Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

Matthew‬ ‭6:2-4‬

Time flies when you’re busy! I’m on call again this week, so there wasn’t as much venturing out, but there’s been a flurry of activity anyway! I went to a local church service and experienced African style praise, which was absolutely u_h-m^aaa_aaa^aay-_jing! I started attending a weekly Tuesday night jam session with people on the praise team on the ship (I finally got around to signing up to help out), and am attending a class on how to do Ukrainian egg decorating called pysanky. I found out there’s a CHINATOWN IN CONAKRY! Lab on call has been full of excitement with big cases and projects, and I made a new patient friend on the ward! It was also fire drill week but then it turned into the most interesting social experiment there was…

And every knee will bow

I’ve been wanting to go to a local church service for a while now, but I’ve only now managed to make it to one! The African services have a reputation for being quite long—you show up in the morning and then don’t come back until right before dinner sometimes! I went with a group from the ship to a church called the Assemblies of God Church (Eglise des Assemblees de Dieu).

The car ride was rather long, we were definitely out of Kaloum by the time we got there. I remember seeing a ton of little lizards on the road when we got out of the car! They were just scampering about.

The logo of the church, which you can see painted on the wall outside, is a cross with a Bible open to Romans 10:13, “Whoever calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” The shield in the front says AD for Assemblees de Dieu.

We went for Sunday service at 10am (Sunday school is for the first hour, 9am-10am). The service was held in both English and French, and I felt surprisingly at home with the bilingual service. Even though I didn’t understand much, if any, of the French, there was a lot of the funny moments when the translator pauses, trying to choose words to translate, only to be “helped” by the speaker or the congregation, which then leads to the speaker switching to the translated language and the translator having to swap to the language that the speaker was originally speaking in… It just reminded me of how our combined English and Mandarin services go at home sometimes. Some of the other Mercy Shippers had some more trouble with understanding the service with the constant language switching. I didn’t realize how helpful it was to be so used to bilingual services!

The church was super nice. It had fans inside, and the building was quite beautiful inside. They have Acts 16:31 painted over the pulpit: “Believe in the savior Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”

The praise worship was amazing. The Guineans really have a way of letting loose with worship through music. It makes our western “style” of praise seem a bit… how should I say it… a bit serious? They sang hymns that I recognized with reverence typical of most church services I’ve seen, but as they finished each song it got more and more celebratory. By the end, everyone was really praising with all they had, the congregation was on their feet dancing, even walking up and down the aisles and up to the stage dancing with the people leading the singing! It was really amazing. You could see how much these people loved God and praised Him through the music. I really wish I could have captured it for you, but even a video would not have done it justice.

And as if I hadn’t had enough African worship, we were led by our African on-boarding team for worship!

On-boarding is an 8-week training program required by Mercy Ships for long-term crew (serving more than 12 months). The training is available to short-term crew, but it’s optional. It has both spiritual/faith-based components as well as professional and departmental components. There are two on-boarding trainings—one in Africa for long term African crew, and one at the ISC in Texas for “everyone else” (which has become an issue for discussion before I’m told). In any case, the group who went to African on-boarding returned to the ship this week and led the evening Sunday service worship.

Evening Sunday service usually has the same format: call to worship, Scripture reading, message, then response worship. After the response song, everyone is dismissed, but you’re welcome to stay and praise a bit longer if you’d like for a few more songs. That’s when the true African praise came out! Eventually everyone who had stayed were on their feet dancing a bit, and people went up to dance with the on-boarding team, just like people went up to dance in the church in the morning.

It’s really an awesome experience to see how people of other nations do praise worship. It’s something that I think really helps to bring us all together—we’re all so joyfully praising and worshipping the same God, even if it is in different languages and styles. I think sometimes people can get caught up in preferences—thinking this style is too loud, or it’s too rowdy, or it’s too serious—that they have trouble letting go and praising God to praise God. It’s a really awesome experience and I’m so so glad I got to be a part of it.

It’s the little things

I’ve found a lot of joy in some little things this week. When I got back from the Sunday service, there was a little school of fish swimming next to the ship. It was so nice. I just sat there and watched them swim in circles with all their friends.

I also joined a little music jam session get-together thing on Tuesday. They have a cajon, which is the slap-box that I mainly play at home for worship team a lot! It was good seeing an old friend but I might have gotten way into it and my hands were really red by the end! We just picked random songs out of a songbook and played and sang. I also got to play the African drum, which was pretty cool.

Also also also Sunday night dinner was PIZZA NIGHT!!!!!!!!!! We only get pizza once every 8 weeks. Ahhhh it was so good. I didn’t know how much I missed pizza. By my quick maths and rusty memory, we may have had it my first week here, but it was more of a kinda charred flatbread and not really a pizza like this T H I C C C R U S T B O I right here.

I also can’t believe I went this long without doing this, but I GOT TO VIDCHAT MY CAT TOBI HI TOBI YOU ARE SUCH A GOOD BOY!!!!

Since you’re probably wondering, there seems to be no indication that Tobi recognized me or cared that I was on the screen. It’s FINE, he’s a cat.

BUT. He knows how to come when called, sit, and give paw!! Bonchi has done an awesome job training him. I’M A PROUD MOMMA.

You’re a good egg

For reasons of seasons unknown to me someone started teaching a Ukranian egg decorating class that’s going every Sunday for 4 weeks. It’s not quite Easter season yet (and it still won’t be even when we finish), but I’m really excited to learn how to make some really sick egg creations.

Ms. Kim, one of the high school English teachers at the Academy, teaches the class. There’s a lot of Christian symbolism in traditional Pysanky, and that’s some of the educational part of the class.

We started with drawing a border, which splits the egg in two halves. The tricky part is trying to draw straight lines on an irregularly curved surface.

Check out my egg. It’s off to a great start, I think.

The idea is that we have to think of what we want our egg to mean, and then pick symbols to use that impart that meaning to decorate the egg. Then you have to write a little card that goes with the egg so that the person you gift it to knows all of the intentional choices you made while making the egg. It’s a really cool craft!

Chinatown… in Africa!

Who knew. But it’s real; I went there.

It’s not really that impressive, but I’m impressed it was “big enough” to have a gate. You can see the Chinatown’s entirety inside the gate pictured above—it’s more like a small strip mall with a few stores and maybe some housing on the upper floors.

I went to the supermarket to get some groceries for a dumpling night some friends and I were been planning.

Since I’m going to be here for Chinese New Year, I figured maybe I could help give some “cultural lessons” to our friends on the ship the way that they shared their Christmas traditions with us in December. With Niña’s help (and Ramón’s muscles), we prepared all the ingredients from scratch from a recipe my mom found and translated for me!

The hardest part was that they don’t sell ground pork in pretty much the entire country. Pork is already hard to find because an overwhelming majority of Guineans don’t eat pork because they’re Muslim. We had to find pork belly and pork tenderloin in the Chinese market, then hand-grind it by just chopping it a lot.

I then messaged some friends to see who wanted to come learn how to wrap dumplings! We had a really good turnout. Poor Melissa was in the galley making dinner when all of a sudden all these people walk in and take over.

Then everyone just went for it! It was super fun (as dumpling wrapping parties alway are), and we finished super fast!

We actually ran out of dough with tons of filling left—after cooking our dumplings we realized we probably didn’t roll the dough thin enough. But that’s a good lesson for next time! We froze the meat for Tuesday’s dumpling party.

Then we cooked and ate them!

It was a resounding success. Everyone seemed to have a good time and everyone said the dumplings tasted fantastic! They were SO GOOD!! Thanks, mom!!

LAB HAPPENINGS

Hey remember the moldy boi from last week? I put it on my makeshift mycology “incubator” and it grew!

I also got tapped to do some environmental mold-growing. The pharmacy gets containers of medication shipped to them, and the container is kept on the ship with an air-conditioning unit inside to keep it cold… but then some mold has been growing on the sides of the boxes so Sandy (the senior pharmacist) asked me to culture it. She also wants me to identify it (“or some sort of classification”) so she can get some measures in place to help deal with the mold. I haven’t quite figure out how I’m going to do that yet…? It’s not really growing any hyphae or anything yet so I’m not sure what use it will be to try and do any microscopic investigations (yet). We do have lactophenol cotton blue, but the tape we have is the matte scotch tape and not really the nice super clear stretchy mycology tape. It still has quite a while to grow some extra structures but I’m not super optimistic because we were literally just scraping powder off the boxes and trying to catch it.

I also got paged for some blood transfusing! We had an ICU patient who was a major plastics case who was just constantly bleeding from their graft site, so I had a 3am page to transfuse a unit. Then I got paged again at 7am for a second unit, but we didn’t have type-specific blood on hand (they wanted whole blood). In the end, the patient recovered pretty well from the first unit so we didn’t have to transfuse a second, but I got to draw my friend Maddy to replace the unit we used up overnight! We had to stick her twice because one arm just dried up after 100mLs which was very sad (because when you stick them again you have to use a new bag and they STILL have to pump out a full unit). But she prayed to the Lord and He opened her veins for the second collection.

Also something cool that I didn’t think I mentioned before, but many of our patients don’t read or write, so they “sign” their paperwork with their fingerprint. Pretty cool adaptation, right? I’m always interested in how the ship’s operations has adapted to the field over the years.

We also got some colorful co-band donated to the lab by another nurse’s mom! Apparently they’re used for wrapping the legs of race horses, and that’s where she has it from . . . ? But now we don’t have to use boring old tan co-band to wrap donor arms with. So we wrapped ourselves with it and took a photo for a thank you card. :)

If it’s yellow, let it mellow

… and if it’s brown, flush it down.

The ship is still on strict water restriction, which is getting worse as the water problem is actually citywide now. We’re having trouble getting water to the ship, so the captain has told us to not flush our toilets until someone poops in them… >_<;; Yuck.

It’s actually gotten to the point where we’re using disposable plates and bowls in the dining room because they don’t want to use our water for washing dishes. We’re not sure how long the water restriction will be… We would appreciate prayers for the ship’s operations as well as the water shortage that seems to be affecting the rest of the city! I’m not really sure what exactly the problem is, since no one has really mentioned a drought or anything of the like, but for some reason the supply chain of freshwater has been interrupted.

In other ship news, the captain announced this week’s fire drill would be at an “undisclosed time.” Some sort of maritime law requires that we have fire drills every fortnight where we have to muster, have fire teams and emergency medical response teams do their thing, and every time there’s some “casualty” (a really heavy dummy) somewhere that needs to be rescued. USUALLY, this fire drill is Thursdays at 15:30, and announced on the captain’s board. But not this time.

Rumors ran amok.

First, it was: “It’ll be 6am Thursday!” So no one slept well because no one wants to be caught in their jammies on the dock when the captain pulls the alarm while they’re asleep. Then 6am came and went, and at breakfast the rumor has it, “It’ll still be 15:30 Thursday! He’s just messing with us.” and then at the end of the workday after 15:30 came and went it was “It’s gonna be tonight during the community meeting!” But then the community meeting finished without event. So then people turned their sights on “It’s going to be 6am Friday!” and so no one slept again, and then “It’s going to be 15:30 Friday!” but then nothing happened, and then…
“It’s going to be Friday night!”
…
“It’s going to happen 6am Saturday! It has to be! It can’t go into next week.”
…
“It’s going to be in the middle of the day Saturday when all the emergency teams are off ship!”

I had to just tell people to stop telling me when they thought the fire drill was going to be. Whenever I woke up at night I wasn’t sure if I should bother falling back asleep if the fire drill was going to be at 6am anyhow (including that 3am page).

In the end, it happened Saturday afternoon. I huge wave of relief washed over me when I heard the alarm go off because it meant that finally I’d have some peace and quiet about the next fire alarm for at least two weeks.

I’m surprisingly worn out from this week. Who knew that a week of ship life could be so exciting? I’m trying to decide what day of the week to take off for next week. I think it will be early on in the week, because I’m POOPED.

Missing you all. Let me know how I can be praying for you!

Jasmin