who, at his table, would get the first piece of bread.  Then rolled it again and so forth.  What strikes me about this story is that this one prisoner thought of a logical system of fairness in a world in which all logic and fairness was gone.

The other thing that happened to me today was very illuminating.  While we were at the immigration center, I went out to find the bathroom and I walked the wrong direction and went through a glass door only to find that I was locked out and no longer had access to the floor where we were meeting.  I was stuck in a glass holding room of some sort.  Then it dawned on me that the metaphor of access that the building stands for was being made very clear to me.  I was suddenly on the “outside.”  I tried another door, it too was locked.  I had thoughts of me being stuck there and no one would know where I was.  Finally, I found my way down to the first floor and made my way up to the second floor and back.  Irony, man.  Our speaker was talking about access to Germany and I’m living it.  No access.  I don’t know need to hear any statistics.  I understand.

The other thing from today that is memorable is when Tobi said the following, “History makes everything complicated.”  Perfect.  I wrote down in my journal.  He was referring to the Bundestag and Reichstag, but I thought you can take that sentence in any direction.  It can refer to something as important as German history, but you can also apply it to something like your own personal history, you know, relationships and their history or family, etc.

After I met with several of you this afternoon, I realize I was saying the same thing to many of you.  Many of you are very comfortable with analytical writing, critical essays, etc.  I’m asking you to do something different and by doing so, hopefully you have another writing tool in your tool bag.

In short, take a chance with your writing.  It doesn’t have to be personal or you have to “bare your soul,” just write a narrative that shows what it is you’re trying the learn about Berlin rather than what it is you already know or can look up in a book, google, etc.  The difference in a study abroad class from writng about Berlin in the US is you’re here.  Be here in your writing.

I spoke with Fan about how she is changing her idea for her research paper.  Talk to her about her new idea.  Her idea is doable in the less than three weeks we have here and is a simple and fascinating idea.  Read Sally’s blog about Sachsenhausen.  It’s all about being in moment and on-site at the camp.  You can’t write that in Seattle.

6. 

2 am here in Seattle.  Yeah, jet lag.

Continue writing your postcards.  Actually they’ll mean more to me now that I’m not sharing the same experiences with you.  You can even write them as if you’re writing them to me if you want–something like:  Wow, Shawn, you should see what’s outside the frame of this postcard.

I once had dinner with a man who was the head of an arts organization in South Dakota and he invited me to dinner at his home.  He had three children under the age of 11.  The man was blind and when his children described things to their father, they used the most descriptive and inventive language I’ve ever heard from children.  They wanted their father to see things like they saw them.  The kids had been to museums and art galleries and when they spoke to their father, they would draw on their experiences, make connections for him.  For children, they had an enormous vocabulary, which makes sense in their world.  When I heard them talk and describe things, I saw what they were talking about in detailed and precise ways.  Yeah, gang o’ 21, outside the frame.  Help me see what you’re seeing.

Istanbul.  Hmmmm.  I’m still trying to figure out where to put all that.  The Bosporus, Byzantium.  The call to prayer and all of us asking each other if we heard it that first morning.  Yes, we all said, it was first in our dreams before we realized what it was and that’s the way it should be.  Even for those of you who slept through it the first time, it was there inside of you.  Magical and unexpected.  Wash your hands, your mouth, speak to the angels on each side of you, lift the weight from your shoulders and listen to your heart.  Reflect on life and what you did that was good and what you did that wasn’t and try to live a better life.  Istanbul is a gift of images, feelings, a journey from the fear and terror of the stories about human tragedy to the east where we all discovered something different.  Orhan said armies moved east and west.  We moved east toward the place where several empires ended.

Chalcedon, on the Asia side, might be the City of the Blind, but when you write where is the City of the Blind in our experience?  Yes, it was what we learned in the first week, Topography of Terror, Perpetrators of the Desk, Holocaust, Sachsenhausen.  Therefore, where in your writing about this, do you build your Byzantium?  We actually lived in Byzantium.  Yes, I know it looked like a dorm room, but we were on the Golden Horn, we were there, across from the City of the Blind.  Make something of that in your writing for assignment #3.

As I mentioned in one of my previous e-mail writing tips, your writing should be about being there, not here at the UW.  Don’t report, make the reader see things and feel things they can’t share with you.  If you don’t get it right, you will later.  What good are the 2,122 photos you took to the blind?  Write something you can read aloud.  What does Turkish coffee taste like on the tongue, a summer tomato salad with cilantro, having dinner with white linens in the street in Istanbul’s summer, what would it be like to be there and share it with someone you love?  Like the children I mentioned and their father.  Let me see it in your writing.  You won’t get it right the first time, so all you have to do is write it again until you do.  It’s my job to help you get there.

Think image.  Think what it was like to leave Istanbul behind.  I not only had to leave Istanbul behind, but all of you.  Try not to start a sentence with “We went to…”  Refrain from writing that something was “beautiful” or “amazing.”  It doesn’t do justice to what we shared.  All of a sudden “research paper” is such an inadequate phrase.  Ja?

7.

I know you’re having fun without me, going to plays about sheep jumping over manure and everything.  I’m not the jealous type.

Tomorrow, Thursday, you can stop writing the postcard assignment.  I know some of you will continue anyway and that’s fine with me.  But, it’s optional.  I encourage you to continue.  I know you have other things to get done and things are feeling a little tight right now.

Assignment #4:  I want you to line up your postcards in chronological order.  If you actually wrote on real postcards (as opposed to digital pics), put them on a table in front of you.  If you have digital pics put them in chronological order along with your brief narrative.  You’ll notice that there is space between them.  What occupies that space?  For assignment #4, I’d like you to recall something you did between writing each of the postcards or recall an image from memory.  Sebald and Pamuk’s writings are all about memory, Berlin is all about historical memory, Istanbul is a site of memory where civilizations rose and fell.  Think of one or two things that you can recall in that time between each postcard.  It can be anything from the trivial (I ate a doner and remember the man had green eyes…) to something very meaningful to you (call to prayer in

Istanbul, something you read in Sebald or Pamuk, etc.).  Make the recollection no longer than the space on the back of a postcard, a fleeting image (75-100 words maybe less, you decide).  Try not to look at your journal.  Sit and remember.  That writing, the writing in between postcards, should be different than your writing “of the moment” on the postcards.  When you get back to Seattle, I’d like you to post all of this on your blog, scan postcards front and back, and in between postcards you have these little narratives from memory.  Believe me, your writing will have depth, a soul.

If you can’t remember anything between two of the postcards and your mind is a blank and you’re having writer’s block, then just write a fiction, in other words, what would you have liked to have done between the writing of two postcards.  You don’t have to tell me that you’re just making s__t up.  Take a risk.

OK, that’s the last assignment. It’s not a difficult assignment, but it should change the way you write from now on.  In a similar vein, if you go through your photos on your camera or on your laptop, you’ll notice that they’re all in chronological order.  Your first reaction is always to locate the picture (“I was standing in front of…”) or date it (“First day in Berlin…”).  Try to remember what happened in the space between the photos.  It’s interesting memory work because in some pictures there’s a lot of time between the photos and in others it’s only a matter of seconds.

I’m going through the blogs today and I notice some of you haven’t posted any of the writing assignments yet.  They’re not difficult so try and catch up.  The assignments on the surface might seem easy and you might be telling yourself that you can post all four writing assignments at once.  Try not to do that.  I know many of you are writing drafts of your assignments and just haven’t posted them yet.  No problem.  Learning to write effectively is cumulative and incremental, in other words, write everyday.   Then revise.S

8.

OK, it’s 3am here.  Jet lag.  Day Two of reading your blogs.  I’m grumpy.  I’ve become the Stasi Police of Writing. No more good cop.

I’m banning the following words from your writing:  beautiful, amazing, incredible (as in “It was beautiful, amazing and incredible…”), images/imagery (“The mosque was filled with images.”), interesting (“I found the place interesting.”)  It’s lazy writing.  Remember my story about the blind father and his children?

These words don’t describe anything.  What specifically makes something beautiful, amazing and incredible?  You don’t have to start making lists of everything you can remember, just pick something that struck you as significant.  What images/imagery?  Why is something interesting?  If you’re describing a person examine them more carefully–did they have a slight wrinkle around their eyes when they smiled, did you watch how a worker used his hands, what draws you to be closer to someone (you can’t hear them because of the noise in the street, you want to be closer, you’re in a crowded subway).

You can smell the Heine subway station before you get to it.  What does it smell like?  Not the specific smell (urine, dusty newspapers, day old orange peel), but what does it remind you of (home, the last stop) and it smells different than Alexanderplatz (which is fast food, shoe repair, plastic water bottles).  Imagine traveling all the way to, oh say Istanbul, for the sake of discussion, and then coming back to Berlin to the Heinrich Heine stop, the last stop, before you’re able to fall into your bed.  It’s comforting even though you don’t like the smell of the subway station.  The station for us always represents the beginning of a day and the end of a day.

Go back through your blogs, seek out banned words before I find them.  Please.

Obviously I found them already otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this.

9. 

Vivian Gornick writes in The Situation and the Story, “A memoir is a work of sustained narrative prose controlled by an idea of the self under obligation to lift from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver wisdom.  Truth in a memoir is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand.  What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.  For that the power of writing imagination is required.  As V.S. Pritchett once said of the genre, ‘It’s all in the art.  You get no credit for living.’”

To Timbuktu and Back or How I Never Made it to the Fabled City

by Kaia Chessen

Timbuktu – (noun) A city in the West African nation of Mali, known for its extreme

inaccessibility. Now it is used to mean any extremely distant and inaccessible location.

(The Urban Dictionary)

The port is a sandy expanse, home to a small covey of pinnaces, slender arched wooden boats that rest their oars between excursions on the wide earthy current called the Niger River. A larger ship, perhaps a hundred feet long and low to the water, painted in ornate green, blue, and gold patterns, is waiting to disembark. The sun is barely above the watery horizon and I stand, weighted with my backpack which holds all the worldly belongings to which I have had access for the last two months. I glance at my watch, adjusted seven hours from my home in Seattle where it is still the night before. If difference was measured in hours, a meager seven would not begin to approximate the incongruousness I feel here.

The vessel is an industrial ship used to transport millet, but tickets are sold to passengers as well. According to my guidebook, I could travel comfortably and quickly to Timbuktu in an SUV or speedboat, but I have chosen otherwise. A ride above sacks of millet is the least expensive means of travel (which is becoming a more pressing concern as my stash of CFA bills dwindles by the day), but more importantly to me, it is the way most locals commute. I came to Mali, the large inland West African nation, to meet its people and experience their culture, and I know I won’t find either of these things in the air-conditioned confines of an all-terrain vehicle. Moreover, spending a few days on the water sounds peaceful, lounging and communing with other travellers. The water is low this time of year, and the journey more difficult. Reaching Timbuktu on a millet-shipping vessel, unlike a four-hour sprint on a motorboat, I am told will take three days.

Climbing aboard, I marvel at how deep the cavity of the boat is. The millet bags, approximately three feet by two and over a foot in thickness, are piled to the boat’s brim. In the ship’s center is a clearing, a four foot-wide walkway where a miniature gas stove has been set up. I select a bag towards the rear of the kitchen area, and I sit, waiting in the brisk morning air as the other passengers meander aboard.

When we are ready to depart, the boatsmen ease the behemoth from shore. Those on the ship’s edge use long wooden poles, impaling the river-bottom, using its leverage to inch us forward. Others wade up to their chests in the water, guiding the craft along.

To each side of me are other travelers, equipped with satchels filled with clothing and goods for trading. With my mud-covered polyurethane backpack, khaki traveler’s pants, and wide brimmed hat, I am a far stretch from blending into the crowd. A group of women directly in front of me chat as they situate themselves. They are adorned in popular Malian attire, tailored dresses made of bright print material and head-wraps. A little girl moves restlessly among them. As she becomes aware of my presence, she is immediately playful. She reaches to grab my hand so that she can pinch my pink skin. The women laugh. “Kadija,” they say pointing to the child, informing me of her name. I wade through my bag to find a pen and my journal, offering it to the girl for her to draw in. She is not shy, grabbing the pen from my hand and scrawling asymmetric shapes across the page.

Inevitably, I am in need of a bathroom. It occurs to me that I haven’t seen one on-board, nor have I seen anyone sneak away to a particular section of the boat, so I use one of the few French phrases I know—“Où est la toilette?”—and I’m directed to the rear section of the vessel. I search for something that looks like a restroom, but find only a grapefruit-sized hole carved into the wooden stern, depositing directly into the milky brown water below. Far from shore, this appears to be my only option. Only a few millet bags block the view of the rest of the boat. Luckily, no one seems to be paying any attention, so I squat as best I can over the tiny hole.

We are on the open water now. In the distance is a village which I can conceal entirely with the tip of my thumb. The settlement consists of a few mud dwellings and a mango tree. At the river’s edge, naked children gaze boatward between splashing one another. Several women bend over bright plastic buckets spilling over with laundry and soap suds. One woman lifts her pail, careful not to allow any clothes to escape, and she pours the sudsy water back into the river. As we near the town, our ship slows, and a smaller boat is sent with a couple of crewmen to the shore. Perhaps twenty minutes pass, as we sit idly on the water. When the small boat returns, one of the men has something hanging from his hands: a bouquet of live chickens, upside down and held by their legs. Onboard, he holds them off the side of the boat, breaking their tiny necks with his fingers. He pulls their feathers out by the handful. For a few moments, the passing current is dappled red and white.

The youngest of the group of women I now call my neighbors, an infant strapped to her back, hops over the edge of the burlap precipice, into the kitchen pit. The baby’s head bobs up and down as his mother’s feet hit the boat’s floor. One of the older women sees me watching, and through a series of improvised hand gestures and a string of Malian French communicates that the young woman is cooking to pay her way up river. Reaching over the side of the boat, she dips a large pot into the brown water. Remembering the hole in the back of the boat, the chicken carnage, the soiled laundry, I keep one eye on the kitchen to ensure that it boils completely. Even so, I’m hesitant to partake in lunch made from this river. At home, all water runs through filtering systems, filtered of things like animal remains and human waste. Now, I fear slightly now for my own mortality, but I have no say in the matter. The Niger River is the only water source for miles, and it will be the only water available for the remainder of our journey.

The rice is flavored with bouillon cubes, and a few bits of chicken parts are allotted to each bowl. We scoop the food into our mouths with our fingers. Kadija picks up a fistful of rice and smears it across her mouth. The women point and laugh at their daughter, and I laugh with them. Conversing is difficult, but we can share in one thing that is universal: the humor of a child with food on her face.

Soon after lunch, Kadija falls asleep in someone’s wide skirted lap. The hours lapse slowly on the river. The sun hangs low in the sky. The landscape to either side of us is flat and covered in dry brush. A herd of long-horned cattle promenades beside us, wading across the shallow bank in a procession. Their shoulders are muscular and their eyes are fixed forward, paying the massive barge no attention. Every so often we pass another village. As we drift by, children run from some invisible place toward the shore, yelling and pointing in our direction. Eventually, when the sun falls behind the horizon, we lie down, one by one, across the bulging, leaden burlap. Above the canopy a half-moon reflects like an impressionist painting across the rippling water. The women and their children have retired next to me, and their chests rise and fall with their slumbering breath. As hot as it has been during the daytime, it is chilly at night, and I shiver in my sleeping bag. Finally, to the sound of water splashing against the boat’s side, I find sleep.

At once, I am jolted awake. Someone is holding my shoulder and shaking me. I open my eyes just enough to see one of the boatsmen looming over me, making a series of hand gestures in lieu of the language that can’t exist between us. Tiring of trying to communicate with me, he steps over my outstretched legs and shakes the shoulder of a sleeping child to my right, giving him a terse order. The boy rolls over onto the millet sack beside him. The man, with the help of another member of the crew, takes the sack the boy was previously sleeping on, and they heft it into the air and painstakingly flip it over. The boy spreads his little body over the overturned millet bag once more. Now, they are back, gesturing for me to move aside. I glance down at my watch – 12:34 AM. I groggily sit up and roll off my millet sack. Up and over it goes, the men grunting as they lift its weight. I watch as the crewmen make their way through the ship’s bed, waking passengers one by one, and flipping the top layer of millet as they go. Their intentions are mysterious to me. I do not have the words to ask. Still shivering, I try unsuccessfully to return to slumber.

When the sun comes up there is more rice and bouillon. For me, there are malaria pills, sunscreen, and more silence. Not literal silence, as the other passengers exchange words now and again, but a lack of language to which I can assign meaning. My understanding of French is so abjectly minute, not to mention my Jula, which is essentially nonexistent, that it makes any meaningful communication impossible. Though there are people all around me, I feel pangs of loneliness. I resign myself to reading my travel guide, but that too seems pointless while confined to a boat, reading about mosques I cannot reach, and the foods I cannot eat; reading about the vastness of Malian cultures while being confined to a finite glimpse of Malian daily regimen.

At some point, our ship begins a deliberate turn toward the bank. I look up to see the boatsmen heaving their bodies against their long poles to gain momentum. There is another small village, of which only the thatched roofs are visible over the low hills. At the shore, the women begin hoisting themselves over the boat’s edge, long skirts, sandals, infants, and all. I grab my day-pack and leap down behind them, falling into the soft sand. The women find a dry patch of grass to sit on, and Kadija wanders down to the water to splash its surface with her miniature hands. Some of the other passengers meander along the riverbank, while others rest near the boat. I kneel to search my day-pack for my French dictionary. I want to ask the group of women why we have paused our journey, but without the language skills to form a proper sentence structure, the best I can come up with is, “Pourquoi bateau arrêt?” Why boat stop?

The burliest of them tilts her head to her shoulder. “Le millet est mouille!” she explains. The millet is wet! I turn around to see several men working, sinewy muscles flexed, to haul the soaking, heavy masses from the boat and lying them on the shore to dry in the sun.

“Pour combien de temps sécher?” How long to dry?

The woman laughs and shakes her head. “Je ne sais pas, toubabu,” she says in a mixture of French and Jula. I don’t know, white lady. Wherever I go in Mali, I answer to toubabu, a name given to tourists and foreigners. In truth, I don’t mind. I enjoy that Malians seem to be able to talk about race openly, without reservation or embarrassment. It is often not this way in the U.S. I cannot imagine yelling, “Hey, black lady!” to a stranger on the street. When I told this to a friend in Bamako, he wanted to know why. I thought for a moment before explaining simply, “We have a different history in America.”

In the village, several passengers from the boat have already purchased mangos from the local girls who come running barefoot with baskets balanced on their heads. A man sitting on a rock nearby savors the last of his fruit, sucking the juices from its yellow pit. As I wander sun-weary and confused into the scene, children come running again, although both boys and girls this time, with no mango baskets in site. They stop together, frozen a few yards from where I stand. The smallest of them, a boy, screams in terror and runs to hide behind his mother’s wrap-skirt while the other children laugh. This is not the first time my presence has induced this reaction. When children ran screaming in one village, I was informed that several Belgian physicians had been through a few months prior to distribute immunizations. “The children are all afraid that you have a needle,” someone explained. Another person suggested that the older children tell stories to the younger ones, revealing that people with light skin are in fact ghosts. Now, I kneel to the little boy’s eye-level. I smile to show I mean no harm, but he only recoils further.

Standing up, I see two older boys running towards me. They each clutch an arm of a pale-skinned girl who comes only to their shoulders. Her legs move involuntarily, barely holding her upright as she is propelled forward. As they near where I am standing, the boys push the girl in my direction before retreating back into the crowd of children. Any adults who may be nearby seem to be preoccupied with their labor, with conversations, or in pounding millet and preparing supper, and pay no notice to the commotion. The little girl stares up with round pinkish eyes, pupils weakly fluttering from side to side. Like the other girls in the village, she wears an oversized t-shirt, a skirt made of print-fabric, and rubber flip-flop sandals. Her tight platinum curls, like their black ones, are pulled back in tiny braids. Unlike the other children, seeing her up close for the first time, I see that she has albinism. She trembles. She cannot be more than seven or eight.

I drop down again, hoping to make my strange appearance less threatening. How many children can I frighten in one day? The girl recoils with the upper half of herself, her feet planted like tiny baobabs in the sand. My surprise passing, I am overtaken with anger. I am angry at the two boys who dragged her out here in front of the others, tossing her like a toy in front of a strange woman, and I am angry at the mob of children who are mostly still now, who do nothing but look from a safe distance. I want to tell her that she is beautiful, and am once again frustrated at my inability to communicate.

The girl’s eyes continue to flutter. Remembering the second pair of sunglasses I have stowed away in my backpack, I take the ones on my own face and gently place them on hers. I did not come here with the intention of distributing gifts, but it is obvious that this girl’s eyes are far more sensitive than my own. The glasses are too big, and are sliding down over her nose. I notice that her skin is badly burned and covered in sun-spots. I sort through my backpack again and offer her my bottle of sunscreen, hoping I can find more once I get back to a city (in the end, I cannot; sunscreen does not seem to be commonly carried in Mali). Squeezing a small dollop on my finger, I rub it onto my own skin to demonstrate. She looks behind her for a clue from the other children as to how to respond to this gesture. The other children only stare. Soon, one of the boys comes skulking from the crowd. Catching this, the girl’s face crumples and she shoots me what I interpret as an apologetic glance before darting in the opposite direction. The boy breaks into a sprint behind her, and the other children follow closely behind. My first thought is to chase after them, but in an instant they have vanished behind rows of homes.

I sit down on a rock and gaze out at the river. Although I am traveling by myself in this country, I have rarely been truly on my own. Wherever I am, there seem to be people nearby to befriend, to commune with over a long bus ride or a meal, or at the very least, to haggle with over the price of a souvenir or a bunch of bananas at the market. However, every so often, I feel hopelessly, frightfully, uncontrollably alone. Now, cursing my own powerlessness to help this girl, feeling helplessly immobilized in my journey upriver, and parched to speak in a language I understand, I am as lonely as I’ve ever been.

The millet bags remain spread out across the shore and my new friends, the group of women, sit sprawled languidly across their blanket. I wish I could ask them when we will depart, but I get the impression that no one would have an answer to give. They speak among one another, but I wait in silence. We wait until dusk, and by this time I want to burst through my own skin. Still no action has been taken suggesting that we might, at any foreseeable moment, embark. As the final scraps of daylight melt down the sky’s canvas and into the horizon, as the moon surfaces above our heads, the boatsmen finally begin to stir. Without urgency, they haul the grain, now dry from its hours in the sun, arranging the bags once again across the boat floor. This takes more hours into the night. As our boat eventually pushes off, I can just make out the faces of a few children who have come from the village to the shore to wave us away. Among them is one of the boys, gesturing vigorously, a pair of sunglasses on his face.

The third day aboard the ship, I fall in and out of sleep all day, making every attempt to cover my own pale skin from the ever present sun. I am unable to shake my memories of the village and the girl. All three of our meals are boullion and river-water rice. I flip through my French phrase-book. “À quelle distance?” I ask the women. “Halfway,” they show with their hands.  This is supposed to be a three day journey. At night, I am awoken by boatsmen again, and again, I shift my cold, aching body from one unforgiving sack to another.

On our fourth day on the water, the river is low and our boat becomes implanted in its soggy floor. The men heave and pull on their giant levers without success, until someone comes up with the idea to lighten our load. The crew begins lifting millet bags onto a couple of feeble wooden rafts that we have been towing alongside us, and they usher onto them as many passengers as can fit. Stepping over the side of the main boat, I take a seat next to a middle-aged man in a torn t-shirt and slacks that appear to be coming apart at the seams. We exchange friendly smiles and proceed to sit in silence, staring into the tide. Eventually, I grow bored and fish for my dictionary. Crudely, I ask if he lives in the city. He does. I ask if he has children. Six daughters, he says, grinning wide. I ask why he is traveling to Timbuktu. He is going to sell something at the market. I can’t understand what. We sit for another lengthy stretch. He points to my cheap plastic wrist-watch and then to himself. “Donne le moi,” he says. Give it to me. Taken aback by his request, I consider this for a moment, and then shake my head no. I rely on my watch. Another moment passes, now an uncomfortable space between us. He points to my water bottle this time. “Donne le moi,” he says again, revealing several missing teeth with his grin. Again, I shake my head. He points to my sunglasses, my spare pair. “No!” I say, feeling equally guilt-stricken and annoyed by his persistence. We sit quietly next to one another for two uncomfortable hours (I watch the minutes tick by on the watch that stays still on my wrist), staring vacantly out at the current that cannot carry us. The boat is freed just in time for our dinner of rice and bouillon.

In the morning of the fifth day of our voyage, I wake with my head in a fog. I habitually disinfect a water-bottle full of river water, using a filter, a steri-pen, and iodine tablets (usually only one of these methods is necessary, but I’m not taking chances), and take a giant swig, washing down my malaria medication. When my stomach begins to churn, I realize the grave error I have made taking my pill before breakfast. Without food to help absorb the antibiotic, the caustic medicine grips my insides. I look around for something to eat in an attempt to ease my discomfort, but I have long since consumed the bread I have brought with me from the city. I locate some pepto-bismol in my bag. Hoping that it will do some good, I place a couple pink wafers on my tongue and chew. As I wait for them to do their work, the pain intensifies. Doubled over, I taste something sweet and acidic at the back of my throat, and barely manage to bend over the side of the ship before a cascade of pink emerges. As I rest there, bowed over, my stomach feels better all at once, and in the same moment, I decide I am finished with this millet boat.

“Malade,” I tell the boatsman, rubbing my belly. Sick.

With a look of concern, the man motions for me to wait and within an hour, he has flagged down a small pinnace of local fishermen to escort a tired, sore, and homesick toubabu to shore in their canoe. I bid adieu to the group of women and to little Kadija, to the boatsmen, to the man who wanted my watch. As I step off the millet boat for the last time, I realize my privilege to be able to simply opt out of an uncomfortable situation. I have no way of knowing whether the boat would take another day or another five days to arrive in Timbuktu, but I doubt anyone else will likely be disembarking prematurely. My reasons for travel are less important than theirs likely are. I was traveling to see a place I have only read about, to make my fiction a reality.

I do not yet know that the daily passenger van which travels from the closest nearby village to Timbuktu will not show up that day. I do not yet know that I will be spending the night on an old mattress thrown on the dirt floor of a generous family’s courtyard under the stars. I do not yet know that the only vehicle to pass through town the day after will be traveling in the opposite direction and, feeling my time in Mali fall away like sand in an hourglass, I will take it. The trip that took five days by shipping vessel, will take four hours in the other direction.