Chennai, India

This morning, the MV Explorer arrived in Chennai, India. Formerly known as Madras, Chennai is the capital of one of India’s 28 states, Tamil Nadu. With a population of roughly 8 million inhabitants, which is about the same as New York City, it is India’s fourth largest city. Chennai is sometimes known as the “Detroit of India,” due to the fact that it is responsible for roughly 60% of the country’s auto exports. It is also India’s second largest exporter of software and information technology. The city is also an important cultural center. It is home to India’s second largest film industry, Kollywood, and Chennai is the site of some of India’s best dance, theater, and art festivals.

Semester at Sea Voyager’s have been privileged to have three wonderful interport lecturers with us since Chennai, who have been introducing us to Indian culture and history. Sneha and Anusha, two Indian university students have been on board the ship as well as Dr. Hamsapriya Srinivasan, an Indian professor in political science.

While this was the first voyage for Sneha and Anusha, Dr. Hamsapriya has been a part of the SAS community for the past twenty years. Her first contact with Semester at Sea was when she was invited by the U.S. Education Institute of India to give a lecture to visiting SAS students. Afterwards, she tagged along with others and visited the ship. The next day, she hosted around 30 Voyagers for lunch and showed them around Chennai. Every year since then, she has helped organize trips for Voyagers on their stops to India, briefed them when they arrived, and she has been an interport lecturer twice.

Dr. Hamsapriya is also an avid supporter of the mission of SAS, and told me that it, “scores hands down on any other education program,” when I asked her how she felt it compared to other study abroad options. India is often cited by Voyagers as the port that impacts them the most during their journey. This will be my first visit to the country but Dr. Hamsapriya conveyed to me that, “The sites, sounds, smells, and crowds hit people as soon as they’re off the ship…but for those on the trips that involve human contact, they find that people are very open, generous, friendly, and go out of their way to do things for students.”


Semester at Sea students also were very interested in talking to Sneha and Anusha to learn more about the lives of Indian university students. They learned that education is extremely important here and is compulsory beginning at age three. Schools are free until you reach the university level and even then, the government provides loans and scholarships, which make the costs extremely low. The two girls were also quick to point out that on average, females in India score much higher on the national exams than males.


Photos by SAS Photographer John Weakley

Vicarious Voyage

In addition to the friends and family members of the Voyagers aboard the MV Explorer, there are hundreds of school children across America and some others around the world who are following this semester’s voyage as well. They are part of Semester at Sea’s Vicarious Voyage, which pairs up classrooms of K-12 students with students, staff, and lifelong learners aboard the ship. It is a unique opportunity for us with SAS to share our experiences with others back home and it offers the students we are corresponding with a far more intriguing way to learn about the world than textbooks can provide.

Classrooms participating in the Vicarious Voyage program range from inner city New York to rural Virginia to the California coast, second grade through seniors, and include ESOL (English as a Second/Other Language) learners of all ages, art classrooms, Teach for America classrooms, Gifted Education programs, and two international classrooms in Thailand and Okinawa, respectively. The SAS Voyagers participating in this program exchange postcards, letters, and emails with their selected classrooms throughout our journey.

SAS Voyagers also send cultural packets to their classrooms that contain interesting items that will help explain the people and cultures of the countries that we are exploring. Amber Tullos, an SAS student from the University of Oklahoma has been corresponding with 21 students in a third grade class at O'Hara Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. At our first “packing party,” where participants in Vicarious Voyage gather together to send out their cultural packets, Amber decided to include newspapers, postcards, maps, and other items that would help, “broaden their understanding of different cultures,” as she told me. She also put together a CD with videos and pictures taken in port, which is something that many of the SAS Voyagers I spoke with are doing. They find it a great way to make their exchanges more personal and the added media provide a great visual accompaniment that will allow Vicarious Voyagers to see more of what we’re seeing than ever before.

Below is a video of our first packing party, enjoy!




Created by SAS Staff Video Producer, Jerry Pratt

Giving Back

An often overlooked but very significant component of Semester at Sea are the service opportunities provided through the International Field Program and some of the independent service projects that students undertake on their own. In most ports, there are often numerous chances to contribute in some way to the local population. Many of the students I have spoken with are continuing the charitable efforts that are part of their normal schedules back home while others are volunteering for the first time.

Why are students choosing to visit a hospital, or an orphanage, or distribute food to the hungry instead of visiting a famous site or maybe visiting a museum? Here are some of their answers:

“To do something beyond yourself.”
“Because we all need help at some point.”
“For a reality check.”
“For the gratefulness in the eyes of those you have helped.”

Two of the most recent projects that Voyagers participated in were Operation Hunger in Cape Town and a visit to the SOS Children’s Village of Bambou in Mauritius.

Operation Hunger
The Townships of South Africa are home to millions. It is estimated that approximately 10,000 people arrive in Cape Town from the Transkei and Ciskei every month in search of work, that in most cases cannot be found. When they arrive, they squat land in the Townships and build shacks out of tin, plastic, cardboard, or any other materials that they can find.

Operation Hunger works to combat malnutrition and promote the dissemination of knowledge about poverty and malnutrition in South Africa. Its integrated development program includes locally managed growth-monitoring programs, targeted food support, water supply, sanitation facilities, health/hygiene education, income generation and livelihood programs, agriculture and food production. Two groups of Semester at Sea Voyagers participated on a program with Operation Hunger on consecutive days in South Africa.

The principal activity of the Voyagers was to help Operation Hunger staff ascertain malnutrition levels by taking weight and arm measurements of Township children and recording the results. The group was so touched by the children they encountered that during the bus ride home, they started a collection amongst themselves and put together over $300 to purchase toys for the Township’s children. These Voyagers also began planting a nursery, which the second group completed. The hope is that the residents there will be able to take these plants once they grow and start their own gardens.


The participants of the second SAS Operation Hunger group were the lucky ones who actually were able to hand out the toys purchased the previous day. After putting the finishing touches on the nursery and taking the malnutrition measurements, the SAS Voyagers spent hours playing with the children as the Operation Hunger staff tabulated the recordings taken by SAS.

After all of the calculations were completed, everyone went to a soup kitchen where the children were to receive their meal, which normally consists of a soup with additional vitamins added in. However, the Semester at Sea Voyagers went into a store and literally bought every loaf of bread available and then took food from their own lunches that they had brought with them to make sandwiches for the children. In the words of Adrienne, a student from UCSD who was there that day, “The smiles we helped put on these kids faces were amazing. All we were doing was playing with them and it brightened up their day…it was completely life changing.”

SOS Children’s Village
The first SOS Children’s Village was opened by an Austrian medical student, Hermann Gmeiner, in Austria in 1949. Today, there are SOS Children’s Villages in more than 106 countries and they provide homes to approximately 50,000 needy children. The Village that the SAS students visited in Mauritius can house up to 120 children and consists of 12 family houses, homes for the Village’s director and the SOS “mothers,” who help to take care of the children, a staff house, a community hall, an administrative building, and classrooms. The children who live here are for the most part “social orphans,” meaning that they have parents who are either in prison or incapable of providing care for a number of other reasons. About forty SAS Voyagers participated in this service project. They met with the administrators of the program, toured the Village’s facilities, and then spent time interacting with a number of the children who live there.