Voyage creates new view

Jennifer Ryder, a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh, said she still hasn’t been able to fully process all she saw and experienced on her recent Semester at Sea voyage.

Ryder described the trip as “the most intense 100 days I’ve ever had.” She spent them sailing around the world with more than 700 students, faculty and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the program’s distinguished lecturer in residence.

“I don’t think I’ve really let it hit me yet [that] I’m never going to have that opportunity again,” Ryder said. “I only knew those people for 3 ½ months, but I feel closer to some of them than I do people I’ve known my whole life.”

Semester at Sea, a program sponsored by the University of Virginia, allows students an opportunity to study global issues in the context of the different countries they visit.

Ryder’s ship, the MV Explorer, visited ports in countries that included Malaysia, South Africa, China and Vietnam. Students are required to take a minimum of 12 units, and classes meet daily with one-week breaks.

During those breaks, students are encouraged to explore the ports they visit, whether on prearranged tours they booked prior to leaving, or on spur-of-the moment journeys that Ryder said gave her an up-close and personal view of the areas she wanted to experience.

“I wanted to be a traveler, not a tourist,” Ryder said, and while every country made an impression on her and told its own story, her favorite was India.

After landing in the port city of Chennai, Ryder had one goal in mind: to see the Taj Mahal.

With four friends in tow, Ryder flew to Delhi, rented a jeep and made the five-hour drive to Agra, where the group toured the Taj Mahal with a private guide.

The Semester at Sea program also features “interport lecturers” who come on board in one port to lecture students about the next port they’ll be visiting.

Tutu was already on board, and he taught the classes on South Africa, spoke to Ryder’s global societies class, and conducted a prayer service after the killings at Virginia Tech.

Ryder described the global peace activist as “very down to earth, with a contagious laugh,” and said he always entered a room dancing.

As a student who almost never got up early enough to have breakfast, Ryder was surprised — first to be awake that early, and again when she saw Tutu and his wife having breakfast in the dining room the last day the ship was in Japan.

Knowing she would never have an opportunity like that again, Ryder and her friend approached the couple, asked to join them, and spent the next 20 minutes answering questions about the trip and how she felt about her experience at sea.

During his lecture, Tutu shared about his life and conditions in South Africa. Ryder wishes he would have gone into even more depth, because she said she was unprepared for what she saw when she visited the Khayelitsha Township in Cape Town, South Africa.

South Africa is the country that made the biggest impression on her, and in describing the people she saw there, Ryder said tearfully, “They’re living in shacks as big as the playhouse I had as a kid.”

And, she’s planning on doing what she can — small as it may be — to help.

She met students on the ship who were part of a group called Feel Good, which started on the University of Texas campus selling grilled cheese sandwiches to raise funds for the Hunger Project. She now has a goal to start a Feel Good chapter at the University of Pittsburgh when she returns in August.

Since the trip ended, the hardest part for Ryder is sitting still.

“I have to be doing stuff all the time, ‘cause I wasn’t in the same place on the trip for more than a week,” she said.

While Ryder said she might be interested in a summer Semester at Sea program, she really feels the trip has a lasting impression if you only do it once.

“You can never replicate it or compare it to another one,” Ryder said. “And when it’s over, you’ve changed so much, but everything else stays the same.”