Some, albeit many, may ask what a carpenter is doing on board a ship. I must admit I asked the same questions myself before arriving on board the Africa Mercy. I thought to myself about what types of projects I might find myself doing here in Africa. I really had no idea! Many people here actually ask me the same thing.... the funny thing is when the ship was converted to a hospital ship they really did not think they needed a carpenter. I have definitely found out there is a never ending supply of work.
In addition to my carpentry work I am also part of the Deck department. We are responsible for all the daily work that happens with a ship. Loading and unloading cargo, operating cranes, forklifts, general maintenance, safety, mooring lines and more. I often get called up to help with some operation or the other. I also carry a pager every couple days where I will be on call for 24 hours at which time I could be called up for work at any point. The deck crew also do a rotation through night watch where for 7 days you would be in charge of the security of the ship. This means you would do a complete search of the ship from end to end and bottom to top every hour all night long. I have not had the pleasure of experiencing this and will not have to but it is a job I would not mind as you get to explore when no one else is around.
The last ship, the Anastasis, had a huge carpentry shop and four or five carpenters working full time. That ship was very old and had a lot of wood on it. New ship regulations extremely limit the use of combustible material on board a vessel of this size. This means that almost everything is metal. Even the walls in our cabin are metal, so if anyone if coming to the Africa Mercy, bring Magnets!
I have found the work on board to be very varied and requiring some resourcefulness in order to complete a task. Many of our supplies are shipped to Africa via a container loaded on a ship in the US and then shipped to a major port and then transferred to another ship, finally arriving in Benin about a month later. This means that if you need parts that can not be sourced locally that you can expect the wait to be over a month before you see the parts you need to complete a job.
It is possible to find a lot of interesting and useful things in Benin. Most prices I have found are about the same as at home and a lot of prices are actually more than at home. Very few items I have found are cheap in comparison. It is not hard for me to go out and spend some 70000 CFA and return after a three hour endovour with only two sheets of plywood. 40000 CFA exchanges to about $80 american.
The markets are something to be experienced here. Throngs of people going about life as usual and me the lone Yovo (white person) standing amongst the swirling tides of traffic. All I hear is the noise of zimmy-johns (motor bikes) and people calling out their wares. You hear a lot of people making a kissing sound which is the local call to get your attention. The occassional call of 'mon ami' (my friend) followed by a banter of uninterpreted and potentially not too friendly words at my ignoring their wares. You can not just look at an item and ask for a price. The process is the following: you ask the price, they tell you a ridiculous price, you counter, repeat process until item is in a bag and in your hand with the owner looking like you have just stolen the food out his own mouth! This is actually a very invigourating and endering experience in Africa and believe it or not has earned me some respect from the shopkeepers. I have had many a good laugh with a shop keeper with my style of bargaining and made a few enemies as well. Usually this bartering process is very friendly but sometimes intimidating as the shop keeper plays his part of being shocked by the low price you keep offering.
Adrienne and I had an interesting experience last sunday. We went out to the local craft market to purchase some memorabilia from the local crafstman. We were going to look for a couple of carvings that we were interested in. The craft market consists of a lot of small huts divided into four where each shop keeper sets up there items for sell. We manouvered our way through the different shops trying to ignore the beckoning kissing sounds emiting from all around us calling for our attention. We would enter a shop and look at the different carvings try to explain that we would not be buying something even the next item that they would hold out, or the next item they would try to put in our hands. We would escape the shop and make our way into the next shop where we would look at excatly the same carvings and occasionally we would ask what the price was. This is never a good idea unless you intend on buying an item so it makes the process very difficult to judge which items are in your price range. Typically, they will tell you a price that is three times what you will end up paying. We probably went into at least 50 different shops which all sold roughly the same carvings of varying quality and skill. In the end we bartered for a number of items which the locals found very amusing. I was told that I am an African and Adrienne was reminded she is still 'american'. A number of times I was told by the locals that this how is works, you ask the price, we tell you, you try different price. They often got mad at me when I would ask the price of something and when they told me their first price I would put the item down and walk out. I found it amuzing but I was not going to waste my time on poor quality material when it often takes 15 minutes to actually get the price you want.
I should explain that in Africa there is a strange pattern that I see here. The shop keepers of certain wares always group themselves together. For instance if you wanted to sell watches, you would move your watch stand to where all the other sellers of watches are standing. This is common for almost all things that are being sold. I have been wondering about why they follow this strange marketing process and have no solid conclusions but I believe it is intended to make things easier for the customer. If you want to buy a piece of fabric you go to the road where all the people who sell fabric are. If you want some wood you go to where all the people who sell wood are. This makes it a little easier to find out where you should go, however the major downfall of this system is that if you need socks and a pinnaple you will be traveling to two different sides of the city before you are done. Economically speaking this system makes no sense to me but to make things even stranger is the mentality that if you buy from one person you should buy from the rest too. This means that if you were to go buy some fresh pinapple from a fruit stand the rest of the fruit stands would be mad at you for not buying from them.
One of my tasks here that consumes a lot of my time is trying to find the local materials I need to work on a project. I have found a number of suppliers that carry some items but it is always a possibility they only have one or just happen to not carry the item you need. It is a never ending process on board of juggling the projects I have on the go (currently I think about 25 projects) with the daily additions of quick jobs that need a remedy right away.
I do a lot of maintenance and repairs for the some 500 crew members, patients, day workers, and tours that travel through the ship every day. Stairs, doors, hinges, you name it all get a lot of use and are broken more often than not. The last few days I have been attempting to work on a set of staircases where the stair nosing has fallen off. The stairs happen to be in a location vital to mobility between decks which means they have a lot of traffic. If I was to close these stairs for the day there would likely be a lot of unhappy people as they would have to travel down to deck 3 in order to go up to deck 5, or else they would have to go all the way aft (back) in order to go all the way forward. I decided I would try to work around the people using the stairs. I ended up spending more time moving all my tools off the stairs to let people pass through then I did actually fixing the stairs. It was a little amusing but made for slow progress. Today I gave up and put signs up to close the stairs... this seemed to have the opposite effect than intended and traffic seemed to actually increase on the stairs rather than decrease. In the end the stairs are finished and many complaments and thanks you were passed on as people walked through my portable job site.
Life is very busy and sometimes amuzing on the ship. I must say that I really enjoy living on board and working for such a good cause. I keep myself fairly busy with visits to the hospital wards, the hospitality center for playtimes, soccer on monday and wednesday nights, ultimate frisbee on friday nights, date nights with my wife, community meetings on tuesday morning, thursday and sunday night, deck work, fire fighting training and drills.... life is good!
Below are pictures of a place called Bab's Dock in Benin that Adrienne and I went to for an afternoon off last saturday. It was relaxing and rejuvinating not to forget to mention beautiful too!
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