Sunday Afternoon Guests

On Sunday afternoons, the crew members of the AFM are allowed to have Sierra Leonian guests on board the ship. Last Sunday was the last available day to have personal guests to visit during this field service, so the ship was very chaotic because everyone had their friends on the ship. My friend Vince and I had our friend Fatmata (Effie) and her sister, Aminata (Amie), on the ship to visit us. They arrived to the ship around 4:30 and we were able to give them a tour. However, we are relatively limited in where we can take guests on the ship, so we were only able to show them around decks 5, 6 and 7. Deck 5 consists of the dining room, the reception area, the Starbucks cafe, the ship shop, the library and some guest cabins and family cabins. Deck 6 has the academy, the laundry room, the crew galley, the International Lounge (which is a big meeting room for Sunday evening church services, Thursday evening community services, etc.), and the galley. Normally guests are not allowed in the galley but as we were standing in the International Lounge the food services manager came out and offered to show our guests around, which was really exciting for them. (He also gave us fresh bread, which was really exciting too-- Not just for them, but for us as well.) The only portion of deck 7 we showed them was the outside, but they were very happy about it because they had never been on a boat before, so it was scary and exciting at the same time. After we gave our guests a tour of the ship, we had dinner with them. I think dinner was probably the highlight of their time on the ship because the dinner lines are all self serve and they were able to have as much or as little as they want, which is rare for West Africans. During dinner a few crew members came over and greeted our guests and the chief engineer came over and gave each one of them candy! It was so amazing to see how welcoming everyone was to our guests, even though they did not know them personally, and there were many other visitors around. Fatmata and Aminata left around 6 to go back to their village.
Later that evening, I was invited by my coworker to go to a Philippine ship docked a few ships down. A group of 7 of us went over to have dinner, and the food was SO good. Real juice and real citrus were such treats! The ship we visited is a container ship and the crew consists of about 25 men, mostly from the Philippines except for one German man and one Russian man. After we ate dinner the men whipped out a karaoke machine and went to town on it. Apparently karaoke is one of their favorite things to do! James, my coworker, was so excited to be able to belt it out... It was like watching a little kid on Christmas day. I got a tour of the engine room a little later with two of the people I came with which was cool, but very, very hot. All in all, it was a cool little trip. The men were extremely hospitable, and it was fun to see a different kind of ship than the one I live on.

Effie and her sister's baby girl

Effie, Amie and the little ones.

My guests and I

James singing Karaoke on the Philippine ship