Life Goes On

Life onboard the Africa Mercy continues to be busy. In addition to working shifts in the hospital every day, I've been spending time with friends, saying goodbye to many of them as they return home, and taking trips into Freetown. Here are some pictures from the past few weeks:

"Tea at ten" has become a tradition every night in the dining room

Goodbye party at The Country Lodge restaurant

Saying goodbye to sweet friends

Everyone gathers on the dock to wave goodbye

Spending time with patients at the Hope Center

Views of Freetown

views from deck 8

Here are some pictures I took from Deck 8 (the top of the ship) the other day. It was kind of cloudy, but that's just going to get worse now that we're getting into rainy season.

Port side, toward the ocean. When it's not cloudy it's nice to sit out and watch the sun set over the water. There are lawn chairs up on the deck and always someone sitting out there.

Starboard side. This is the dock. You can see the gangway up toward the front of the ship, and behind it those tents are where they do admissions before bringing patients on board to the hospital. All those white vehicles belong to Mercy Ships.

Looking past all the containers on the pier, you can see the mountains in the background.

On the other side of that funnel thing in the bottom right of this picture, is a corner of the dock where it's nice to sit and listen to the waves crash against the rocks. You can smell smoke from people's cooking fires, and sometimes hear kids playing on the beach. I was sitting there with some friends the other day and a man came rowing by in a little boat and called out to us: "Hello, good people! How are you? Thank you for the good work you are doing here."

Freetown

a walk around Freetown

Here are some pictures from my walk in town last Sunday. We have to be very careful of the pictures we take, due to cultural sensitivity, so I don't have very many with people in them. Because of recent wars, and journalists coming and taking pictures of whatever and whoever they want, many Sierra Leoneans become offended when people try to take pictures. I did manage to get a few though:

This is the famous Cotton Tree in the center of town. It's said that this is the site where the settlers of Freetown, former African American slaves, first gathered for a thanksgiving service when they established the colony in 1792.

An old church down the street from the Cotton Tree. There's a courtyard around it with beautiful trees and other plants. We wanted to go in and see it, but the gate was locked, so we just had to look over the wall from the outside.

A view down the street. You can see the Cotton Tree behind the building to the right.

This street was surprisingly empty - most of them were very busy and filled with cars, motorcycles, poda-podas, and pedestrians. Poda-podas are public transportation vans that you can rent out for a group or just flag down and join whoever's already crammed inside.

Toward the end of our walk we went through a quiet, garden-like area called the Bishop's Court. These are the old ruins of some big house.

Before going back to the ship we stopped by the Hope Center and visited with the patients there. The Hope Center is an outpatient facility where many of our patients stay if they're going to need to come back to the ship for treatment in a few weeks and live too far away to go home, or if kids are malnourished and need to gain some weight before they can have surgery.