MadProf's
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I just realised that I forgot to post about my trip back to Larnaka…

I spent most of the day that I left in packing, wandering around slightly disconsolately, wondering what I had forgottern, sorting out other peoples stuff which they had left in the cabin, and finishing off packing stuff myself. I had already agreed to take presents back for 2 people on board to supporters or friends in Cyprus, and 2 other people brought stuff to me randomly during the day and said “would it be OK for you to take this back with you? I know this guy in Cyprus who I met while in port there and would love to send them this gift…” Anyway. I also had random things to clear up, like I took some old sunglasses up to the Creative Ministries Office, they always want more sunglasses as props and costumes, and all that. I had a childrens activies/crafts book which I had be loaned before Sabbath Week which I needed to take back, and so on and so forth. So many things to do.

The last of the STEPPERs ate together with our STEP mum for our final meal ( lunch ) on board. The 2 SP-STEPPERs, one Swiss girl, and myself. Our Albanian STEPPER had somehow managed to go on overnight, and had been gone the last 2 days or so, and none of us knew when she would actually arrive back to Doulos, or when her flight was!

Anyway, we were told what time the minibus would leave. At half an hour before that time, I had most of my stuff packed, but not all, and was slowly going about the cabin finding other random things to pack, sorting out clothes and things to take to Charlie, and so on.

Suddenly I realised that I was supposed to go to the quayside earlier than that, in order to say goodbye to people! And worse yet, I needed to go to the loo before leaving! So I quickly rushed to the loo, washed my hands, rushed out again, and picked up my bags, and found that I had forgotten to pack my washing bag, with toothbrush and all, so I collected that, and packed it, then saw on my bunk that I hadn’t packed some other things, so I packed them, looked at my watch, was shocked, saw loads of things in my drawer that I needed to either pack or send to Charlie, and then heard my name being paged on the info system! So I picked up all my bags, and then thought “Oh, yeah, I’d better phone them back!” So I phoned info: “Hi, this is Daniel, I’m on my way! Sorry!” they started laughing, so I hung up the phone, and struggled out and up the stairs towards the prom deck and gangway.
Thankfully, another friendly Deckie saw me, and offered to carry my bag for me, so I could just cope with my hand-luggage, and with the weighing scales that I had borrowed from info to weigh my bags. Which reminded me, I needed to take them back to info! So I changed direction, and we headed up to info. I gave them the scales, and clambered out of the door to the other gangway.
Someone else had offered to carry my handluggage too, but it was that terrible backpack which I had just fixed with the sewing kit, and I didn’t want to take it on and off my back more than I had to. I had a 30 second argument about this with him, he claiming that I would be offending his culture if I didn’t let him carry it for me, which was nonsense. Well, perhaps not nonsense. His culture might be offended, but he wouldn’t. He had been on Doulos so long that you’d have to punch him on the nose to offend him. And his culture wasn’t there to get offended anyway. So I let him carry the scales for me. That seemed to make him happy, anyway.
So I got to the gangway, and all the others were already in the minibus, which was running and the driver wandering around looking distracted “You’re late!” he shouted. “I know!” I replied.

A few people have suggested that I start formatting my blog and filling it out a bit, and turn it into a book, and try and get it published. So I went through and copied all the text into a AbiWord document, went through it all with the spell-checker (which I had to look at sternly and tell not to use American spellings…) and then did a word-count… 26839 words! Wow… I would never have expected that! Subtract a few hundred for headers and dates and all, and well. Yeah. That’s pretty good for a start. I’ll start tinkering with it soon, and adding anecdotes and all. Just random perhaps interesting stories. Like this one:

While I was on watch, the second time, more people would come and just chat to me, which was nice. It helped the time pass faster. Anyway, one of the guys who came up and chatted was a Project Worker (short termer, not a STEPPER, just came for a specific job or time or whatever), from Finland. We were talking about this one guy some of the ship’s company had met, who said he was British, on holiday on Durban, but had had his passport stolen, and now the British Embassy would not let him get a new one, as they had no proof that he was who he said he was. Not a fun situation. Anyway. Apparently, for Finnish people it is a lot easier, you can just walk into any Finnish Embassy, and get a new one just like that! I asked how this was possible, and he told me in his deep nasal voice “You just speak to them in Finnish. Anyone who speaks well Finnish must be from Finland. Nobody else can.” Ah. That explains it. Apparently also the government has some kind of way of validating it, perhaps with fingerprints or DNA or something as well… I could probably use this as a good excuse to rant on for a few pages about the horrors of Big Brother Is Watching You And Reading Your DNA. or something like that. But I wont. I mean, most people already have pretty strong opinions about it, one way or the other, and whatever I say will have no effect on them. Or on their opinions. I used to have so many random discussions and arguments with one of my cabinmates, who left earlier than the rest. The American Seminary-student. Man, that was fun. “What is the difference between ignorance and innocence? And which is the more blissful?” “How to respond to leadership, and disagreement-with leadership?” and so on, as well as all the usual ones , Speaking in Toungues, Church leadership structure, responce to disagreement with leadership, basis of faith, various cultural things, and so on. Lovely. We disagreed on so much! And at the same time had a similar view on many things. Yeah.

Ja.

I’ve been doing loads of laundry… so many guests move in and out of my cabin and they forget to take their sheets to Laundry when they leave, so there was about 20 sheets, 9 pillow cases, and so on. About 20kg in all, I think. I also have given some towels to Charlie.

Anyway, I have added a few more things to my case, and one or two people want me to take things back to Cy for supporters and friends there… so I hope I have room!

Doulos is A.C to about 24 or so, and yet it feels like hard work here! I will go ask about flights now…

I’ve packed, at least mostly. And the main luggage is about 18 kg, w/o towels (which I may leave), and w/o todays clothes (all quite light, which is why I am packing them and not wearing them. Although I may pack my heavier ones since it is so low).

I have not actually re-confirmed my flights, but was told by someone else that the pursor may have done that. I was going to ask her today, but the office was shut. I hope it all turns out OK. Anyway, if the meals are meat, I shall just eat less (ie, that which is not meat) , and drink more fruit juice, which may be a good thing anyway.

I’m so tired today. We went out to a Zulu village/tourist thingy. Very cool, I guess, but living in Larnaka has made me so skeptical of Tourist things of any sort at all that I enjoyed it less than the others. Oh well.

There was a crocodile park there as well… they have well over 50 crocs, in various places, and we had dinner there as well. They had this thing they called “The Fear Factor Challenge”, which was basically they put out some tables in one of the croc. compounds, and the people who wanted to could sit at the tables and eat crocodile kebabs with nothing between them and the crocs, and 1 guard standing there with a stick to point the crocs in the other direction.

Not really my thing.

So I just stuck to the resturant, and had a quite nice fresh salad and bottled water. Nice to have truely fresh vegitables, again. Doulos ones always seem to have a slightly brownish tinge to them… Anyway. I justtified not doing the Fear Factor with the following sylogism (if that is the right word):

Premise) The park will not gain a good reputation by having visitors lose fingers.
Premise) If it were dangerous, then visitors might lose fingers.
Conclusion) It is not dangerous.

So, therefore, you pay the extra 40 Rand or so just for a “thrill” which is in fact, not dangerous, and rather silly. And also, if it was at all dangerous, then I quite like my fingers, and find them quite useful, at times, and so risking them for the sake of saying I had eaten with crocs is intensely silly.

So I didn’t.

Crocs are such weird creatures. The keeper bloke who was showing us around before hand was down in the compound with them and tapped them, and one of them (100 years old this year) roared at him, and snapped at the stick. They are just so primeval! So totally lifeless until roused, and then totally instinctive until they forget, and then back to domant again. And so big! Weird. Weird. Weird.

Anyway. I’m tired. I’m buring a few CDs of stuff.

Bananas, other fruit, yogurt, just usual stuff is so unusual here. I am looking forward to coming home. And yet I know I will miss Doulos too.

About 10 STEPPERs left today. So it will be very lonely now in my cabin. 10 person cabin, now with just 2 people. Myself, and a German new STEPPER, who does not speak so much English, and keeps totally different hours to me. I am going to bed about 11pm, and getting up at 6, or 6.30am, he is in bed by about 9pm, and wakes up about 7.30 or 8am. So, yeah.

Very good on board Sunday Service, extremely good talk/sermon/whatever by one of the pastor/leader/teachers on board about the book of Job. Then afterwards I was able to help set up for the Doulos birthday party, and then get into a clown costume, makeup, and all that.

At the beginning of the programme (it was raining, so we were all indoors), we did a small sketch, which was fun. About 3 minutes. Then after that, I went outside (it had stopped raining) with the other clowns to do some juggling and other entertaining. I spent the whole afternoon out there, juggling, playing with someones very nice poi, and being funny, making people laugh, etc. Clowning is fun. But tiring.

If/when I come back to the Doulos, I would really like to organize or be part of more regular juggling/ circus workshops, or whatever. There used to be some, but now the people who used to do that have mostly left, and there are only 1 or 2 part-time jugglers on board, with not a huge ammount of motivation to practice, except when there is something coming up…

Speaking of coming back… People who join the Doulos for 2 years join in groups, and first have a 2 week or so training time together in whichever port the Doulos will be arriving at. These groups are called “Preships”, and people will mostly still introduce themselves for on-board events with something along the lines of “Hi, My name is David from the Istanbul Preship” or whatever. Preship training happens every 6 months. The end of January/Febuary, and in August/September.

The last Doulos Preship to join (the most recent one) joined actually in Larnaka, which was why the ship visited then. They are the Beruit Preship. The next one will be Richard’s Bay (South Africa), in less than a month. This is all kind of technical, I know. But the point of it all, was that people don’t really have a whole lot of choice in where they join the Doulos. And I think that if God wants me to join, He is able to provide the money, and also the flight costs, at that time. Some people have said it all tends to be last minute, with crazy things happening, like having people wanting to support them and telling them in their last 2 weeks before they come, all that kind of thing.

Anyway. About joining, the Febuary 2006 Preship keeps coming up in conversation with people here, as there would still be a lot of people I know and have been working with, many of whom are leaving next August, or September 06.

Some of us STEPPERs went out today to the largest Shopping Mall in the Southern Hemisphere… “Gateway” … You can probably find it on the internet (surely).* Huge place. I felt quite intimidated. I think I have more culture shock at places like that than I do from any place in Mozambique! I mean, it is just so BIG. And so posh, and modern, and all of that.

I think I spent about 15 dollars, on getting there and back (we had to go by taxi, and split the cost), and on a meal (veggi lasagna), and a vegetable curry pie. Lovely lovely food. The veggi lasanga was about 7 dollars, the pie about 1 and a half, and the rest was the taxi… It’s odd, I feel quite bad about using the money for this, but some of the people did say “use this money as you want to…”, and I have not spent a lot of money, comparatively.

Money… strange stuff. Yesterday I was helping on my e-day at that orphanage where they had 50-something kids in a tiny little house, with 2 or 3 kids to a bed, today walking around a Shopping Mall where one single concrete column which is for decoration only, and doesn’t even hold up the roof probably costs more than the entire cost of the orphanage building!

The ship did give a gift to the orphanage, but they had to purposely make it small, as a large gift would be overwelming, or something like that, and would actually do more harm than good.

It’s this whole relativistic thing. One person’s poor is another persons stinking rich, and neither of them is right. Particually thinking of stuff like say the Doulos P.M (private money). Crew get 20 USD per month as personal money. In Mozambique, that is a huge ammount, which can go a huge way, and still leave a lot to be donated at the end of the month, but in Cyprus, 20 USD is 10CYP, which is enough for perhaps 3 gyros, if you go to the right kebab shops, which if you were staying in Cyprus for a month, and wanted to go out and see the place, isn’t much.

Being a STEPPER is a bit different, so many people have said, as we don’t have P.M, we have brought money with us to use… Like, one of the others was telling me today, she is American, and all her friends and family and supporters are expecting (explicitly in some cases) gifts and souveneers from her when she returns. So it is a bit hard for her to get all of these and see everything and do everything.

If you are on for 2 years (or more), you can be more relaxed about things like gifts and so-on. I don’t know… I’ve spent a long time today just sitting in the Mall, thinking about all of these things, about what is right and wrong ways to use money and stuff like that.

Amazing days. Wow…

Yesterday, for e-day, we only left the ship at 6.30pm. We went to a Methodist Church for the homeless meal they have every week. We did 2 dramas, someone told their story, and they sang a song too.

Just as we were eating (good food. A kind of vegetable soup/thing with some rice, and white bread.), all the lights went out. The church was quite hi-tech, and they had spent most of the time before that setting up their computer-powered power-point lyric projection for the songs they (the church) had planned for the evening.

I was quite glad the lights went off, actually, in the end, as it meant the whole program was a lot more simple. We didn’t use the music for the dramas, just did them straight. Which IMHO is often the best way. The music does make things seem rather too professional, which in a situation like that, you don’t really want. Many of the people there are in fact believers, but many are still struggling with drug addiction, and other problems, which the church is helping them with.

I was able to talk with one guy quite a lot afterwards, his name is Julian, and he had a broken leg. He was talking about his life, moving to South Africa (from the UK) about 30 years ago. He now does not have a job, since he broke his leg he cannot work, but he had such faith, and trust in God, saying “I really am so thankful to the Lord, He has never let me go more than 2 weeks without work.” And was in fact going back to work the next day.

As he did not have a job because of his leg, he had not been able to pay his rent, and so had been sleeping on the streets for the past few weeks. Talking to him helped me to understand a lot more of why there is still anger and racism. He was quite a nice guy, but in his talking was not friendly towards the Black and Indian people in S.A. During Aparteid, he had had a job, and had been safe walking around in the city after midnight. Now, any time after dark is too dangerous to walk around, and he has no job. He believed that it was because now that Black people have more rights, they want to be in charge, and to squash the Whites.

I was able to tell him that it is not just S.A, and nothing to do with people’s skin colour. Like how we in Cyprus are getting increasing crime and less safe, particually in Lemesos, and that there is now resentment in some Cypriots against Russians, because they believe it is them bringing in the crime. There are elements of truth mixed into all of this, but blind hatred and racism isn’t the answer, of course. We just have to treat all others as we believe Jesus would, and pray about what we cannot.

The last few days have been kind of stressful, and kind of funny. I don’t know wether to laugh or cry, a lot of the time. I figured laughing is more socially acceptable, so have tried to stick to that.

I have had my last 2 working days in Deck, and did hardly any work at all, it feels like. The day before yesterday, we were going to be doing some varnishing on the Starboard prom deck, just outside the mess. However, after devotions in the morning, all the lifeboat teams got called to safety training, and so that meant we didn’t do any work for about an hour. STEPPERs are not envolved in lifeboat or safety training.

Then when we got there, we discovered that it had rained on the previous days layer of varnish, which another team had done, and it looked terrible. So as we were not sure if it would rain again on top of whatever we did that day, I suggested putting up some poles and hanging a canvas over it. We could not just hang a canvas without poles, as the deck above stops right above the railing, and the canvas would be hanging on the railing.

So the (acting) team leader told me, “Good idea, you do that and the rest of us will go and get the varnish and other cleaning stuff for the rails.” So off I went. I found some roller extensions, which would work fine, and also got some rope from the foc’s’cle. Then I set to work, perhaps not in the easiest way, but in the most straitforward that I could think of at the time. I fixed all of the poles sticking out horizontally from the ceiling out to about a metre beyond the edge of the railing, and used the rope to keep them all from falling out. Just using simple hitches all the way along.

When I had finished putting up the poles, which took about half an hour, I went to find the others, who were still not there. They were all up on another deck, varnishing that one. I told the leader that I was finished with the poles, and asked where I should get the canvasses from.

He said, “Well… I hate to say this, but I think this whole thing is just taking too much effort, and if it does rain, we’re screwed anyway, because this rail we are working on now will get wet. So, if you could just take down the poles, and instead pray that it doesn’t rain.”

Thanks.

OK. Well, no problem. So I took down the poles. I was just finishing that, when they all trooped down, to get ready for lunch break. As they were walking past, the leader looked at the ceiling, and asked what on earth the splashes of rather messy water were on it. While attaching the rope, I had unfortunately let some of it hang onto the wet deck below, which was still wet from the cleaning team swabbing it. When I pulled the rope through the loops to make the hitchesto hold the poles in place, it had splattered the surrounding locale with droplets of muddy water. Oops.