Special Anniversary

What could I do on a ship? One of the most common questions people ask us. You don't have to be a doctor, nurse or Surgeon to fill an important role onboard. Eddie Wong is a pastry chef, and a good one as well! He spends his time in our galley baking bread and other yummy stuff for the crew and last week he baked his 10,000th loaf of bread onboard. Yes that's 10,000! He makes about 70 loaves per day to keep us all well fed which means starting before 5am each day. So what could you do onboard a ship? Why not check out the vacancies on the mercy ships website http://www.mercyships.org/ you may be surprised....

Crew Muster

Is it a Birthday Party? Is it a picnic? No...it's a Crew Muster! Part of living onboard a ship is preparing for the worst, and nothing onboard a ship is worse than fire. So our fire teams practise different scenarios, and at regular intervals we evacuate all crew from the ship to practise our mustering procedures. Yesterday was one of those days and so whilst the fire teams sweated in their fire proof suits, and Rob helped the reception team in accounting for all 400 crew / day workers, Anne and the children sat on the dock and relaxed :-)

Hats off to the Immigration Service

Whilst in the UK we were given a few baseball caps to hand out in Liberia. We gave one to Captain Ansu Sherman of the Liberian Immigration Service. Captain Ansu processes all the passports for crew joining and leaving the Africa Mercy, which is quite a task! His salary is around $70 US dollars A MONTH, with which he has to feed, cloth and send to school two children as well as look after his wife and himself. A bag of rice which will last them 3 weeks (using 3 cupfulls a day) now costs about $40 so I don't know how they manage. There are many many people in Liberia who earn less and for them life is a continual struggle to survive from one day to the next. How blessed we are to always have food at hand.

Birthday Boy

A very special birthday took place yesterday with Nathaniel turning 6! Unfortunately he still had to go to school, but he managed to squeeze in a party with friends (and cake) and then later on a trip out to get ice-cream. All in all a very exciting and fun filled day for our little super-hero!

Welcome Home

After a quiet but busy, relaxing though sometimes stressful, tiringly refreshing time back in the UK we are settling back into life onboard the m/v Africa Mercy in Liberia. It's amazing how easily we slotted back into life onboard compared to the struggle we had settling in the UK. I guess this is partly due to the ship being God's home for us right now and partly due to the familiarity of everything here.

So why are we starting a Blog? After talking to many of you back home we wanted to try to do better at keeping in touch and figured a Blog might help. Please give us feedback as you visit so we can make it as interesting and relevant as possible:-)

As you can see from the picture we have been back to the orphanage to see our friends there. This was the only picture with most of us in it, Iona was just out of shot, but she was there. Anne was leading us all in an action song which everyone enjoyed!