An elderly Vietnamese woman, her smiling face shadowed by a wide-brimmed straw hat, sits in the market of her small hillside village, surrounded by fish, rice, and vegetables. A young boy, scantily clad, holds onto the wooden doorway frame of a one-room hut.
Local women appear to be laughing, almost shyly, as they work and shop in the market.
A junior in the Honors Program, Washinsky spent the spring semester of his sophomore year traveling around the world. He enrolled in the Semester at Sea program, and along with six hundred other college students, Washinsky took classes aboard a converted cruise ship and traveled for the semester. He told me about it then and I knew I had to try it. The Semester at Sea program that Washinsky participated in is run by the University of Pittsburgh and is open to all college students. Most of the students on Washinsky's ship were from the United States, primarily from the West Coast, but there were also students aboard from Germany and Brazil.