We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

As we've all noticed, Christmas has recently come and gone. We celebrate it on the ship in grand style. There are things leading up to it, and then the holiday itself.

Decorations in the midships area, during Winder Wonderland

There was Winter Wonderland, which was basically a ship wide craft show. People had booths and sold candy or food or crafts. It was cool.

Kendall manning her Winter Wonderland stand

There was story telling night, where people told Christmas related stories but made it more than just stories. They acted them out, or had us make crafts, or other things like that.

The ship shop decorations

The academy did their Christmas play, "Bethlehem Express." It was great, and everyone from preschool to high school had a part.

These are all the decorated dining hall

On Christmas Eve, one of my small group girls, Aimee, made us all a fantastic brunch. There were hash browns (courtesy of Chelsea), eggs (Kendall), and exotic pancakes made by Aimee herself. It was fantastic! That afternoon we had Christmas Eve service. I got to sing in the worship team, which was really fun. The whole crew dressed up, and we all ate together. The dining room was enchantingly decorated, and the food was fantastic. That evening we set out our shoes, for the tradition is that little Christmas elves will fill our shoes with gifts in the night.

The shoe elves came!

The 4418 Christmas tree

The current 4418 girls: Bethany, Rachel, Lyndsay, me, and Annie Lou

On Christmas day, I checked my shoe (the elves came!) and ate brunch with some friends, and then opened presents with them. It was a group of people all roughly in their 20s who are, obviously, all away from home. It was a lot of fun. After that, I hung out for a while, went over to the 8 berth to give them their presents, and then ate. I opened presents with my roommates after that, which was nice. The evening's activity was a massive free concert put on by the Tenerife Port and the Tenerife Symphony Orchestra. It was so close we could walk there, and it was AMAZING! I was so happy and excited, and it was worth it.

Waiting for the concert: Leah, Kendall, and me

Our view

Hooray for fireworks!

Thanks for all the cards, love, and prayers! Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and lots of love from Tenerife!

When your friends are starting to leave

Sometime soon I will make a Tenerife blog. But first, sad times.

Michelle

Kendall and Michelle

My walking companion, my soundboard, and my friend! Thanks for all the wonderful talks, for listening to me, and for keeping me fit! I truly enjoyed getting to know you, and I think you will be a marvelous teacher. I miss you!

Bonny Jean

Walking in after saying goodbye to you was a sad, quiet affair! You are always such a light and your joy is contagious. I will miss singing show tunes with you, dancing with you, being silly with you, and naturally, having very deep conversations with you! Knock knock! Who's there? A sad Kaylee because her friend Bonny Jean left!

Esther

When I first saw that a Kiwi was going to live in our room, I was so excited to get to hear a lovely accent. But you are so much more than wonderfully pronounced words! You are fun and willing to jump in to whatever adventure comes your way! I'm so glad you came, and I'm so looking forward to visiting you in beautiful Wellington one day!

We'll search for tomorrow on every shore

It is said that dolphins bring good luck to ships. If that is the case, we will have much good fortune, as the dolphins have been coming in larger and larger numbers to swim with our ship. The day of the waterspout, I saw dolphins from afar. Every time since then, I haven't made it to the window in time to watch them swim by. But yesterday I was out on the bow when I heard the cry of "dolphins!" I hurried to the other side to join the people already staring into the water. I saw nothing. Then, just below me, one jumped. I had never seen one so close before.

Later we saw a pod of probably over 20, jumping and frolicking by the bow. There were at least four baby dolphins too, and that was really cute!

Thanks to Ali Chandra for the pictures!

That night, Kendall and I went to the bridge. We each had a turn steering the ship, which was not as complicated as I would have thought but still rather tricky. Then we went out on the catwalk in front of the bridge. The starry sky stretched out above us. In the sea below us there were constant flashes of light, probably belonging to bioluminescent fish. Then, we saw a sparkling path being made in the water. It was most likely a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton, but to me, it was one of the most unearthly, amazing sights I've ever seen.

That night is when the ship started rocking in earnest. Few people on the ship slept, especially as a particularly steep swell caused stuff in pretty much the whole ship to come crashing down. The rocking itself was bad enough. The rocking continued for the last few days of the sail, making us all MORE than ready to get to Tenerife.

This morning we arrived! It is so beautiful and CLEAN! I will post pictures at some point, but for now, I'm just so happy to be still.

And all of Your children will stretch out their hands/ And pick up the crippled man

It occured to me that if you are just reading my blog, it would not give a good picture of what is going on during the outreach. I mean, we all know that the ship is a hospital ship providing free surgeries for the forgotten poor, but what does that look like?

Here are some statistics from the 2009 Benin outreach:

Reconstructive and Plastic Surgery:

Reconstrictive and plastic 996
Cleft lip & Cleft Palate 185
General Operations 1,161
Local Surgeons trained 2

Ophthalmic Surgery:

Cataract removal 3,521 (Sometimes as many as 40 a day!)
Pterygia removal 448
Strabismus repairs and enucleations 122
Local surgeons trained 5

Field Eye Clinic:

Eye Evaluations & Treatments 33,851
Distribution of Sunglasses 7,083
Distribution of Readers 5,689
Training Community Eye Field Workers 18

VVF Repair:

VVF Repairs 154
Surgeons trained 4

Orthopaedic Surgery:

Orthopaedic Surgery 231

Dental Clinic:

Dental patients 10,175
Dental hygiene patients 794
Oral health education 13,174
Train teachers in oral health 25
Train Beninese as dental assistants 2

Palliative & Outpatient Care:

Home Care 28
Support Burkitt’s lymphoma patients 6
Train Family in wound care 19

Locals were also trained in Agriculture development, mental health care, and administration, among other things.

I could list more. The crew of the Africa Mercy was busy over the 10 months they were in Benin! The statistics are from: http://navigator.mercyships.org/download/attachments/23331521/Benin+2009+Field+Service+Thank+You+Presentation+10Dec09uk.pdf?version=1

Hopefully you can access that. It is a wonderful slide show that they played for the dayworkers on their last day. It has pictures and a little more information about things.


"As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?'
'Neither this man nor his parents sinned," said Jesus, "but this happened so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.' "

John 9:1-3

I look to the sea, reflections in the waves spark my memory

We have been sailing for roughly five days now, and I'm learning an interesting fact: sailing, while occasionally punctuated with sea life and interesting weather phenomena, is rather boring. We have turned more northerly, and we are somewhere in the vicinity of Guinea. For some reason probably having to do with currents and trade winds, the sea is much more choppy. It's kind of fun.


Yesterday I went out to the bow intending to listen to my ipod and relax. Some of my roommates were there, so I went to talk to them. As we talked, we noticed a distinct change in the water in front of us. We were headed into rain. This was good news! We quickly threw our stuff inside and watched it approach. We were soon soaked from head to toe! It was exhilarating! My clothes are still not dry.


Last night I spent the night up on Deck 8, which is the top deck of the ship and is out in the open. I, along with my some of my 4416 friends (Kendall, Chelsea, Bonny Jean, and Emma), dragged my room's sleeping bag up and set it somewhere relatively out of traffic. It made for a surreal night.


When we first went to bed, it was cloudy, and I was fully expecting to get rained on. The wind started to pick up so I got into my bag. The wind eventually got so strong that I was pretending I was on Everest. By some miracle, I fell asleep.


Around 1:30 in the morning, Kendall and Chelsea woke me up. The clouds had cleared from above us. There is a meteor shower going on right now, so we lied there, watching for meteors. We saw a few, including one rather creepy one that stayed a while and was really bright. We noticed flashing, and Chelsea went to look and reported lightning. I got up to see. All around and behind us there were storms. It was incredible. Then Chelsea noticed something. We watched a white shape come up, seemingly out of the water, and fly in an erratic pattern. It appeared to be approaching us. As we stared, we saw strange, flapping movements on the side of the shape. It was a bird! We had no idea what it was doing so far from shore. After being awake for a while, we headed back to bed. It was a moment of overwhelming sensory stimulation: lightning flickering and reflecting off the bulkheads, wind blowing and whistling over my sleeping bag, the hard, cold metal ground underneath me. Wow!


To alleviate the boredom, there are activities, mostly Christmas centered, that are taking place. The second night we were sailing, they had storytelling. There were six or so stations around the ship, and we went in groups to those stations. Crew members had prepared stories and skits, which they performed for us. It was nice. Last night was Winter Wonderland. People set up booths and sold everything from baked goods to popcorn to homemade jewelery and crafts. The talent on this ship is rather impressive, as everything sold was of high quality. One of the photographers on the ship had a photo booth, so we got a picture of our cabin:



The women of cabin 4418 from left to right: Esther, me, Annie, Lindsay, Rachel, Bethany, and Priska



And because I mentioned them, so now you can have a visual, here are the 4416 girls:


Top row: Bonny Jean, Emma, and Chelsea
Bottom row: Kendall, Michelle, and Amie

'Cause I've got to be free

Hello from the sea somewhere just south and probably west of Ghana. So far I'm not seasick at all, although the constant (and sometimes severe) rocking makes my head feel a little weird. The ship was originally a ferry so it has a flat bottom. That makes it rather unstable.

Last night I stared at the stars for a couple of hours. I can't remember the last time I've seen so many. It was nice to discover that there are the same constellations here as there are at home. I am planning to sleep on Deck 8, outside, at least once on the voyage.

This evening during dinner, our Polish Chief Officer announced a "water tube from the sky" off the port bow. I knew instantly what he was talking about, and I ran to the window to witness my first water spout! I ran out to the bow with the intent of taking pictures, but unfortunately, as I've discovered many times here in Africa, my freezing cold room makes for a cold camera, which makes for foggy lenses for about 5 minutes or so. Also, my camera battery died at this point, so I just watched the waterspout. It was so close and absolutely amazing! We could see the water being stirred up and the funnel rotating. It amazed me because we weren't even in a storm! It was overcast but it wasn't raining at the time!

All pictures in my blog today were taken by Daniel Um.

The water being stirred up.

As it dissipated, it got ropey.





About an hour later, we got told that a pod of dolphins were nearby!


Less than five minutes later, we were told that there were whales! We didn't really see those very well, but there were many spouts from the whales as they came up for air.


Being in the waters off Ghana, I realize that all these exciting happenings in less than an hour and a half is evidence for Ghana indeed being the promised land, as they claim.

To sum it all up, sailing is awesome, and God's creation is incredible!

I'm sailing away! Set an open course for the virgin sea.

On December 8, 2009, the Africa Mercy set sail from Cotonou, Benin.




The gangway being loaded. We are officially all on board.




We got to leave work to watch us set out. From the left: Kendall, Chelsea, and me.

One of our tug boats. This one was on the bow.

The other tug boat.

That massive space between boats there was our berth.

This is the pilot boat. It pulls up along a special hatch where the pilots that steer the ship out of the harbor can get out.

Sailing into the sunset. They opened the bow for us to sit on.




Me, staring off into the evening.

Ch-ch-ch-ch changes! (Turn and face the strain)

We will soon be leaving Benin. As I talked about in my last post, so many wonderful people have gone home. My room has only one person in it who was here when I arrived. The living room part of it has even been reorganized:

Before . . . and

After! Better use of space? Only time will tell.

Another thing is that we are packing up all the stuff we had out on the dock:

There used to be fences lining the whole side of the ship, as well as a security building. Now it looks so empty!

Speaking of empty, this area used to be lined with cars. Like so:

And where are those cars now? Well, some of them have been driven to Togo, and the rest are on Deck 8, of course!

I have mixed feelings about leaving Benin. It's has areas of beauty:

On the way to Bab's Dock

And places that make me sick.

Trash in the water of the harbor

It is filled with wonderful people:

Kid from the beach at Grand Popo

And I have made wonderful friends here:

I know that though I look forward to the adventures of the sail, Tenerife, and Togo, I will always have a special place in my heart for Benin: a country that though small, sees itself as larger than life: