thunderbird summerim
A T-bird’s First Flight:
My Summerim in South Africa By Daisy Jasmine, Staff Writer, Das Tor
A
young woman stands on the deck of a pirate ship, peering over the railing at the choppy waters below. A single dolphin cuts through the surface, cheerfully keeping pace in the ship’s wake. The woman pulls her jacket closer, shielding herself from the whipping wind. As she gazes overboard, her attention is captured by what appears to be a plastic bag in the water, then another, and still more. Scanning the ocean around her, her frustration shifts to confusion and then relief as she eventually recognizes the unfamiliar sight of what is not litter, but countless jellyfish floating mindlessly by. The boat bounces over a sharp wake, breaking her from her reverie as she grabs for the railing. A flock of birds, disturbed from their jetty perches, alights with a rustling of wings. Her companions laugh at some unheard joke behind her as the waves break against the ship and the rocks. She steps back, looks at the bright midday sky, and stifles a yawn. It is three in the morning back home. It dawns on her for the first time that she is as far from home as she could possibly go. During my first year at Thunderbird, I sometimes felt like a bit of an odd one out. Every classmate I spoke with had amazing stories to share of their experiences around the world—their home countries or the far-off places they’d visited. I, meanwhile, had never gone farther than New York, and though New York does feel like a completely different world from Phoenix, it still meant that I wasn’t a Traveler with a capital T. Not in the way that my classmates were.
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I didn’t even have a passport. The world felt prohibitively huge. I surprised myself with how attached I got to the idea of participating in the Summerim program. I had heard very little about it, and I had no idea what to expect, but I knew that I had to try. So try I did, and after just a few short months of bureaucratic red tape, paperwork, and the occasional moth flying out of my wallet, I found myself on an airplane—then another—then another—and suddenly I was in my hotel room in Cape Town, a day and a half before the program began. It was early evening, and I went straight to bed. I spent the free day doing the tourist thing, posing a photocopied Flat Stanley in front of every scenic view for my cousin’s third-grade summer homework. (Flat Stanley also visited a liquor store, not that I sent that one to my cousin.) Eventually the rest of my classmates began to arrive, and not a moment too soon—any longer and I probably would have started having conversations with the paper doll.
Once the program started in earnest, we quickly fell into a steady—if frantic—rhythm. Suddenly there weren’t enough hours in the day, and yet we kept going strong. We always managed to drag ourselves out of bed, because we had fascinating and new places to be. The first time I really processed just how far out of my bubble I had gone was over breakfast. I sat with my roommate, and as we oohed and aahed over the best chai lattes we had ever tasted, I messaged “good morning” to my friends and family back home and received responses of “good night.” I had time-travelled—we were out of sync. The only way I could have been farther from Arizona was if I hopped on a shuttle and took it to outer space. We saw a lot and experienced even more in South Africa—if I described every event in detail, this would never fit in a single essay. For every lighthearted visit to a brewery museum, there was a thought-provoking stop at a historical landmark or museum on the era of Apartheid, honoring those who were
winter 2018
