Moving Forward

Things are moving forward here. Time is passing and things are getting done. The work on the ship is progressing well though it is an incredibly big job - lots of moving to and fro, tearing out this and that, replacing old stuff with new stuff and putting the pieces back together. The hole in the side of the ship is closed now, the new generators have been moved into position and are now in the process of being installed along with the new air conditioning units. (Below are photos of the hole in the ship and a new generator in the warehouse before installation.)It was amazing to see how they moved the four huge 30-ton generators into place with jacks, blocks, rollers, wenches and lots of manpower - it was kind of like watching well orchestrated performance complete with conductor. It is amazing all of the stuff going on in such a relatively small space. Sparks fly down in the engine room from the acetylene torches and welders weld all over, even under the floor so you have to watch where you step. I got to talk to a fellow who was inspecting welds with dye penetrant and magnetic particle methods of non-destructive inspection (NDI) similar to the work I did on helicopters in the military. That was fun for me since I understood the processes well. Most of the work has been happening while the ship is in dry dock. It is really cool to see the ship from the bottom of the dry dock. There is a huge hull down there about 18 feet high that usually only the divers get to see. Everyone is encouraged that things are moving along pretty much on schedule at the moment.

A few weeks ago we had open house at the Academy. School is going well for the children. This year volunteers are teaching "life skills" classes for the students. I am teaching a photography class for the next few weeks and I have six junior high and high school students in my class. Others are teaching cooking, gardening, and being a good neighbor (community service). Last month the kids were offered their choice of cheer leading, which Bethany very much enjoyed, outdoor survival skills - Joey's pick, auto mechanics, and dress making.

Also this month Jenny, Bethany, David, and I helped to clean up and paint a local parsonage. Bethany had a lot of fun mopping with a local girl her age named Namagugu, Zulu for "precious". Joey helped in the galley that day to prepare for a braai (South African barbecue) that we were doing here in conjunction with a church some crew had been attending in Ballito. To braai is a very popular past time among the white South Africans at least. Hardly a gathering goes by without a Braai, even in rainy weather. Joey and I went to Durban to Northside Church http://www.northside.org.za/ for a men's get together on the 15th. We had a braai and played rugby in the fellowship hall. The pastor spoke briefly on courage. Afterwards we spent the night at the home of one of the families in the church because of our curfew of 6pm at Appelsbosch (it has since been extended til later since we now have a shuttle service - using the land rovers was too expensive and difficult in terms of maintenance so we now have shuttles going to a few locations in Durban). I was able to pick our hosts' brains a bit about living in South Africa. The following morning we had an English breakfast at a burger place called Wimpy - wonderful. It was a great time. Joey really seems to enjoy the fellowship at Northside.

I have been spending a lot of time hanging up laundry here and keeping things running smoothly in the household. I've done a bit of photography and a bunch of other stuff that has come along, like the photography course. I'm learning a bit of Zulu with it's many clicking sounds. That's fun, but not particularly easy considering that my mouth is not used to producing some of the sounds necessary to communicate. Jenny is plenty busy working on writing policies and procedures with no immediate end in sight. We have been living the country so we have had great opportunities to see and play with some cool creatures. David and his buddies find all manner of small critters, from very friendly chameleons to large moths, to snails, very odd caterpillars that carry their homes around with them, and even a small snake. I spend some time documenting the collection in photos. The boys are loving being boys and exploring I just hope they don't find any puff adders or black mambas! The Academy had a big camp out this past weekend in the soccer field here. We had a big fire with songs and s'mores. What a nice opportunity to be outdoors! I finally got a few good photos of the Jacaranda trees that bloom here in the spring. What lovely color!It's nice to be in a place where we can experience Spring again! It's a little weird that its Fall back home, but still very, very nice.

John

Home Away From Home, Away From Home

Sawubona! (Zulu for "hello" or "greetings") Since our last blog post much has happened. We have been very busy and blogging over the past few months has not managed to get done. We left Togo in June for a visit home to North Carolina. It was very nice to be home and reconnect with our family and friends there! Many positive things happened that I feel would not have had we not taken the time and spent the money to visit home. I think for us personally, visiting home every year is very important, if not absolutely necessary, even though it is financially very painful. Other long term families on the ship have found the same to be true for them. We stayed with Jenny's parents and got lots done and had lots of fun camping with family, eating our favorite foods, and visiting with lots of friends. Bethany got some face time with her cat Smokey too. Joey got to spend some time with his old Boy Scout troop and he and I went to the National Jamboree in Virginia with the troop. David spent a lot of time driving the golf car around his grandparent's yard. Among other things Jenny spent a week in Atlanta for Mercy Ships attending a hospital standards and policies seminar. I spent time staining the storage building that we have our household goods stored in among other things on my long list of things to do. We home schooled our kids for the month of August as school at Mercy Ships Academy started at the beginning of August. We also had a lot of speaking engagements and fundraising meetings during August. It was such a difficult month that Jenny and I have decided to avoid homeschooling completely in the future if at all possible. We would like to leave that to those who have the talents and passion required to teach children well. We don't seem to possess them. We were very glad, though, at the end of our visit home that we had decided to make the trip, despite the great cost and the time away from our jobs on the ship. We returned to Africa at the end of August and met the ship in Durban, South Africa. The Africa Mercy will be in Durban in shipyard until late January having generators and air conditioning units, among other things, replaced. (The ship at the moment is in dry dock and the work is moving forward full force. There presently is a scurry of activity on the ship. It is quite something to witness. I have some photos of the work being done, but I will have to wait to post them to my blog until I have delivered them to Mercy Ships.) We arrived at the ship on September 2nd, moving day! All of the families and non-technical (non-deck and engineering) long-term crew were moving off the ship to live at Appelsbosch College between Wartburg and Tongaat in KwaZulu Natal province, 90 minutes drive northwest of Durban. So we moved with them immediately upon arrival at the ship. Thankfully we had had a day and a couple of nights to rest in a hotel in Durban before meeting the ship. It was still quite stressful packing our cabin in a couple of hours and preparing for the move as soon as we arrived. We had missed all the pre-move briefings that the other crew had gotten during the sail from Togo. All of our personal things that we would need and all of the departmental equipment and supplies, computers, etc., etc. that we would need to live and do all the administrative tasks slated for this time at Appelsbosch were loaded onto trucks and we piled into ship vehicles and buses and convoyed out to Appelsbosch, through the hills and past round Zulu houses. We arrived on moving day at Appelsbosch in a cold drizzle and unloaded and unloaded! We all slept well that night! We have been living at Appelsbosch (our home away from our ship home, away from our home in North Carolina) now for nearly a month. Our family lives in the 4-story building below.There have been many challenges here as the college has been little used over the past four years and many of the systems here have needed work. The staff helping us here are doing a great job. We have people working security for us and running a small tuck shop for us and working to keep the water running despite the current shortage. We rarely have both hot and cold water and sometimes none at all, but there is hope that that will improve with increased rainfall. It has been unusually dry this month. We had lots of trouble with internet access initially and phones didn't come for about 3 weeks, but things are running pretty well at the moment. We have a gym at Appelsbosch with badminton, a trampoline (albeit a bit hazardous), pool tables, and basketball goals. The kids also have lots of trees to climb in and plenty of space to run and scooter and play. I think it has been a little of a transition for the ship kids who haven't had such space and freedom for so long. We have already had two broken arms; one from a skateboarding accident and the other from falling out of a tree. The latter was a bit scary as there was a significant concussion as well. The kids have found lots of little brown chameleons to play with and cool bugs like praying mantises. Bethany named the mantises inhabiting our dorm "Manny" and "Paul". We are sometimes awakened very early in the morning by the very loud cattle just outside our dorm. I often laugh at how vocal they can be. The walls of our dorm rooms are a bit bland in institutional grey, but we have managed to make things pretty homey. The mattresses are not high quality so Jenny and I each have our own crater to sleep in (you can probably see that in the photo below), but it really isn't too uncomfortable.Bethany had a birthday party about 3 weeks ago and the girls had a big time. They bobbed for apples, drew angels and added the wings blindfolded, played musical chairs and ate cupcakes. Jenny has been busy working on policy and procedure writing for the hospital. I worked in the galley mostly cutting up vegetables and meats (and sometimes my fingers!) for the first few weeks we were here, but I'm pretty heavily engaged with doing photography for the P.R. department now. I've been to the ship several times to take pictures and to Pietermaritzburg to cover one of Mercy Ships' programs there, a mental health training class attended by pastors and church leaders from all over the KwaZulu-Natal province. They were learning about working with children on the day I visited.We also had a wedding here a couple of weeks ago. Two of our fellow Mercy Ships crew members decided to get married here, so everyone pitched in and we had a wedding. He is from northern England and she is a fellow North Carolinian. It was a beautiful day and a lovely wedding. I photographed the event, but had a corrupted flash card and lost all the photos (a photographer's nightmare!). Fortunately, after downloading some recovery software, I was able to recover all the photos! Thank the Lord for that! Our family has also been privileged to see lots of other beautiful things like the Southern Cross in the night sky and the Drakensberg Mountains. We had a long weekend this past weekend so we visited the Champagne Valley in the Central Drakensberg (home of the Drakensberg Boys Choir). It was very nice to get away and just be a family for a few days. We stayed in farm cottage owned by a very nice couple with a son-in-law from Dallas. There were lots of nice birds on the farm, including fluffy chickens and even a weaver bird or two.We saw birds of prey at Falcon Ridge, learned about honey bees and ate honey cheesecake at a place called Scrumpy Jack, went zip lining on a small zip line course (David loved that!) and went on a one hour horse ride. None of the kids had ever ridden horses before. Bethany has since decided that she wants to work at some horse stables and own her own horse (oh boy, here we go!) We also did some riding around to look at the scenery (the adults enjoyed that, but the kids grumbled about being in the car.)We had a lovely family weekend in the "Berg", but traveling around carries a little stress with it in that security is a definite concern here. We don't travel at night if it can be avoided. Against the backdrop of apartheid and with the recent increase in racial tensions, we feel a bit vulnerable here. Whites are in the minority here making up only a little over 10% of the population as I understand it, and the indigenous people (Zulu primarily) here seem much cooler toward us and less willing to enter into conversation than what we generally experienced in West Africa. I'm a bit uneasy about that, but mostly just saddened by it. Considering the racial climate, it is easier to understand how people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela might have been shaped by their experiences here. It is nice to be able to easily communicate though, but there are so many cultural issues that we don't yet understand. South Africa is a real mind bender of a place! I am finding it continually difficult to wrap my head around the economic disparity that I see here. It is not uncommon to drive into a city and see very nice houses right next door to corrugated tin and mud shacks with no water or electricity. Often its that juxtaposition that is overwhelming to me. Poverty is so prevalent in West Africa and you see economic disparity there, but it just doesn't seem as deep, maybe, or as widespread. I hope to become more educated about all of this as our time here wears on.

John

Ups, Downs, and Unusual Things

In the past few months David has been taking Karate lessons, along with several of the other boys, on board the ship here from one of our African crew members, Montez. He has really enjoyed that! The boys did a demonstration at a recent Academy function and that was a lot of fun to watch! David also participated in a short recorder concert! Bethany and her classmates recited some poetry they had written in class. Bethany has enjoyed writing poetry.

David came home a few days ago with a big smile on his face and a paper in his hand with "David" written on it many times. He exclaimed with great enthusiasm that he had been learning how to write in cursive! He clearly felt that this was a rite of passage and that now he too could write his name in cursive! He's coming into his own one stroke at a time! Joey and Bethany went to Kpalime a few hours north of Lome' last weekend on a junior high and high school youth retreat organized by the Academy. They had a good time there hiking, playing in a waterfall and having prayer times with the leaders and teachers. They did complain a bit, though, about the "midgies", small flying insects (not mosquitoes thankfully) that loved to bite them. They also had a rough first night as the chemical that their mosquito nets were covered in burned their faces so that they had a lot of trouble sleeping. Bethany also had some stories to tell about a huge beetle in the shower. I think these were great opportunities for character development so I'm glad for them especially considering that, all things considered, they seemed to have enjoyed their time there.

A few days ago two of the teachers in the Academy here had their heads shaved. A large crowd of crew gathered to watch in the cafe' area of the ship as it happened. The Academy had held an auction of goods and services that the teachers were able to provide at little cost to them in order to raise money for flights to Kenya over Easter break in order to attend a teachers' conference there with other christian teachers in Africa. Having an opportunity to share ideas with other missionary teachers and be encouraged in that way was needful for them. Two of our teachers, Ben and Tommy, had offered themselves in the auction in order to further encourage donations to the cause. Almost $5,000, in gifts from crew members, was raised in the auction a large portion of which was given in hopes of seeing our male teachers lose their hair. So on the 15th of April, after the conference, the ceremonious shaving commenced led by Paul our London-based hairdresser. The guys had also been required, as the auction price rose, to shave their legs and wear pink bows on their cleanly shaved heads, for a time, which they both humbly took in stride with no trouble. They took their humiliation like true men for the sake of our children's education! I only wonder what some of the new crew who were not here for the auction and didn't understand the context may have thought about all of this. I wonder if anyone, watching bewildered, thought, "So is this what missionaries do in Africa!" I guess the answer to that question might be a very meek, "Uhm, yes, but only sometimes." After all, missionaries need to have some fun once in a while too.

The day after Easter, Vincent died here on the ship. He was the man I wrote about in my blog post entitled "Green Thumb" that had surgery on the ship early in the field service in Benin. It turns out that the reason his thumb would not heal was because he had cancer there. It eventually spread and took his life. He was cared for and loved here on the ship throughout the course of his treatment and eventually became, as is rarely the case, a palliative care patient on the ship here in Togo. His life and death affected many crew members in profound ways. We couldn't cure him, but I believe that he received love and care here that he would not have gotten at home. Even what family of his we could locate in Benin did not want anything to do with him, so we became his family. I hope we were able to help him in some way find a bit of peace during his final days. A pastor here in Togo buried his body. I will remember him and his story. Vincent was an outcast, unloved and full of pain. That was clear. Jesus loved him here through us. That is the testimony. Isn't that what this is really about? God's love extends to every one of us! Perhaps part of God's purpose in bringing him to the ship so many times was to remind us of that.

I'm sure most reading this blog will already be aware of the grounding of flights in Europe as a result of the current volcanic eruption in Iceland. We here have been greatly affected by this too. There have been a number of crew members, mostly short-term, who have been stranded on the ship over the past week because they couldn't fly out. Most all flights to Europe and North America from here are not possible at the moment. An orthopedic surgeon is among those stuck here. They have been able to fill his surgical schedule with patients so he can continue working while he waits for a flight out. That's a bonus here, but I'm sure he will have a stressful time once he gets back home trying to catch up on his backlog of patients that missed their surgeries this week there. Other new crew were supposed to come this week and have had to delay or cancel their plans. We just continue here the best we can and hope, like everyone else that normal air travel resumes soon. It isn't usually loads of fun when things don't go the way we had planned, but we are not always given a choice. But we are always given a choice about how we respond to the forces that bend us, about the attitude of our hearts when control is taken from us. A saying I have heard comes to mind, "Blessed are the flexible for they shall never be bent out of shape."

An interesting group photo I have made recently is one of all of the people named Jen, all of the ladies named Jennifer, Jenny, Virginia, Ginnie, Jen, etc. and even a man named Jens.

I also recently made a group photo for the O.R.'s Loud Scrubs Day. Things were quite colorful around here that day. One doctor wore a pirate hat that day because he didn't wear loud scrubs. Jenny called it the "hat of shame". One Dutch nurse even made her own loud scrubs by dying a bed sheet and sewing a scrub top out of it! She gets the award for effort! Fun.

John

Settling in Togo

We've been in Togo now for a little more than a month. We still don't really feel that familiar with Lome', the port city we are docked in, but we are slowly getting out and about. When we arrived in February the country was gearing up for elections and we knew that our freedom of movement would be limited. Personal travel away from the ship was suspended for a little over a week during the election and the initial post-election period. We heard lots of reports of large gatherings and some protests, but things seemed to resolve in a mostly peaceful manner. In 2005 there was quite a lot of violence surrounding the Togo elections, so this year many of the Togolese here in Lome' closed their bank accounts and left the country for Ghana or Benin in case violence broke out. We had all been praying that things would go well this year, and apparently they have. The approach to screening patients has been very different this year as well due to the elections. Instead of having a very large screening, effort has been made to avoid large gatherings and have multiple small screenings. I think this system has been working fairly well. Jenny and I were involved in the first screening when there was a lot of uncertainty about how big the turn out would be, but we haven't been involved in the more recent screenings. We, as a family, hope to get out a little more in the coming weeks, but we are often too tired to even want to leave the ship on the weekends. Sooner or later, it seems, cabin fever should force us out more.

In the past month or so I have finally gotten around to doing some reading in the evenings. I finally read "The Shack" by William Paul Young that had been much discussed here. It explores some basic issues underlying our conflicts with God. I have also been reading "Have a Little Faith" by Mitch Albom on a kindle borrowed from a friend. I've found both books very interesting.

A team from Discovery Channel in Canada joined our ship in Tenerife and has recently left the ship after finishing filming an episode of "Mighty Ships" for the cable network. I expect it will air in May or so in Canada. It's possible that it may be seen outside of Canada as well. It will be interesting to see what the film team came away with.

Jenny made heart-shaped waffles and eggs for Valentines Day. And Jenny and Bethany made some pretty pink play dough from scratch using beet juice for the coloring. Bethany made crepes (from white play dough) with scoops of strawberry ice cream (from pink play dough). We all would have liked for it to be real. I spent some time in the crew galley too making real chocolate souffle's. I had forgotten how to make them so the second attempt was much better than the first.

Running club for the kids, which we didn't have in Benin due to the dock conditions, has started up again on Thursday evenings. The kids are having a lot of fun with that, and we love to watch too. I ran with the kids last Thursday. They have a few fun games at the beginning and then fit the kids with pedometers and set them running up and down the dock for 45 minutes or so. They love it and we love that they love it. Bethany saw a rat run under one of the vehicles parked on the dock during running club Thursday. It ran out from under one of the shipping containers that form the wall around our dock space and probably decided that seeing all those kids running was a terrifying sight and immediately headed for cover for fear of being trampled. Good thinking, rat!

A few weeks ago Bethany aquired another temporary pet. She found a very sluggish fly in the dining room and decided to bring it back to the cabin. Jenny and I weren't too excited about the idea, but figured there wasn't any harm in it. Besides, Bethany misses her cat Smokey and has wanted a hamster for years. In light of that it seemed a bit cruel to deny her the pleasure of having a pet fly for a day. Bethany kept the fly in the top of a shoebox without a cover and named it "Mungry the Hungry Fly". She gave it bits of apple and drops of water on a piece of plastic. She even provided some furniture and decor for the fly's new home. And the fly seemed to like being there okay. It stayed on the shoebox cover for six days!! Every day Bethany tended to it and fed it. Finally the evening of the sixth day it left. Where it went we don't know. Perhaps it got strong enough on apple juice and water to fly away.

John

Tenerife, To & Fro and Togo

Well, we're not still sailing now! I realized that our last post was titled "Still Sailing" and much has happened since then! We arrived in Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands, in the port of Santa Cruz, where we had docked a year earlier, just before Christmas. The last few days of our sail to Tenerife was very rocky. There was a storm centered over the Azores to the north and we had some large swells to pass through. I would say that the mood on the ship during that period was a bit depressed as most were suffering from some degree or other of motion sickness. We had a bit of rather serious damage and some huge messes in a couple of places on the ship as things got loose and went careening about. The floor of the galley was covered with flour and eggs at one point. We went without hot meals a time or two as well because it was too dangerous to use the ovens with all the rocking. We were just happy to have something to eat to keep our tummies settled. The O.R. was hard hit as one of the large eye microscopes (on wheels) got loose and paraded around the room smashing into things. Before it was discovered it had buckled the double doors so badly that they looked like a giant piece of popcorn. So a few additional things not on the list before the sail also needed to be attended to when we arrived in Tenerife.

We were very happy to arrive in Santa Cruz de Tenerife and our family was in the middle of the pre-Christmas (or pre-Three Kings Day - Jan 6 in Spain) buzz trying to prepare for the 25th. We gathered small gifts and candy for others on the ship and did our more-or-less annual clothes, shoe, and toy shopping for the kids. And I bought enough Greek yogurt (one of those lovely European delights that you can't get or is way too expensive in West Africa) to stuff our small fridge. Christmas came and went. I was able to say hello to Nestor (the guide who had taken the boys and me caving the year before) at the shop where he works. We ate at McDonald's which we all enjoyed maybe more because of the familiarity than anything else.

The week after Christmas, we took the ferry to Gran Canaria, one of the neighboring islands for a little family time away from the ship. We had a friend who had offered us a free place to stay there, and we had wanted to visit a different island, so we accepted the offer and had 5 wonderful days there. Since it was Christmas-time there were no rental cars available, so we got around using the public bus system, which happens to be very good in the Canaries. We played on the beach, ate Korean food (a highlight for me), went grocery shopping for many of our meals (that was really pleasant for us because we have done so little of that for so long), and wandered in and out of shops looking (also something we don't really do in Africa). I got some Russian candy from a Russian food store that, if not amazing, was interesting. We visited the Casa de Colon in Las Palmas, the house where Christopher Columbus stayed on his way to the New World and we saw the large Christmas sand sculpture nativity scene they do every year by the beach in Las Palmas. We also visited Aguimes, Puerto de Mogan, and got a camel ride through the sand dunes in Maspalomas. Much fun was had by all.

We arrived back in Tenerife in time for the Three Kings Day parade in Santa Cruz on the evening of January 5th. We went to the parade and watched the three kings arrive in town on camels and assemble to greet the long line of children waiting for them. Somehow Joey, David and I wound up where the soldiers on horseback leading the procession assembled at the end of the parade. One of the horsemen let the boys try out his helmet and play the part. That was a really fun bonus. Some months earlier I had planned to go on a mountaineering trip with some friends on the ship so some of my time after we arrived in Tenerife was taken up trying to gather last minute items for the trip. A good friend of ours who we met at our introduction to Mercy Ships class (IMS) in Texas in January 2008 had done quite a bit of mountaineering in the past and had become interested in arranging a trip to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. I figured that I would not be able to go so I basically dismissed the idea. Well, she went through with the preparations and had gathered a group to go by September or so and the question came up again. I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to climb with a group of friends like this, I desperately needed to get in shape and a trip like this would provide the incentive, and Jenny was very supportive of the idea, so I decided to go with them during January. I must say that the idea of leaving the beautiful island of Tenerife during this respite to travel back to Africa was not overwhelmingly appealing, but I had wanted to see Kilimanjaro for a number of years and was excited about the opportunity. I didn't think Joey was quite ready for the intensity of Kilimanjaro, but he did a number of great hikes with our team as we prepared in Tenerife. They were really strenuous with incredible views and Joey took every one in stride. He's a great hiker! Joey and I even went most of the way up Mt. Teide in Tenerife, and the highest mountain in Spain no less :), in a day. We didn't make it quite to the summit, but we both agreed we had had enough. Since the weather up there wasn't the best and we had to hike back down before sunset we turned around 45 minutes or so from the top.

I left with the others for Tanzania in early January. Climbing Kilimanjaro was very hard, but good. We spent 8 days on the mountain.Summit day was certainly the most difficult part. We left our tents before midnight and hiked in the dark up from about 15,000 ft. to 19,300 ft. (5,895 m.) or so at the summit. It was cold and windy and the trail never seemed to end. The high altitude caused a lot of physical and mental changes including some confusion, disorientation, apathy, headache, muscle cramping, and momentary loss of coordination. I had never experienced anything like that before, and there was just nothing easy about it! We arrived at the summit just after 7 am and spent 15 minutes or so at the top. It was very foggy and frost was forming on everything and everyone. We arrived back down at camp around 10:30 am, collapsed for 1 hour, had lunch, and then hiked 4 more hours down to a lower camp. In addition to summiting, we descended about 9,000 feet in all that day. It was quite a blessing to have done it, but I would be happy not to do it again:) Since we were going to be in Tanzania anyway, we had decided to see some animals too, so we visited the Ngorongoro Crater Conservation Area and the Serengeti National Park in northern Tanzania. God's creation is stunning and northern Tanzania is an incredible part of it.

While I was gone for those 2 1/2 weeks, Jenny's parents came to visit for a week in Tenerife and everyone had a great time. Jenny spent a week after that looking after the kids and working on some continuing education coursework needed for her nursing license renewal. My time in Tanzania was great, but for me, I was more excited about coming back to the ship than I had been about going to Tanzania. My time away helped to remind me what a blessing my family is and how much I enjoy doing stuff with them. It was really wonderful coming "home". A few days after I got back to the ship it was time to sail for Togo. But before we left we were able to squeeze in a visit to Monkey Park on Tenerife. That was a blast! Several of the cages there are walk through so you can feed and touch the monkeys.(The first two lines of that sign are: "Please keep your children under control during your visit." and "Do not leave your children walk alone." So, we made sure to put Bethany in the cage with the monkeys.)One of the monkeys pulled Jenny's scrunchie out of her hair and ran off with it. Thankfully, he soon had enough of it and we got it back. There was a moment of horror during our visit too! We were watching one of the small brown monkeys up close when he suddenly reached up and grabbed a ball of poo from the rear-end of a nearby mongoose lemur just before it fell to the ground! The monkey returned quickly to face us with his newfound payload. Convinced that it was soon to be hurled in our direction, Jenny and I yelled for the kids to run away and I'm sure I muttered some military lingo or other like "incoming!" It was quite a tense moment, but soon the monkey dropped his handful on the ground and, with that, the panic subsided. Whew!!Back at the ship we again stocked the fridge with yogurt, got a few ice cream bars for the freezer (very uncommon treat for us in Africa), made sure we had what we needed for the next 6 months and sailed away. The day we sailed was stormy early in the day and cleared later, so we were able to leave, but Tenerife got hit with some bad flooding and storms the following day and over the following weeks. We were fortunate to have sailed when we did, but we were sad for their losses.

So, then we sailed to Togo in early February experiencing even rougher seas during the first 2 or 3 days than during the previous sail! UGH! I don't think much got damaged this time, though, thankfully.

Someone had given a donation specifically for a new pool, so the ship had gotten a new pool mostly installed during the time in Tenerife. It is still in the process of being finished and due to water concerns in Togo, it may be a while before it is operational.

Arrival in Togo went well and there were brass and drum bands to welcome us into the port. We all dressed up for the occasion and sang African praise songs as we arrived. Very nice! Now its time to get our hands dirty; that's what we're here for.

John