Pro Anchor Women's Football Club

Say hello to the newest female professional soccer player in Liberia. Yes, that’s me. I had my first game Sunday, against a village/town called Paynesville on the other side of Monrovia (it was a friendly match - the season starts ‘soon’, but I have yet to pin down what exactly that means). Allow me to elaborate, in yet another entry concerning the beautiful game:

There’s a field near the entrance to the port where we saw some women with soccer balls the first week we were here. Intrigued, we introduced ourselves, and they invited us to come play with them on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Having no idea who they were, we showed up the next Tuesday. It turns out that there’s actually a professional women’s league here, and this is one of the teams. It’s financed by the port, hence the name Pro Anchor. After the first practice I filled out a form and they took a picture, and now I’m on the team.

Last Sunday I was told to be on the side of the road at 2pm, and lo and behold, a taxi drove up at 2:15. I was shuttled inside with my friend Lucy, whom I took along as my manager (i.e. water-bottle holder and fellow stare-attracter; she also provided a good deal of entertainment for the fans as the main topic of discussion on the sidelines was whether or not her curly hair was real). We were taken to a schoolhouse somewhere downtown where the rest of the team trickled in, and they handed out uniforms (long-sleeved, in 1239847 degrees, no big deal) and cleaned my cleats for me (the purpose of this was unclear) as we waited for the bus. The bus arrived; a rusty hippie van that comfortably seats maybe 12 people, 14 uncomfortably. We counted 27 passengers when we left, and picked up three more on the way. Two were hanging out the door. I would have felt unsafe except that I was wedged so tightly amongst my teammates and various coaches (I think there are 9 of them) that we could have driven into a concrete wall and I wouldn’t have budged.

We finally arrived in Paynesville at 4:30, for a 4:00 game. We parked in the middle of a village and were escorted by the villagers another half-mile through huts, other soccer games and banana fields to find the field: A rolling sand dune enclosed by weeds. The penalty areas and stick goals were on the weedy bit, so they were a few feet higher than the rest of the field, making life difficult for the goalies. There weren’t any lines, but there were very enthusiastic linesmen with branches that they waved when they thought the ball might be out of the bounds, usually after someone got tangled in the brush or body-slammed a spectator - of which there were plenty, as the entire village had turned out for the game. They crowded the sidelines, including behind the goals where they were frequently hit by shots gone askew. There was a contingency of children who gathered on one corner of the field and scattered every time the play approached their perch, only to return when the coast was again clear. The fans participated fully in the pre-game and halftime talks, crowding the huddle and listening solemnly to the coaches’ admonitions, and shaking the hands of their favourite players.

Surprisingly, no one twisted or broke anything, and the play was quite competitive despite the conditions. I was very well taken care of; the coaches made sure no one tried to marry or buy Lucy and me, as per the usual offers, and when I was pushed by an opposing player she received multiple threats from my enraged teammates (‘You kick her, I kick you! You kick her, I kick you!’ – I tried to convince them that I really wasn’t upset). The final score was 3-0, Pro Anchor victorious, and the white girl (me) scored one goal and had an assist (thank you, bumpy unpredictable ground in front of the goal), enough to garner her a following of at least 849375 scantily clad child fans wanting to shake hands and tell her their name. This made it difficult for her to manoeuvre her way through the throngs and into the car of the club’s President, but she made it eventually and he very kindly escorted her and Lucy all the way back to the port.

Oh, the glorious randomness of it all…

Daily Miracles

Last week was our first week of surgeries here in Liberia (finally!) and it’s been amazing! Some highlights:

We’ve started eye surgeries again, which had stopped by the time I joined the Ghana outreach so they’re new for me. They make us very busy in the Sterilizing Room, but they’re fun to watch. We do mostly cataract removals, which are just a short 20-30 minute operation, allowing us to see 8-10 or more patients per day. There’s nothing quite like watching someone walk into the OR completely blind, being led by both hands, and walk out less than an hour later with an eye patch indicating that they’ll be able to see again later that day. I got to watch one of the surgeries, and the patient was squirming a bit (as would I, if I had never seen a hospital before and all of a sudden I was strapped to an operating table with someone stabbing me in the eye) so I held her hand throughout. When Dr. Glen finished removing the cataract in one eye and inserting a prosthetic lens, she could already see his two fingers held in front of her – the first thing she had seen in years. She left praising God for her sight.

Many of our current patients are from up north in a region called Maryland. These patients were actually flown in on a Red Cross plane because transportation is either too difficult, too expensive or both. My own ‘adopted’ patient is named Esther, a shy teenager from Maryland with a large tumor that has been growing on her right eye for 3 years, claiming her sight just two months ago. She had surgery to remove the tumor and insert a prosthetic eye, not restoring her sight but giving her a normal face again at that oh-so-painful age of 16 – I would imagine the problems of adolescence transcend most cultural barriers, and my heart goes out to her for having had to deal with disfiguration in addition to rampant hormonal mood swings.

And now for the tearjerker: One of the patients onboard is an older man from Monrovia who was separated from his daughter 18 years ago due to the war when she was forced to flee outside the city. They had no contact during that time, so he didn’t know that she had married and given birth to several grandchildren. She recently was able to return t Monrovia, and found a cousin who had heard that the father was coming to the Anastasis for a surgery. She came to the port to find him, and the nurses working on the ship’s ward were privileged to witness their reunion here – after 18 years!

I feel so blessed to be here and to be a part of writing these stories, and I want to thank you all for being a part of it too. It’s amazing to think that behind every one of the 300 people working on this ship is a network of families, churches and friends supporting them with their encouragement, prayers and finances. It wouldn’t be possible without you!

The No Mercy Team

Our dock here in Freeport is guarded by two UN units, one from Nepal and one from Bangladesh. They’re thrilled to have us here, and since the second day we were here they’ve been coming over to ask if we can come out and play, kinda like when we were 10 years old and would go over to the Bansals’ house next door to see if anyone wanted to build a snowman. A friend was recently telling me how intimidated she was by the armoured UN tanks that can be seen patrolling the area, until one drove by with guards yelling back at her to come over later for volleyball. Tonight we asked them if we could use their field for ultimate frisbee, but they don't know how to play, so they asked to borrow the frisbee for the night and practice so we can all play tomorrow.

The Bangladeshis plays volleyball mostly, but the Nepalese have a space big enough for a soccer field, so we’ve been going over once or twice a week to play them with some yellow uniforms that someone bought a few years ago for the ship (we're the No Mercy Team). It’s a pretty big deal. They’ve tried to fix up the ‘field’ by filling in the potholes and putting up fencing, and once when we didn’t have a ball I was escorted in a speeding UN vehicle on a mission back to the ship to get it. Spectators from both sides line the field and cheer, and news of the score circulates the ship in minutes. There’s even an impartial Liberian referee who I think may actually have a whistle implanted in his throat – it’s difficult to tell if he can breathe without blowing it, and he certainly can’t talk without whistled punctuation on every word.

I sometimes feel like I’m at summer camp, until something happens - like my ball goes out of bounds and gets popped on the massive coils of barbed wire surrounding the complex, or I fall lightly but get up looking as if I’ve been in a fight with a cheese grater because the field is covered with rocks – to remind me that nope, I’m still in Liberia.

Are You The Mercy Ship?

Wherever we go here in Monrovia, and to a lesser degree when we were in Ghana, people shout “Mercy Ship!” or ask us “are you the Mercy Ship?” (yes, as a matter of fact, I am the Mercy Ship, the whole thing, I’m a large white boat). Even though there are other white folk around here, apparently most of them don’t regularly go walking in the heat and squalor to explore the markets and sample random foods on the side of the road (strange). Often people are just being friendly and welcoming us, but there are also a LOT of people who need medical care, and want to describe their problem to us in the hopes that we can help them (despite the fact that there are only about five or six actual doctors aboard out of 300 crewmembers). On any given day, we’ll have three or four people describe to us their malady on the sidewalk; one man pulled up his pant leg to show us a bullet lodged in his shin, a woman needed glasses, someone else wanted medication for their sick mother. Almost every crewmember has one or two interesting stories, many of them involving public disrobing to reveal the affected body part, whatever that might be.

Sadly, there is nothing we can do for most of these people because of the limited range of surgeries that we offer and because there are just so many people in need. It’s the most difficult thing in the world to tell someone who is clearly suffering that all we can give them is our prayers, and I thank God for my own health every time I encounter such a case. However, when it’s a problem that we can solve, like a tumour or cataracts or a sore tooth, then we’ll tell them to listen to the radio for the time and place that we will be doing a major screening in early May (the surgery schedule has been booked in advance until then), or give them information about the land-based dental and eye clinics. And when it is the case that yes, there might be something we can do for them – even if it’s a small ‘might’ – then their eyes light up with hope, and the elated Mercy Ships (that’s us) sail home on the clouds :)

Afterthought: Last night we met the head of security from the hotel we ate dinner at, and he was thrilled to learn that we were from Mercy Ships because he has eye problems that he desperately needs fixed (cataracts, I think). He neglected to acknowledge the irony of the fact that he was in fact driving us home in the dark at the time of this conversation...

Patient Stories

Some of you have been asking more about what goes on here - this website was made by a photojournalist who spent some time on the ship, it's worth some time to read through the stories...

Life in a Five-Star Resort Hotel

Monrovia is built on the coast, at the mouth of some wetlands (euphemism for a swamp, did someone say malaria?). One can see how it must have been a breathtakingly beautiful setting at one time (it’s still breathtaking, but now it’s more just because you don’t want to breathe in), and I think I would have decided to build a city here too, if I were into that sort of thing. There is a small raised bit of land protruding out into the ocean, which some say is the highest point in Liberia but I think that’s a lie because it really is more of a bump than a hill, never mind a ‘peak’; but anyway, this slightly elevated real estate was at one time home to a beautiful seven-story five-star resort hotel, overlooking the city on one side and the ocean on the other. Sometime in the early 1990s, the hotel was taken over by Charles Taylor’s people, beginning a steady decline during the war years into its current eerie dilapidation.

Approaching the hotel (barely breathing hard, it’s really not that high), the first thing one sees is the swimming pool, empty but for some garbage in the deep end. The pool deck has been swept clean by the same women who are scrubbing their laundry and laying it out to dry, a few of the hundreds of displaced Liberians who have taken up residency in the empty rooms. We were met by a hoard of children in a random assortment of used clothing (Bugs Bunny t-shirts, Charlotte Hornets jerseys, etc.) who took us inside to see their ‘school’: three blackboards (one with drawings and words to match – ‘cup’, ‘chair’, and ‘mortar’ - !) and a few benches built by one of the Mercy Ships crewmembers during the last outreach, in the stripped ballrooms whose floors still smack of marbled decadence. Everything of value in the hotel has been absconded with long ago, so all that remains are clues to its former elegance – spiral staircases, balconies overlooking the palm-lined beach, elevator shafts and the lifeless entrails of electric circuits – and the effect is quite spooky.

Walking up the stairs while descending into darkness, a little girl named Blessed and her brother Franklin who had attached themselves to my hands - they thought it was funny that I kept tripping in the shadows - took me to meet their mom and aunt, living in a stark but neatly kept room on the sixth floor and making a living by selling little plastic bags of charcoal in the hallway. Blessed’s mom gave me a picture of her ‘to carry’ (I can’t really figure out why, but it’s cute so it’s hanging up in my room). From there we continued to the old restaurant on the top floor, where we could see the entire city, including the port where the ship is docked. I showed Blessed and Franklin ‘my house’, the big white boat in the distance. I think they were a little confused by that, but they still wanted to come home with us. I would have taken them too, but kidnapping is generally frowned upon here at Mercy Ships, so we left them with a ‘God bless you’ and headed back down the gently inclined slope of the highest point in Liberia, photo of Blessed in hand.

Signs

Kids

Ghanaian kids love the camera - we were often inundated with requests for a 'pictchah!', and if we complied then they would try to outpose each other until we called off the photo shoot; then came the gleeful attack of the grubby hands as they tried to see themselves on our tiny camera screens. Here's a sampling of the results :)

Harbor Swimmers

With four-fifths of the country unemployed, Liberians are forced to devise creative ways of staying alive, giving rise to some interesting careers. One of these is harbor swimming. Although night swimmers aren’t unique to Liberia – we encountered many of them in Ghana as well – they are more prolific and easier to spot here.

Harbor swimmers, as the name suggests, swim in harbors. They scout out the docks during the day to see if there’s anything worth stealing, then swim back at night, climb up and take whatever they can float with. With cargo ships going in and out and goods being constantly loaded and unloaded, there’s quite a bit worth stealing, though the most common item to see bobbing along is rice bags.

Mercy Ships has been here twice before, and experience has made the ship’s security particularly vigilant. There is a night swimmer watch that volunteers sign up for in two-hour shifts; seven swimmers were arrested just last night (that’s a record for this outreach), and a few days ago the security officers, along with the U.N. soldiers that guard the dock, spent an hour and a half trying to catch a swimmer in broad daylight who was trying to escape onto one of the defunct barges that litter the harbor. They finally got him by bringing in another Liberian to swim after him.

During the last outreach, one swimmer who had already been arrested twice was seen walking around on the docks during the day. One of the security guards recognized him and asked him what he was doing here. His response: “Deciding what to take tonight.”

Ha.

Welcome to Liberia

We arrived in Monrovia Thursday afternoon, and were warmly welcomed on the dock by our Advance Team, singers, dancers, and some Liberian dignitaries including the Vice President. It already feels worlds away from Ghana - I wasn't prepared for the desolation of the city, and I haven't even been very far beyond the dock yet. The port in Tema (Ghana) was frightening in its activity: crawling with heavy machinery, hundreds of ships coming in and out every day, a high-walled city of shipping containers. The Monrovia harbor is empty, with just two or three other ship - and it is the only commercial port in the country. There are sunken ships visible in the water, marooned ships on the beach, and even a massive barge that was tipped over in 2001 from improper loading - still resting on its side, half in the water. Something like 40 people have drowned trying to steal goods from its underwater containers.

On the bright side, the air is much cleaner, the view from my porthole has water and sky instead of containers, the sunset view is gorgeous, and we have a good stretch of dock all to ourselves. Because the entrance to the port is guarded by the United Nations it also feels much safer, though once we leave the dock it's far more dangerous than Ghana was, and we certainly won't be taking any 5-day excursions to little surfer villages.

We've spent the first few days here learning about the history and status of Liberia through speakers and films in order to better understand the people that we'll be serving - and it's been heartbreaking. Conceived in America and established by liberated slaves in 1847, Liberia was once a posterchild for independent Africa. It was peacefully democratic from its inception until a 1980 coup ignited 23 years of civil unrest, with a bloody civil war lasting from 1989 through 2003. The final standoff between the Liberian Government, headed by Charles Taylor, and the rebel army, called LURD, occurred in Monrovia and is documented in the film 'Liberia: An Uncivil War.' We watched the film last night, and it was a bit unsettling to see images of such recent fighting right outside the gates of our port. Charles Taylor ended up stepping down and fleeing the country after Nigerian peacekeeping forces arrived, but not without first bankrupting his country, leaving it the poorest country in the world at the time according to some estimates.

Successful elections were held in 2005, and massive improvements have been made under President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, a Harvard-trained economist and the first female president in Africa. But the situation is still dire: 14 years of civil war produced a generation of uneducated and unemployed ex-child soldiers. Unemployment is around 85%, leading to problems with rampant theft, prostitution, teen pregnancy, and civil unrest. More than 1/3 of the population lives on less than $1 per day, and access to basic healthcare is rare. The lack of infrastructure, including electricity and water, continues to discourage foreign investment. If you're interested in reading more, it's definitely worth some time on Google, and here is a link to a good blog that I've been following (thanks Michael).

Needless to say, this is the closest I've ever been in time and space to such violence and destitution. I'm apprehensive to leave the safety of the port, and I've managed to make excuses to stay mostly on the ship so far - a vestige of my experience in Ghana, I think (or maybe I'm just a wuss, I'm ok with that). However, I can't think of another place where the services of Mercy Ships are more needed, and though it's overwhelming to think how our minor contributions are dwarfed by the desperate needs of this broken country, I'm thrilled to finally be here and anxious to get to work!

Sailing!!

I'm somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, and I can't see land, but I can write on my blog. As one H. M. Plum put it, 'things have really changed since the Titanic days. I don't remember Leo DiCaprio being on instant messenger when they hit the iceberg.'

Things got off to a slow start, as there was something wrong with the engine that only became apparent when it wouldn't start on the day of our departure. The engineers stayed up all night, and a prayer meeting was held, and the engine was revived by around 3am. They say that this ship is held together by prayer, and I'm beginning to think there's a good deal of truth in that.

In the days leading up to the sail, we were all warned against seasickness and given preventative medication to take. It seemed to work as I didn't actually hear of anyone getting seasick - but on the first day of the sail, either as a result of over-medication or staying up all night to bid farewell to Ghana - the majority of the crew could be seen stumbling around half-asleep and hardly able to keep their heads from rolling to one side, nevermind carry on a polite conversation. If this weren't Mercy Ships, I would've thought someone had spiked the Tang. Add that to the fact that no one could walk in a straight line anyways due to the motion of ship, and it was all quite surreal.

Sailing has been delightful - the clean air is most welcome after the smut of the Tema harbor. Dolphins can be seen playing around the ship (often noted in announcements by the captain, immediately after which the ship tilts a bit towards the side that they're on due to the mad rush of crewmembers with cameras). There was a stunning sunset worship service on the bow, and afterwards a large cohort of young ladies secretly dragged mattresses out for a massive slumber party under the stars (it's hard to keep things like mattresses secret though, I think a few people caught on).

Because there wasn't too much work for the OR staff to do, with everything in the OR tied to the wall or duct taped to the floor (kudos to the man who invented duct tape), I volunteered to work in the Engine Room because they had asked for people to help with something called 'tunnel watch'. Having no idea what that meant, I signed up for a four-hour shift.

It turns out the Engine Room is right around the corner from Purgatory: 902849754 degrees Celsius, monstrous black metal bellowing enginey-type machines closing in from all sides, grated floors covered with oil so you constantly feel like you're going to plunge to a feiry death in the bowels of the ship below, and a roaring sound that vibrates every part of your thoracic cavity. My job was to take the temperature of some metal things (I dunno...they hold these big shafts that turn?) every 15 minutes to make sure they didn't overheat, check the oil of the same metal things and top it up when needed, and move the water pump around so the engine room didn't flood. I'm sure it's much less responsibility than it seemed at the time, otherwise I don't see why they'd let me do it, but I felt pretty important, and I don't think I broke anything.

At the end of four hours I was sweating profusely, black all over, and in awe of the poor, poor souls that spend 8 hours a day down there, making this ship go. As for my contribution to ship maintenance, I think I'll stick with the (air-conditioned) prayer meetings.