I stopped an old man along the way

There is a lot of anticipation for our upcoming sail here on the ship. All the long term people who have sailed before simply glow as they talking about sailing. Partially it's because we have been here coming up on ten months. When your home is mobile, it ideally should be moving. Also, there are far fewer crew members during the sail, so everyone gets very close. Because of that, I'm looking forward to it too. Most of the friends I've made so far are leaving right before we set sail. This makes me a little sad. But the few that are staying are really cool, so I think it should be a wonderful time.

Yesterday I made a drink for a nurse who had spent all day assisting in a surgery. A local boy had his lower jaw removed over a year ago because he had cancer. However, they never put in anything to replace it. This kid had been walking around for a year with no lower jaw. Yesterday he got a new one. He will be able to eat properly, smile, walk down the street without shame, and so many other things that we all take for granted.

I went to play ultimate frisbee last night. The first field we went to got taken over by a group of rather pushy men right after we got there. We then drove to a different field. There was an accident or something, so we ended up getting stuck in traffic for a half hour or more. One of the Mercy Ship guys even got out and started directing traffic. We made use of our traffic time to study people. I got waved to a couple times by women with their left hands. Apparently this is very rude in this culture, but both of them were smiling and using their right hands to hold things. So either I basically got flipped off by smiling, happy women, or they were being friendly, using their "clean" hand to hold their bundle of stuff. Hard to say. I think I'm going to go with the latter. We eventually got to the field. It was basically a dirt lot. There were three cars worth of people so I didn't really get to play much, but I was more in it for the experience than the game. We got quite a crowd of people watching our game. A water bottle got stolen, so we ended up sticking all the rest of ours in the car. I was just glad it wasn't mine.

Today most people have off, so we're using the time to recreate. I'm going to a pool at a hotel. The rule at these pools is that men have to wear Speedos. This particular pool is owned by a French lady, which half explains it, but also I think they want to discourage men from coming in off the street and jumping in with their shorts on. So although my eyes will be assaulted, it is a good rule overall.