Hide and Seek

No matter how old I get, or how many times I have suffered, there is one mistake I make on a near-habitual basis: I underestimate the sun, and overestimate my ability to thoroughly apply sunscreen. 

 

I took myself on a date

 today. Me, myself, and I went to Gulfport, Mississippi, a shore town right on the Gulf of Mexico and only about 70 miles from my Loyola summer home. I sat on a completely isolated, brilliant white sand beach for about two hours. I saw and spoke to no one, spare an older man, Tom, an Ohio resident and truck driver, who introduced himself to me... we yankees can spot each other, I think. The rest of the time I drifted lazily between the last chapters of a book, taking pictures, and dips in the Gulf, which felt a little cooler than a warm bath.  

I felt very patriotic today. Maybe it was the fact that every single lamp post and street sign in Gulfport had a flag attached. But mostly, I think it was because of how mysterious, beautiful, and diverse this country is. Within one hour I left the mansion-lined streets of Uptown New Orleans and landed on a deserted beach looking out over blue Gulf waters. Since living in Michigan I have seen beautiful lake shores, beaches and forests. On the drive down here, we saw mountains, rolling hills of vineyards, rivers, and national parks. We of course also saw strip malls, billboards in bad taste, desolate towns, and a lot of fast food restaurants. But what's great about this country is none of that seems out of place. It all fits together like one of those 1,000 piece puzzles; the hard parts of it make you think, make you angry, drive you crazy, the easy parts are soothing and reassuring, and when you finally get it all together, it just makes sense. 

But my drive to Mississippi was also confusing. Everywhere down here- the radio, the lunch conversation, the newspaper, the walls of restaurants- I see and hear about Katrina. I hear sentences that begin with "Since Katrina," or "Because of Katrina," or "Before Katrina." I remember the pictures of the flooded streets of the city and its poor neighborhoods, the roofs blown off houses, and the horrible images brought to the world from the Louisiana Superdome

 (I'm including a picture of it from my window). I was anxious to get here and learn about the storm, the aftermath, the recovery. But being new to the area, finding evidence of Katrina is not easy for me. Which is creepy. The media coverage of abandoned buildings, FEMA trailers, ruined neighborhoods... all of that is weirdly missing if you are a visitor to the city. This is both disorienting and unnerving.  

I expected that on my drive to Gulfport, as the MS coastline was hit incredibly hard, would yield signs of the storm and recovery efforts. I was wrong. After my day in the sun, I stopped in Bay St. Louis for a cool drink and a snack at a small coffee 

shop called the Mockingbird Cafe. After

 a fresh scone and an ice-cold strawberry lemonade, I made a quick trip to the restroom- its walls were adorned with newspaper articles-turned-plaques of the recovery of the house and area where I stood. The article spoke of how the cafe had been like the living room of the community after Katrina, whose wrath closed 100% of the businesses in the community. People gathered in Mockingbird to comfort one another, to mourn their losses and to rebuild the one most important thing the storm had taken from them; their community. 

Bay St. Louis was hit by a 34-foot high wall of water during Katrina. There is a twisted oak tree that still stands in the town facing the Gulf- seven people and a dog survived the storm because they were able to cling to this tree. I drove right past it while I was downtown and only learned of its significance after I got home and began thinking about this post. It is incidents like this and others that make it feel as though I'm in an eerie game of hide and seek here; sometimes I am looking right at Katrina's ghost, and don't even realize it.  

Just as my travels are helping me better visualize and put together the unique puzzle of our country, so is this experience in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. I am slowly piecing together the pains and the stories of this region, and hope that before I leave, I will have gained an understanding of what happened here that I can share with my own community. 

Day 5: Lions, and Tigers, and Audis. Oh My!

Hello from Port Elizabeth, South Africa! I have been staring at the blank posting screen for about 30 minutes now, trying to think of how to even begin describing all that I have been through, seen, and done since arriving on this amazing continent and in this complex, diverse, and beautiful country. I can say without a hint of exaggeration that the past five days have been the most intense and crazy and amazing I've experienced in a long while, partly because of the sheer wild variety of things I have been doing. In South Africa, I am trying to balance being a tourist in a foreign land with being a professional in a totally different higher education context. 

By day, we are at Nelson Mandela Metro University working with and among South African higher education professionals, giving workshops, having conversations, and interacting with faculty and staff across the institution around issues that I are both familiar and utterly unfamiliar to me in my work with students. For example, today I gave a presentation with my colleague, Katie, on the first-year experience and transition, and we asked our audience to brainstorm a list of the challenges students are facing in their first year. Two examples were given during our discussion by their staff: first, female students prostituting themselves in order to be able to pay for transport to and from school, and second, discovering that more than half of students at NMMU only have enough money to pay for food to eat for half of the days in a year, meaning many go days with nothing, while trying to go to class and still be college students. The discussion we had was vibrant, challenging, and interesting, and I hope we were able to help our South African colleagues conceptualize the first-year experience in some new ways that will assist them as their program grows. 

By night, we have been spending our time eating amazing meals for less than $20 every night (filet mignon, wine, the whole shabang- I have also tried ostrich and springbok since I have been here), walking along the sandy beaches of the Indian ocean, and spotting all sorts of wildlife, which leads me to the next item up for discussion...  the subject line of this post. First, it is important to note that in the last three days I have seen monkeys, mongoose (mongooses? mongeese?), springbok (South African deer/antelope type creature), and a variety of birds. But today, we went to a big game preserve, and I was within inches of herds of giraffe, zebra and springbok, many of which came near to us in our car as we drove through the park. But there was also a portion of the preserve where we were able to drive into an enclosure to "be amongst the lions," which we were all super excited about. I was riding in a toyota mini-bus, and the other half of our group was in an Audi Quattro as we entered the enclosure and the gate swung shut behind us. We could see three lionesses lying in the grass ahead, and drove slowly up to them. At first, they seemed perfectly content with us gawking out our vehicle windows and taking zillions of non-flash photographs of them. Cute, even. In fact, at one point it looked as though they were cuddling with each other and purring. But, one got up and began to pace back and forth next to our cars. Then, no lie, she looked my classmate Jess in the eye through the back window of the Audi, and began to snarl. The lady lion then proceeded to chase our cars out of the enclosure, leaping up and putting its front paws onto the trunk of the car before we made our getaway. It was exhilarating and terrifying, and incredible, indescribable in a way that can do the experience justice really. It was like being in a National Geographic special. 

This only continued when we arrived at the restaurant and sanctuary at the very top of the preserve, which had spectacular views of the whole park and the Indian Ocean. The man who waited on us at the register heard our lioness story, and laughed. Yes, he laughed at us. He then told us, "oh yes, she was just playing with you. She's been known to tear off bumpers and hubcaps too." Gulp. He took my 50 rand (the currency here), which is a little less than 7 US dollars, and gave be a ticket to play with baby lion cubs. These "babies," however turned out to be 5 1/2 month old male lions, more like lion adolescents, who yes, were very playful, but also had paws bigger than my hands, and teeth that surely could have done some damage. Nonetheless, I went into the cage and spent about 20 minutes petting, playing with, and photographing the three cubs- Dutch, Marli, and Abello- and marveling at how incredibly lucky I am. 

There are many more details of my Africa adventure that I hope to share with you while on this trip, but I am going to stick to these two tails (get it, lion tails? hahaha) for now, in hopes of keeping you reading over the course of the trip. Tomorrow promises to be much more low-key than today, but it's South Africa, so who knows?