First two days on ship

The first few days have been quite odd, to be honest, just because I have no work to do. Most of the people on the ship have “normal” schedules—9 to 5, Mondays through Fridays—but the galley is a little different. Obviously, people still need to eat during the weekends, so we have two teams that alternate schedules: when one team works 3 days, the other team gets those 3 days off. The team that I was assigned to had just finished working, so I had my first two days “off”. Which would’ve been tremendously nice… if I wasn’t so brand new . It kind of felt like the first day of high school all over again, except this time, everyone already knew each other. A weird feeling to have at 22, and I can only imagine how those even older than me feel.

My first full day on board (Wednesday), I spent getting over jet-lag and slept until 1 PM, ship time (4 hours difference between New Jersey and Togo, so 9 AM Eastern time). It was really peculiar waking up on a ship: I have these curtains that wrap all around my little bed/cubicle, and we have no windows in the cabins so I when I woke up, I couldn’t tell if it was night or day. I took my first “two minute shower” on the ship (hop in shower, water on, get wet, water off, shampoo up, water on, wash off, hop out); reminded me of my time as an exchange student in France when I had to do the turn-on/off shower to conserve water in the house. I walked around for a bit during the afternoon, getting lost , trying to familiarize myself with the different parts of the ship. I also started introducing myself to nearly every person I came into contact with, which got really tiring after awhile because it's always the same questions over and over again: "What's your name?" "Where are you from?" And the one question that is unique to Mercy Ships, "How long are you here for?" I'm a short-termer, as I'm only staying for 3 months, but a lot of people are here for long term (2+ years), and when you ask some people, they answer, “I don’t know”—not because they’re being evasive of your question, but because they genuinely don’t know when they’ll be leaving the ship (ie, they’re here for forever). Honestly, I don’t know if I could ever come to the point where I’d be OK with living on a ship for my entire life, so I have a genuine admiration for the people who are so committed to the mission.

Then at six, I had my official ship tour, and since I was the only arrival from my group that was new to Mercy Ships, I got my own personal tour guide! She was a really nice girl from Hospitality, the department that deals with arrivals/departures and… hospitality, and we just zipped around the ship. It’s incredible the different amenities we have here on the Africa Mercy. I’ll have to post another time with pictures of what the ship looks like, but it’s really incredible when you actually get here because this is basically a self-contained community that has nearly everything that a person could need on a day to day basis, and some stuff that we really don't "need" but makes life comfortable—I mean, we have a Starbucks café, for goodness sakes.

At night, the galley department went off-ship to have dinner—a goodbye party for the person who I’m now replacing in the galley. We all climbed into the back of a truck and drove on those crazy Togolese roads again, and I had my first “real” African meal! Pretty good, actually—I had rice with a choice of meat sauce. This was where having a Korean background came to my advantage—I was perfectly fine eating the food, while nearly everyone else was huffing and puffing at what I thought to be a tiny amount of spice in the dish. It was really nice, as I got to meet a lot of the people I’d be working with in the galley before I even started work.

The people on my team advised me to get a good deal of rest while I still could, so I took their advice and had a really slow, calm day the next day too. I woke up a little earlier on Thursday (gotta get over that jet lag quick), and went exploring some more— I took a poke into the galley, and they have a piano here (scratch that—three!), so I got to played for a little while, which relaxed me a great deal. I had lunch and dinner with my cabin mates, who are all really awesome girls who each have really different life stories. Funny enough, at 22 I’m one of the oldest in my cabin. I’m in the eight-berth cabin on this ship: there’s one ten-berth and one eight-berth cabin on board, and they’re both infamous for housing the younger girls who mainly work in hospitality/housekeeping/other non-hospital crew. The main advantage of being in an eight-berth though is that there’s always someone around, so even when I felt really uneasy about being “the new girl”, my cabin mates have been good about including me in things like meals and after activities, which I know is not an easy thing to do so I appreciate it so much.

So work starts tomorrow! My shift starts at 8 AM and ends… “whenever” (ie. when we’re done cleaning up after dinner, normally around 7:45/8 PM, or so I’ve been told), so I’m a little nervous about how I’ll be after three continuous days of work, but I’m sure it’ll be OK. Pray for me that I don’t burn anything down!