Humility

I didn't think I'd post much after getting home, but I thought I needed to share this audio file. Last Sunday, Dr. Gary Parker, the chief medical officer on the Africa Mercy, was interviewed by the BBC's All Things Considered, talking about life on the ship, health-care in the least developed world, and the role of his faith in his work.

Click here or here (it will be available until July 30).

If you've got 27 minutes and 57 seconds, it's worth a listen.

Home

I suppose it's time.

I've been avoiding writing this one last post out of denial—if I write it, it means it's true. It means the year is over, Africa is over, and the "real" world is real again.

But, these last two weeks have forced itself upon my psyche, with a stubbornness surpassing that of Macarthur's promise to the Philippines. The real world has returned. And it bears a striking resemblance to what it was when I left.

It is strange to think that, just twelve days ago, I was sitting on a ramshackle dock in an impoverished country in West Africa, debating whether the rainy season had actually started or whether it was just being coy. People warned that returning to the west would make you feel like what had happened to you in Africa was just a dream.

And it's true. It's amazing how easy it is to slip back into western culture, to slip back into home. But it's home, redefined, and it's western culture seen through a pair of changed lenses.

Here's hoping those lenses remain changed.

Reformed curmudgeons

We're officially into our last week in Liberia, the last week in a year away from what used to be reality. Sunday, we'll be on our way back home, retracing the steps we took nearly five months ago when we came here. Monrovia. Abidjan. Brussels. New York.

There will, I predict, be plenty of things that we'll have to get used to. Grocery stores (though you could make an argument against that in New York City). Restaurants. Traffic. Sushi. The lack of ready beaches. The ability to take showers that last more than two minutes. Cold weather. And cheese.

But, most of all, I think it will be exiting communal life that will be the hardest.

This surprises me. Acculturated to the fierce individualism of my generation, I figured that being stuck on a boat with 400 other people would frighten me. It had all the makings of immense claustrophobia. I've never been one for small-town living. The blessed, communal anonymity that NYC offers—of running into a thousand people just leaving your apartment for shrivelled hot dog and faux papaya juice, each of whom would avoid your gaze with a studied detachment—that was the sort of community I was all about.

So, my impressions of communal living were uninformed and—I hate to admit it—stereotypical. Unwashed. Militantly utopian. Dandelions and dirty fingernails. Greasy-gray ponytails and socks the color of day-old guacamole. It's hard even to write these descriptors now. Because, see, now I know it's different.

Practicing medicine in Africa has been spectacular. I'm going to miss it. This country itself is gorgeous. I'm going to miss it, too. But missing those pales in comparison with missing community. Community isn't about Esperanto or people who think that the word ganja is anti-establishment verlan.

No. Community is about sitting on a dock, watching the sun take its final spectacular breaths for the day, cheering loudly, with ten people whom you met only a few months ago but who have become your family, as the quickly descending globe scatters its golds and reds and baby blues and ominous greens across the sky with the abandon of a reformed, Dickensian curmudgeon. Community is about watching massive jellyfish over the side of the ship, embroiled in a two-hour-long conversation about the merits of marmite, millenialism, or post-racial presidential candidates. Community is a Scottish dance on a West African pier. It's learning how rubber is made from a man with one eye. It's four Koreans and a Norwegian performing English songs. It's a Canadian, a Swiss guy, an American, and two West Africans dancing to the victory of a British football club. Community is having spontaneous gatherings of music, with people whose voices blend like only the voices of strangers can.

And I'm going to miss it. I'll confess. Maybe there's room for one more reformed, Dickensian curmudgeon in this world.

Pita for 450

What does it take to cook for 450 people?

I knew it was massive. We get fed three meals a day here. Each one of the four hundred fifty of us get more food than we could want, three times a day, seven days a week. Just what does it take to provide that for us?

Well, let me tell you. For one meal, it takes:

90 cups of flour
210 grams of yeast
6 gallons of water
1 gallon of olive oil

72 liters of yoghurt
100 onions
40 legs of lamb
20 heads of garlic
1 can of dried mint

4 gallons of rice
1 pound of butter
1 gallon of pasta
750 ml of salt

2 liters of lemon juice
10 gallons of garbanzo beans
2 cups of paprika

12 hours of work
5 other galley staff

and two very dedicated friends.



It was a glimpse into a part of the ship that we don't see often—a part of the ship that works hard, no doubt, and that does so with parsimonious amounts of positive feedback. So, here it is, publicly: Thank you, Peter, Tyrone, Ernest, Patrick, and Michal. Thank you, and Nigel and Margarita, for helping with the meal, and thank you (and Tim and Vandi and Eddie and Freddie and Carlos on Saturdays) for the food. Daily.

Oh, and by the way. In a totally unrelated attempt at shameless reciprocal plugging, we've just been included in a compendium of the 100 best travel blogs. We're about midway down, in the road-less-travelled section. Some of the blogs we read regularly are there too. Check them out, if you've got a lazy, rainy weekend.

Potpourri for $200

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's visit to the Africa Mercy:





Monrovia from a car window:

Click on the pictures for more

Impatient anticipation

There is a palpable sense of pre-Christmas anticipation on this ship, especially among the forty-odd of us who have arrived this week. Today marks our one-week anniversary on the African Mercy. Most of us are no longer seasick, we've been oriented to death, and we're ready. Ready to get our feet wet, our hands dirty, and get started doing the things we've come here for. The anticipation is almost impatient.

Meanwhile, in the midst of orientations and preparations, we're filling our time with dockside walks and soccer games against the Ghanaian UN forces (they won).

But that all changes on Monday.

We meet our first patients in a stadium.

By the way: this ship, the Blue Atlantic, is docked right next to ours. It has an interesting story.

The Africa Mercy

This post will be short (Crazy, I know...Africa must be doing something to my brain). I just wanted to write a bit about the ship we're on, because that's predominantly what our life centers around at this point. Since patient care doesn't start till Monday, this week has been more about learning to live on board this ship.

The Africa Mercy is the largest non-military floating hospital in the world. And it's big. It weighs 16,572 tons, is 499 feet long, stands eight decks tall, and has enough bed space for 484 crew. To put this in perspective, the largest Staten Island Ferry is 310 feet long, weighing weighs 3,300 gross tons, and the largest ferry plying the Puget Sound is 460 feet long.

The hospital itself is even more impressive. It has 75 beds, a five-bed ICU (including two isolation rooms), an eight-bed recovery room, six operating theaters, a fully functional CT scanner, X-ray machine, and C-arm, and a full formulary, dental clinic, and laboratory. What's most unbelievable in that list of accolades, though, is the equiment itself. You would be blown away by how state-of-the-art some of the stuff in this hospital is: I worked with microscopes much worse than this in residency. And that CT scanner is the only one in Liberia, we're told, and one of only three in all of West Africa.

Quite honestly, the hospital facilities on this ship are impressive. And, so, as promised, here are a few pictures. I'll admit: I'm embarrassed at how unartistic and—well—boring they are, but they do the job. I promise better ones next time.

I told you it'd be short...

A foray into Monrovia

The Africa Mercy is an incongruity. In truth, we're not roughing it here. The ship is new, the cabins are nice, the people are great, and there's even a Starbucks on board (the coffee mavens graciously donate their bean to the ship to keep us happy). Sure, the ship persistently rocks, ever so slightly, wreaking havoc on your semicircular canals and making you seasick even in your dreams. Sure, the food is—um—cafeteria-style. And windows are few and far-between on the floor we're bunking in. But life on this ship is not bad at all. (In fact, here are a few pictures of life on board. More—as well as pictures of the hospital—coming with the next post).

And it's nothing compared with the world outside. The ravages of war are evident everywhere.

A late-night arrival on Friday (after a turbulence-ridden plane ride from Abidjan, straight through a thunderstorm, with cliff-hanging hundred-foot plummets. I'm not making that up) didn't deter us from venturing off the ship on Saturday afternoon in an attempt to make it into the city.

We failed.

See, the city is a 4km walk away from the ship, and, on the advice of two other Mercy Ships veterans whom we ran into, we decided to take a cab. I use that word loosely. The cars are painted yellow, but that's where their resemblance to anything cab-like ends. They little more than pieces of metal, held together by a few well-placed prayers, crammed with more people than even India would find normal, and driven with reckless abandon. And they will not, by any means, pick up foreigners. At least, not for any sort of reasonable price.

So, we stood, flagged down hundreds of cabs, walked about halfway into town, and gave up. On our way back, though, it hit us where we were, what we were doing. This isn't usual travel; this is nothing like any other place we've been to this year. Or this life.

The ravages of war are evident everywhere.

On our way back, we were almost run over (purposely?) by a man driving way too fast, in the gravel gutter off the side of the road. Though, given the state of his car, I'm not sure which one of us would have suffered more from the encounter.

On our way back, it became real. You know those baby-blue helmets you see the UN forces wearing on the news? They're not made up.

And for some reason, it was seeing those baby-blue helmets that made it all sink in. We're in Liberia, a country that's so poor, it doesn't even make the UN's Human Development Index. We're in a country where the UN is more than a cement-and-steel swoop of a high-rise a few blocks away from us, where NGOs are realities of life, where people still carry automatic weapons. We're in a country whose bombed-out shells of buildings far surpass anything I ever saw in Lebanon. And we're here until June.

Today, though, was different. Today, we made it into town for church.

The ravages of war may be evident everywhere, but so is resilience.

We are Fine-O

Here we are. After a mind-numbing series of flights, we have finally arrived in Monrovia, Liberia.

The first thing that hit me was the smell. In a good way. As we stepped off the plane and onto the shuttle bus, I was hit with a solid whiff of rainforest. Clearing immigration was a chaotic jumble as people jostled their way to one of two wooden desks to have their passports stamped. And then we huddled for a long while in a holding area waiting to collect our bags from a makeshift tent.

In truth, this has been one of the easiest border crossings we have made this year. 30 other crew members were on the flight with us, and due to the good repute of Mercy Ships, we were waved quickly through customs. We were transported from the aiport to the dock by a team of staff members, and were ushered up the gangplank to the Africa Mercy where a hot meal and clean sheets awaited us. We slept knowing that the blue helmeted UNMIL soldiers were out there to keep us safe.

The next few days for us will be about figuring out our role here. Transitioning from tourist to employee of a NGO is going to be tricky. Do we bargain with the locals, and if so, how hard? Do we wear our ID badges when we go into town? Who is a tout and who is just being friendly? Then there is sorting out how it is to live in close quarters with your work colleagues. Perhaps one of the reasons New York holds such an attraction for us is the comforting anonymity the city bestows. Here solitude seem impossible. However, the strong sense of community has been a true blessing. We've met kindred spirits frank and sincere, all ready to "spend ourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed..."

We are approaching our approaching our uncertainties with an open mind. Up until now, life has encouraged us only to ask the question, "What do I want?" Here, part of what we have to learn is how to submit to the needs of others. Whether what is needed is something as mundane as scrubbing floors or as exotic as diagnosing cerebral malaria, we want to approach our work here with equal joy and enthusiasm. Perhaps what stood out to us in our short time here is the number of volunteers who have given up lucrative and prestigious jobs back home to work as support staff here, whether it be in the cafeteria or maintenance. May we also have their humility as we face the days ahead.