This is NOT a drill: fire in the galley?

I don’t think I’m supposed to post on the internet the exact time and date of Mercy Ships fire drills, but I will say that our theoretically “spontaneous” fire drills always happen on a routine schedule. To be honest, fire drills are pretty boring affairs for everyone except the emergency teams. The alarm goes off, the captain comes on the overhead with the familiar “This is a drill, this is a drill…”, and the emergency teams reenact prepared emergency scenarios. But for us normal people, we just have to go outside—under the hot African sun—and stand at our “muster stations” for anywhere between half an hour to an hour, until the captain announces that the drill is finished. Basically everyone knows when to expect them, so those who are on the ship usually come prepared with a book or a towel to sit on; if you’re lucky enough not to be working that day, you get off ship (and go to the pool at Sarakawa, like the other team does) to avoid the tedious fire drill.

So this morning, I’m doing my thing, a-working away in the galley, and a piercing alarm goes off—an alarm that sounds surprisingly like the crew alert alarm that begins our fire drills. I didn’t think much of it, until I realized that this wasn’t on the day or hour that I’m supposed to expect it. Two minutes later, the captain comes on the PA, and announces, “This is NOT a drill… There is a fire in the galley.”

Whaaat?? …I’m IN the galley!

I look over on the hot side, and they’re all looking back at me in surprise, and their looks all say, “Where’s this fire?”. And even more strangely, when I look down, there’s not fire , but water flooding our floors. Turns out, there was some sort of electrical problem and a switch went off to activate the sprinkler system in our walk-in dairy fridge, which then activated the fire alarm. Who would’ve known that such a tiny sprinkler could produce a massive stream of water? By the time I got over to the dairy fridge, there was water just completely pouring out of the sprinkler, and the emergency team and some of our galley staff were holding up trash bins up to the sprinkler, trying desperately to keep the heavy stream of water from completely flooding our floors— and in the meantime, getting completely soaked themselves. I mean, they were just getting absolutely soaking wet, which I guess is what naturally happens when you stand directly below a sprinkler (who would’ve known). I ran to grab my camera to see if I could get a photo of all the commotion, but once I had it, I felt really awkward trying to stick my camera out in front of the emergency team amidst all the commotion. Plus, I felt like I'd just be reaffirming my Asian stereotype. So I took one photo, which doesn't do justice at all to the crazy scene that was the "fire"-- you can't see anything and all the water steamed up my lens-- but here it is anyway.

Luckily, Jens, one of the ship’s carpenters, was in the process of making some proper shelving for the dairy fridge, so most of the stuff inside of it had already been moved to our vegetable fridge. Unluckily (so very, very unluckily), the sprinkler in the vegetable fridge was also set off while they were trying to test the alarm/sprinkler/electrical wiring in the aftermath of the dairy-fridge-fiasco (Fieroasco). The amount of water wasn’t nearly as bad in this fridge as the amount we had in the dairy fridge, but it was still enough to require the complete washing down of all the food in the fridge (and the water ruined all the cardboard boxes storing said food). So that’s what my team did this afternoon: we heaved everything (EVERYTHING) out of that fridge, rinsed down with bleach, wiped down every shelf in that giant fridge, and then put everything back in place. Doesn’t sound too difficult when I sum it up in a sentence like that, but it really, and truly, sucked. BAH. An exciting morning that met a fateful, completely not-exciting end.

Of course, after we did all that, the electricians were still testing the wiring. I stood hovering around, watching them really nervously, with what I'm sure was a completely pathetic look on my face. So Jesse (the head chef) went up to the electrician who was about to check the sprinkler pressure and asked him if there was any chance the sprinkler in the vegetable fridge would go off during the night. The electrician thinks for a second, shrugs his shoulders, and goes, “Maybe,”-- to which Jesse replies, “You have to make sure that it doesn’t. If it does, she,” and he turns and points to me for emphasis, “will kill you.”

So, a little about why this blog went missing…

If anyone has been reading this blog (which I sincerely doubt, but who knows), you’ll know that I privatized my blog for about a month. Mercy Ships has a page that lists all the blogs of people who serve on the ship. One day, I looked on the Mercy Ships site and saw that my blog had mysteriously been added to the list-- without my permission.

To be honest, I was annoyed, and I still kind of am. It was fine when I wasn’t on board, but now that I personally know most of the crew and see them around every day, it’s weird to think that they too can read what I post (you know who you are... obviously if you're reading this >:/). I was more freaked out if anything than annoyed at first, but then when I went to the website to see if I could get my blog taken off the list, I came across this disclaimer:

"This site relies on the ability to access public RSS and Atom feeds to keep it updated. These links are all publicly accessible on the Internet and no laws have been broken in accumulating or displaying these links. If you wish for your website/blog not to appear on this listing or be accessible to the public it is your responsibility to make your website/blog private.

(www. = WORLD WIDE WEB)"

Um, can anyone say, rude? Yes, I know, they may be technically correct, but it still would've been nice if they (whoever "they" are) dropped me a line.

I’m not a very public, internet-y person. I very much dislike MySpace, and Facebook news feeds, and the utter stupidity that is Twitter. I started this blog so that I wouldn’t have to write 12 emails whenever I wanted to update my friends or family or church kids on my whereabouts— I did not start this blog so that I could reveal to all the people on the ship (and to all the people who are coming to the ship) that I sweat a lot and that my inner monologue is just a wee bit crazy (or that my inner monologue uses words like "wee" in the first place). And to be completely honest, I also felt pretty petty in comparison to the other Mercy Ships blogs. I still do. I do nothing medically related on the ship, so while the medical personnel write about patients and surgeries and miracles, and sometimes the heartbreak of dealing with death, I'd write about... well, Obama underpants.

Apparently, as was so unceremoniously pointed out to me, it was "my responsibility" to privatize my website, so that's what I did. But this weekend, I decided to get over it. I give. Whatever. Que Sera, Sera. Read if you wish. I will say though that I'm still a bit wary on the decision; there's a chance the blog may become privatized again, so if for some reason you'd like to follow my ramblings, let me know and I'll put you on the list so that you can still read the blogitz even if I have another "Oh crap, what have I done" moment.

Obama underpants? Obama underpants.

The Africans seem to be a tad bit obsessed about our current president, and his face gets imprinted on the strangest things. So far, I've seen Obama t-shirts, Obama socks, and Obama shoes. I've seen Obama's face plastered on the side of trucks, Obama murals painted on walls, and he even has his own beach here, appropriately renamed, "Obama Beach". When we went to Ghana, we visited a bookstore, where I saw an entire shelf of Barack Obama comic books, depicting the teenage life of Obama... in cartoon form. But today, I went to the market and saw... Obama underpants. Pretty classy, if you ask me.

Mission: pizza during rainy season. Result: epic fail.

It's rainy season here in Togo. It's technically been rainy season since I got here in April, but it hasn't been raining all that much-- a downpour for half an hour during the day, and then back to scorching hot weather. I usually love it when it rains, as the temperature cools down quite a bit (and by quite a bit, I mean from an unbearably hot 95 degrees to a still-ridiculously-hot-but-at-least-a-little-more-tolerable 85 degrees) This past week however has been pretty dreary, as it's just been overcast and cloudy all the time. Not only does it make people mopey around the ship, but the rain disrupts everything outside. Especially the roads.

So this evening, a group of us decided to go off ship and get us some pizza (brick oven pizza, no less... in Africa). We piled into one of the Mercy Ships jeeps-- thankfully we had an approved driver with us so we didn't have to walk out to the gates in the rain for a taxi-- and we headed off to the beach road. It had literally been raining all day today, but it slowed down to a drizzle around 4 PM, and I'd gone out earlier afternoon and at the time, the roads weren't all too bad. But by evening, the beach road-- the main road that goes along the coastline-- was in terrible shape. They've been doing some major construction on the beach road for the last month now, but right now it's still just dirt and sand, which- surprise surprise- transforms into mud and muddy sand in the rain. The road was completely congested with almost stand-still traffic, as cars were getting stuck in the mud. Because the stuck cars couldn't move, the other cars couldn't move forward. After 20 minutes, we passed Seaman's mission, which is literally right outside the port; at this rate, we figured the 15 minute ride to the pizza place would take over 2 hours. Jeff, the driver, and I had to be back by 7 PM for a music thing back on the ship, so we decided to abandon our pizza plans and head back for dinner on the ship.

This is where it gets interesting: Jeff makes a huge U-turn on the beach road, and of course, with our luck, our jeep slides into a deep puddle of mud-- and we got stuck! None of us in the group are prone to undue panicking (you know who those people are), so none of us were really panicking or anything about the fact that we were stuck on the side of the road and couldn't get the car to move, but I will admit that I immediately thought to myself, "Oh crap, we're going to get all muddy aren't we?" But while Jeff kept accelerating and shifting gears to try to get the car out of the mud, a random man came running up to us all of a sudden, waving his arms, telling us in hurried French to stop pushing the pedal. He yelled and waived over a bunch of other African men, and they started digging out the sand from underneath our back wheels-- with their bare hands. After about 2 minutes of furious digging, the man tapped on our window and yelled at us to try again-- and it worked! Hallelujah, out of the mud we went. They did ask for money as we left (this is Africa, after all), but still, I just thought that the entire experience was such an example of some major cultural divide-- where in the U.S. could you find a group of random strangers who'll push your car out of the mud, without even having been asked? Johan explained later that this is basically what those men do all day during the rainy season- stand by the road and help push out stuck cars- because that's what happens when you mix sand roads and tiny beat-up secondhand cars (or in this case, a large, Mercy Ships jeep) and torrential rain. The picture above is Jeff with the muddy jeep after we'd gotten back to the ship-- the photo doesn't show it very well, but trust me, it was pretty dirty.

In any case, we finally got back to the ship after our mini-adventure-- sad about the pizza, only to be greeted by a hamburger and fries dinner back on the ship. While I was eating my delicious hamburger, I couldn't help but think of what a friend said after I invited him to pizza. He was completely dismayed that we would even think of skipping hamburger night; he looked at me with this odd look and said, ".. but it's hamburger night. Why would you go get pizza.. in Africa.. when it's hamburger night??"

BIG NEWS.

... We had ice cream for the first time on the ship in about a month and a half. We get a lot of our food from containers that come from Holland (Mercy Ships has an office in Holland; hence, Dutch containers). In any case, our frozen container was supposed to come in over a week ago, and on it was the much anticipated ice cream (and bacon, for that matter. Ever since I arrived on ship, I kept hearing the phrase, "No bacon until June"). The frozen container finally, finally arrived at the beginning of this week. After community meeting tonight, we busted out the boxes of ice cream and stood around Midships, eating globs of delicious ice cream.

It's times like these when you think of how funny it is that ordinary life goes on, even in the most un-ordinary of circumstances. I mean, you're in Africa, living on a hospital ship where patients get life-changing surgeries day after day-- and yet sometimes, the most exciting thing that happens in your day is eating a bowl of ice cream.

Along the beach road

Since I've been here, I haven't been able to take all that many pictures of ordinary life in and around Lomé; as an outsider, I feel quite awkward about sticking a camera into people's business (or into their "beezwax," as my 6 year old cousin would say) when I have no right to, and I don't want the Togolese to think that I-- and by the term "I", I mean other Westerners as well, by association-- have no respect for their privacy. And in any case, as soon as you show your camera, it becomes nearly impossible to capture "normal" life, as people get rather worked up about the thing-- whether they become angry because they believe in the Voodoo concept that a photo captures the soul, or whether they become excited since they've never seen a picture of themselves before.

But a couple of days ago, I went to the market with one of my cabin mates, and while in the car, I was able to get some shots of some pretty average Togolese life on the beach road. Since we're located in the port, the road that stretches along coastline the is the main road that we usually take first in order to get anywhere else, the road along which we barter for taxis and zemis (moto-taxis), and it's the road that leads home to the big white floating ship after a long day's expedition.

Reverse countdown begins: 5 weeks + 1 day

Today was the first day of June. I lose track of time really easily here-- or rather, I don't bother to keep track of it-- so before I even realized it was different month, the first day of June had already passed by. I hate it when that happens; I feel like I missed an opportunity to appreciate.. something.

So in an effort to keep myself more aware, I'm going to be starting a reverse countdown: a countdown to the date of when I have to leave the ship. I'm pretty sure this will completely backfire on me and will just end up depressing me quite a bit, but oh well. So, starting from now, I officially have 5 weeks + 1 day left on the ship. I have just 18 more days left of lovely galley work (yes, I actually counted). How crazy is that-- I seriously feel like I just got here. And yet, as Janina pointed out to me today, it also seems like I've been here forever. You just can't win with time, can you? I still have a million things I want to do before I leave here, and still a million things to be taken care of when I get back. Oy vey.