Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions.

Psalm 51:1

I honestly don’t have as much deep stuff to talk about this week. This is mostly a slice of ship life post of things that happened this week that are pretty telling of what life is like on board. Things people get passionate about like donating blood or the militant nature of laundry, Valentine’s Day celebrations, and an inside look to our fire drills and emergency response. Hope you all enjoy! :)

Things that people get weirdly passionate about

I’ve been wanting to write a part about the deeper (read: subtle) aspects of ship culture but keep forgetting to get around to it. I finally remembered! Here it is. Hopefully it makes sense. And is entertaining and/or interesting.

Donating blood

I’ve mentioned before that our ship crew is a walking blood bank. All of our blood needs are supplied by our crew—we don’t have an external supplier of blood for transfusion. As such, one of our biggest responsibilities on the ship is managing our active rotation of available donors and units.

In the lab, there’s expiry for everything, even water. As you might expect, blood expires after it’s been donated based on the type of preservative/anticoagulant that’s used for the bag. (I believe we use CPDA-1 bags, which are good for 35 days once the bag is filled.) We also do some basic infectious disease testing and blood counts prior to donation to make sure our donors and their blood are healthy enough to donate to another patient. This pre-donation testing lasts for about a month before we’d have to repeat it. As you can imagine, we don’t want to just stab e v e r y o n e as soon as they sign up because then we’d just have to stab ’em again when the testing window expires. So Kathy does some magic number crunching to decide who gets tested when.

Everyone is an eager beaver chomping at the bit to donate. I guess it’s like a badge of pride to have contributed in a tangible way and it’s a way that a lot of non-medical staff can get involved in the hospital mission. But then people who don’t understand the way our blood management works gets concerned and almost takes personal offense when they aren’t asked to or able to donate.

“I signed up to donate but didn’t get called yet!”
“I got my pre-donation testing but no one has called me yet!”
“I’m on call but no one called me in to donate!”

I hear it so much. Then I have to explain the way we manage blood supply and then we get a resigned sigh.

Pristine glass doors

This one is more of a passion of my friends in housekeeping, but we have eight sets of these glass double doors that housekeeping works so hard to clean all the fingerprints off of all the time. (They must be cleaned three times a day.) They’ll spend a few minutes wiping every glass door of every speck, then rotate to the next one. When they reach the beginning again, there are already hand prints on the first door. If you wanted, you could spend all day cleaning the double doors just going from door to door because when you’re not looking, someone will touch the glass with their hands (instead of you know, the push handle?).

One time, I touched the glass with my hand. IT WAS AN ACCIDENT. I felt like a filthy traitor after that and went about my day feeling like a terrible person knowing that I soiled the hard work of my friends.

Flies

I already wrote about this last week but it doesn’t get any easier. Every time you kill a fly there’s another one. They’re cheeky little brats and try to eat your food and then land on you and bother you and AUGH 💢

We even have fly paper plastered all over the dining room. It’s never enough. They all need to GO AWAY AND LEAVE US ALONE!!!!

Laundry

There are more tears shed and fights fought over the laundry book on Africa Mercy, than the Bible.

Dr. Gary Parker

This is the one that reminded me that I needed to write this section.

There is a laundry room on the ship. It houses ten washers and dryers for crew to use (along with one industrial one each for housekeeping to use).

In the laundry room there’s a sign up book for time slots to use the machines to wash your laundry. You are allocated two loads per week, unless the ship is on water restrictions. Then it’s one, or maybe less (we haven’t gotten there yet).

Rules of the house:

• Sign up to use the laundry machines. Every slot is on the hour. You automatically have the following hour for the dryer.
• You have until 10 minutes past the hour to start your load of laundry. After that, someone may take it.
• If a machine is empty 10 minutes past the hour, you can use it even if you did not sign up (or even if someone else had claimed it).
• No loads can be started after half past.
• If someone is late to turning their laundry over, you may remove it from the machine at the top of the hour, but don’t throw it in the dryer.

It’s not difficult rules to follow, and they’re in place meant to give everyone some grace but also to keep everything running smoothly. But the problem was that the analog clock in the laundry room was slow by five minutes, so there was always a little tension over people touching other people’s stuff.

The word “laundry” will get you out of any situation. That is how militant people get over it here.

Someone take your slot unrightfully? The day is ruined.
Are you late for your laundry spot? Run to the laundry room in a hurried P A N I C.
Already use your designated laundry loads but then someone lets you throw some extra stuff in theirs or lets you have their spot. #bless

Anyway, during the Monday morning crew briefing being nice to one another is one of the things addressed. Turns out someone went off on our ship’s operations director’s mother about not following the laundry rules properly, so he wanted to remind everyone of the rules and also ordered this massive as digital clock for the laundry room.

And then this message appeared on the whiteboard in the laundry room.

Speaking of massive as

Check out this ginormous mango my friend bought from the market.

Happy Palentine’s Day, pal x

Valentine’s Day on the ship was pretty cute. The ship had a Valentine’s Day Soireé in the lounge where there was some games, singing, and trivia.

The first event of the night was a game that some of the married couples on board played where they sat back to back and then each took one of their spouse’s shoes. Then someone would raise a question and you were supposed to raise the shoe of the person who the answer most applied to. The couples who raised the same shoe would get points.

It made for a lot of funny and interesting discussions. Then everyone got to poke fun at couple when they disagreed on things like “Who is the more stubborn one?” and both people would pick the other. XD

Questions were things like:

• Who do you trust more behind the wheel? (Lots of disagreements on this one.)
• Who is the more stubborn one?
• Who is the pickier eater?
• Who takes longer to get ready for a night out? (A lot of the men were quick to raise their wife’s shoe.)
• Who loses their keys more often?
• Who made the first move? (Mostly the husbands—except one couple!)
• Who is more of a night owl?
• Who changed more diapers? (Unanimously the women—sigh I guess that’s expected.)

It was really funny because a lot of these couple are people who have served for a long time on the ship in higher-profile positions so they’re all quite fun to get to know when they’re put out there.

We also had some people do singing acts:

And I won some chocolate from one of those FINISH THAT SONG! They’d play a love song or something of sorts and then cut off the song suddenly and you’d have to sing the next lines. The entire room would sing the words, but weeks of Filipino karaoke meant that I was ready to belt the words I knew and being part of the loud section netted me a chocolate bar.

The dining room also made heart shaped breads. It was really cute. And tasty.

THIS IS A DRILL THIS IS A DRILL

It’s already been two weeks since our rumor mill fire drill week and it’s time for another drill. I got to be more involved and insider about what happens during our fortnightly drills. A dummy and someone (alive) is chosen to be casualties, and this week Caitlin’s dream to be a fire victim finally came true!

We pretended she tripped on the stairs during evacuation and somehow broke her ankle. Colton, the Second Officer who was organizing the drill, got a broken broomstick and wrapped it to her leg and covered it in fake blood made from powdered sugar, chocolate powder, and red food coloring. He was quite proud. I warned him that the emergency medical team might find Caitlin at the bottom of the stairs happily licking her ankle.

All things considered, I think it was a pretty good job.

He also showed us his cool smoke machine and orange light to make things look like fire.

Caitlin is normally a name caller for the fire drill, so I got to have her job this time. I just hold a sign so people know where to muster when we evacuate.

Before we know it, the EMT team is called to the blue stairway on deck 5! EXCITEMENT ENSUES! A stretcher came out of the ship! But it was the dummy. And then another stretcher came out—”They’re being waaaaay more careful with that one, must be an actual person.”

Casualties in a drill (or a real emergency too, I suppose) are sent to the outpatients tent for treatment and stabilization. If it’s mass casualty and the outpatient tent gets full, then it’ll overflow into the screening tent.

Esther says we had a record-breaking muster during this week’s drill, evacuating and accounting for all crew within 16 minutes after it started. Amazing!

Finally my time to shine in the lab

This week, we dropped our graduated cylinder behind our fume hood, which is backed into the corner.

I felt like Ash from one of my favorite movies of all time, Fantastic Mr. Fox. He’s a runt with a bad temper but there’s this one shining moment where he feels redeemed because he can save his cousin from the hands of an angry farmer by slipping through the bars of a metal grill covering an opening. I even made a reference to the scene when I told them I could just get it without them having to go through the trouble of moving the hood but then no one got it because no one’s seen the movie as much as I have.

I’m always asking tall people to reach for things for me and so finally this time I got to pay them all back by squirreling into the back and retrieved the graduated cylinder along with a ton of other stuff that had been slowly gathering behind there (including a blood tube drawn during the field service in Congo… six years ago). Everyone was so impressed they made me pose for pictures on my way out. We didn’t move the hood at all, by the way.

The most exciting thing I found in the lab this week was that six year old tube of blood. It was literally just a cake of brown stuff inside. Gross.

Caitlin told me not to post this but I love it so I’m doing it anyway

I’ve also written before that the Africa Mercy is a converted rail ferry (train ferry). You can still see the old tracks where the trains used to sit on! We took a field trip to the container storage area to see them.

So cool! Also the container in the back of this photo is where our moldy pharmacy boxes live. Still moldy, but maybe they’ll get some other thing like a dehumidifier in there to help them.

We also just had a fun time doing more photos.

Devotionals

I got to play cajon for our hall devotionals this week while we did some worship as a department. Angela from radiology played guitar, and Shaleeni led voice, and we sang a few songs and Shaleeni talked about having a spirit of confession. It was a really good familiar time. It’s hard to explain, I guess. But it was good and I wanted to remember it.

Week 11 has come and gone. Phew! Time is winding down. Shaleeni, my Malaysian-Australian pharmacy friend leaves this week, and it kicks off quite a long month of goodbyes to close friends I’ve made here, pretty much until I leave. I’ve been bracing myself for the grief of knowing I won’t be living with them and seeing them and getting to hang out with them on a daily basis.

Jasmin