A Jared-S.-Brickman Snapshot of the World, in 200-Some Pages

Honors College student Jared S. Brickman spent fall 2010 traveling three oceans and visiting 12 countries on four continents. Packaged as a Semester At Sea study abroad experience, the 109-day adventure proved a turning point for the (then) junior from Baker City, Oreg. In Portland, he says, a brief pre-sailing get-together with his friend Kelly became…“a meeting which served as the last memory of my old life.”He travelled with 600 other students aboard the MV Explorer, with its crew of 100. In addition to 100 teaching faculty, the special guest lecturer on board for the entire semester was Nobel Peace Prize recipient and former Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Their 15 ports of call were in Canada, Spain, Morocco, Ghana, South Africa, Mauritius, India, Singapore, Vietnam, China, and Japan; the ship stopped also in Hawaii.

In addition to attending classes on board, Brickman participated in service activities on land. He helped feed a noon meal to school children in Khayelitsha, South Africa and built a school teacher’s cinder-block house in Ghana. He visited elementary, 8th grade, and tech college classes in India, the nation that presented his “largest culture shock.” He said he tried at least one local dish in each country: “I had the misfortune of experiencing snails” in Morocco, whole fish—eyes and all—on sticks in Vietnam, “French fries everywhere,” and “the decadent churros con chocolat” in Spain.
During Brickman’s around-the-world voyage, his experiences included “surviving terrifying rope bridges at Kakum National Forest in Ghana,” living in the home of an Indian family, and meeting a Muslim man in the medina of Marrakesh who reminded him (as an American) that “You know, we are all one people.”

A compulsive writer, Brickman emailed family and friends updates about his journey, kept a journal, and wrote two required short stories for class. He also took hundreds of pictures. “In a way,” he says, “those photographs serve as memories, but still lack the movement and feeling of a moment.” To more clearly capture the multitudes of experiences and human observations on his trip, he did what came naturally to him—he expanded his writing into a book.
“The World in a Suitcase,” self-published in 2011, runs just over 200 pages and is a collection of fiction describing “what I saw and telling the stories of others…and feelings…the interconnectedness of a global community.” There is one chapter for each nation Brickman visited, given intriguing names such as “Spain: Fading Dreams,” “Vietnam: Butterflies,” and ”Singapore: At the Cost of Creativity.” The short-story elements are there—settings, characters, conflicts and points of view, plots, and themes—all presented with a vividness that transcends any two-dimensional photo in the author’s scrapbook.