We fought crime, and we tied

The Ave Marie Health Farm (they farm health!) is about a mile and a half from the gate to the port, and crewmembers often go there on weekends to swim in the pool, watch the ocean waves from the balcony (high enough above the trash heaps on the beach to make it serene), or get massages and pedicures.

Last Sunday afternoon I went to the Ave Maria with a bunch of Mercy Ships folks, and decided to come back to the ship with three other women at around 6 in order to make it back for a 7:00 service. People often walk from that ship to the Health Farm and back, but it was dusk, and we're female, so we thought we'd take a taxi. Because there is usually a surplus of them driving by, we started walking towards the port with the intention of flagging the next one down.

Thirty minutes later, several taxis had passed us by, it was dark, and the shifting figures in the shadows of the barbed wire-adorned port walls were making me uncomfortable. I remarked to my roommate Sabina that I was glad I didn’t have anything in my bag that I would be too upset to lose should it be stolen (one might call this foreshadowing).

Two men passed us walking quickly, and a few minutes later one turned back and came towards us again. With a big smile, he asked Sabina who we were and where we were going. She answered his questions (she’s a sweetheart), and he abruptly turned nasty, grabbing her backpack. She asked him what he wanted, and he showed her a knife; she let the bag slip off her shoulders, and we helplessly watched him run away. Score one for the criminals. Two minutes later, a Mercy Ships crewmember drove by and gave us a ride the rest of the way home.

Sabina is quite shaken up, to say the least; I’m upset that I ever let us walk home, especially once it got dark and I started hearing that voice in my head saying, “You’re being stupid” (that voice always sounds a lot like my dad...I hate it when he’s right). But it could have been a whole lot worse, and despite the emotional violation of having our lives threatened, we’re physically okay - and we learned our lesson; we won't be walking around in the dark anytime soon without an entourage of card-carrying meatheads.

In the end, when we calmed down enough to sit down and list the things in Sabina’s backpack, we realized that the most valuable item in it was actually her Bible. Score one for the missionaries...?


(To explain my blogging hiatus - I know you missed me - the internet on the ship has been down for a week and a half, and was just fixed today. A lot has actually happened, but I'll just post bit by bit, I wouldn't want to overwhelm anyone with too much procrastination material in one entry...)