Deposhify

The other day I was in the midst of a Zanzibar travel planning meeting with my friend and colleague Steve.  Our budget for our upcoming trip to Pemba was out of whack, and as we dissected it we figured out that it was because our friend Kombo, as a proud Pemban, had thrown everything but the kitchen sink at the students in his proposed itinerary, but that he'd also bumped up the poshness of the hotels.  We had much the same issue when we putting together our India/Sri Lanka trip last spring.  Our friend Inder did an extraordinary job, but we had to run through a few iterations where we had to ask him to deposhify things, especially the hotels.  Normally I would assume that our tour guides were just boosting their profits, but that's not the case with Inder or Kombo. Rather, I think they were trying to assure that we had as great a time as possible while also showing off the best their countries have to offer.  That said, I think it also speaks to the perception, very common overseas, that Americans are pretty soft and generally bad travelers.  Sadly, there's a lot of justification for that accepted view.  One of the reasons why I devote so much time and effort to planning these trips is that I want to change my students' worldviews, and an essential part of that relates to getting them out of their comfort zones.  So, deposhify is a word I use a lot in my emails.  I'd like to think that I made it up (much like remasculate) but since my international friends always understand what I'm talking about I suspect that I didn't.

I think I sent this picture to a couple of my friends back at Champlain with some line like, "this is how we roll in the Core."  Of course, the exact opposite is true, as this is how we definitely try not to roll on a Core trip.  There's no point leaving a gated community, which American universities are quickly becoming, to head off to another gated community.  Still, that pool was pretty sweet.