MEET SOME OF MY STAFF

Meet Fredene Bishop. She is from Canada but born in Barbados. She is my Laundress Extradenare. She is faithful and never complains. Fredene is in her late 60's and still kicking strong. She is a Godly woman who has an amazing testimony about coming out of poverty. About praying for food when there was none, leaving an empty pot outside their door at night, going to bed hungry but always praying and waking up to a full pot. About praying for diapers for her daughter's baby because they were out and still having 3 days till payday and someone stopping by with a box "out of the blue". An amazing woman of faith because God was all she had to cling to.

This is Nicholas (need to get a better picture) Katsui from Kenya. Nicholas' tribal name is Safari. His last name means small leopard. Nicholas is a man of many talents. Friendly, open and can talk your ear off. But the one that blows me away is the fact he speaks more than 6 langues including German, Zulu, Swahaili, Italian, Spainish, French...This is Safari vacuuming one of our lounge areas. He was afraid for me to show you this picture thinking you would all be jealous of the position he holds here and would want to take his place....any takers? Nicholas is also an excellent djimbe (drum) player and is also a clown by nature, a real fun guy to have around.

Meet Rosie Manion. She is from the States and is my hairstylist. Rosie is the one on the right. On the left is the mother of the 1 year old that is getting her hair cut for the first time. Nerveous mothers are all the same anywhere in the world. Rosie has a great heart for people and missions. When not in the hairsalon you will always find her in an orphanage or hospital somewhere. Rosie's mother came with her to serve together with her daughter and even shared a room with her. The mother left after about 2 months leaving Rosie behind to serve for another 3-4 months on her own.

Of course this is not all my crew but since I complained to Communications that Crew Services or other service departments were never in the news on our intranet they did these pictures for me and did a brief story on each and I wanted to share them with you.

Love and Blessings,

Susan, Crew Services Manager

BEST PLACE TO BUY TOILET PAPER

Well friends, this week has been another full one here on the M/V Anastasis. We kicked off the week with a visit from the Minister of Health and 100 of his staff and media. It was a great visit as the Minister was extremely impressed with the ship, the crew and what we bring to Ghana. The Minister is one of the key positions here in Ghana so he came with the usual bells and whistles - - police motorcycle escort with sirens blaring of course and what I call the Secret Service because they come before the officials and secure the ship prior to their arrival. Lots of police accompanied this man. The only difference in their police escorts and ours was that there were two police men in full dress uniform holding hands. Remember, that means something totally different here and is quite the normal but I still wish I had had my camera. For these tours I have the priviledge of participating in the meetings and tours because I am a Department Head and all of us are expected to be there, greet and welcome the guests and act in some capacity for a tour of the ship. I do enjoy this but will enjoy it even more when either my clothes I have ordered from the seamstress are done or some of our boxes from England arrive as I only have 1 dress and I’m getting pretty tired of wearing the same thing to each meeting. Not that I’m that vain but the only dress I have has a big white stain on the front of this black shirt which I then have to try to hide using my Crew Badge.

My job has so many aspects to it, I never had such diversity before. One moment I’m trying to figure out how many million cedis (dollars it will take to buy an iron) and which of the 3 trillion sidewalk vendors I should buy it from and the next I’m giving driving lessons to my friend and Housekeeping Supervisor so she can help do some department driving. Or maybe I should just drive my car down the street and buy this iron from the 10 vendors who poke their heads in the car trying to sell you everything from chandeliers to toilet paper. Speaking of toilet paper, actually, I did figure out with the store of toilet paper I have currently and the timing of the arrival of our next sea container I may have to take a Land Rover on the street and hit up all the toilet paper salesman next week.

Some of the not so nice aspects of my job happened this week as well - - I have lost my long-term librarian to an unknown virus which then became more complicated with chest pains and difficulty breathing and water in the lungs. She has had this for over 2 weeks and because of her age they are sending her home not to return. This has been hard on her as you can imagine anyone who has sold their home and possessions to fulfill what they know to be a God calling to now being sent back after only a few short months. Please pray for her return to England and her total recovery.

Robert, Jessica and I went back to my favorite place, the Sisters of Charity orphanage and AIDS hospital to visit the babies and the patients and their children. You want to be reminded of how blessed you are, walk into one of these places and listen to the stories of how children were found abandoned on the street wondering around when they can barely even walk or watch a young mother in the AIDS hospital sleeping in a single bed with her 8 year old son and small baby because non of her family will take he children because of the fear they may catch AIDS from the children. It’s odd, but dispite the fact that I’m surrounded there with so much sadness, it is my absolutely most favorite place to be and count it an honor to spend one moment with the orphans and patients just being there, praying for them or painting fingernails for the women.

I am also standing in awe of how God is bringing some other ministry opportunities to the Crew Services department. You will hear more of this very shortly as I will put together a formal statement and a giving opportunity for you to partner with us to directly provide for a local Pastor’s Training school and psychiatric hospital. It is my pleasure to lead my team through the process of thinking through development issues versus paternalism with these two opportunities. God is weaving what we thought was two separate opportunities into one, providing support from the Pastor’s training school to partner with us to meet the needs of the psychiatric hospital and sustain that ministry long after we are gone.

PRAY POINTS

• Health and a new future for Susan Elliott, the Librarian returning to England Sunday
• The end to the virus that has swept through this ship
• The Community Development Crew as they venture into the tasks of water and sanitation, construction and education out in the villages. Many of these people have never been in Africa let alone done development work before so pray for wisdom, connections and relationships with the local people.
• Staffing issues, needs for increased Crew Services staff as well as technical staff for the Engineering and Deck departments.
• Getting longer term staff in service areas - - short-term turnover and training issues are difficult.

BE THANKFUL FOR WAKING UP

BE THANKFUL FOR WAKING UP

Being thankful for waking up this day is a common theme that runs through every prayer said by our Ghanian friends. It is good to be reminded of such a beautiful and simple blessing of the Lord. If nothing else, God is teaching us here how to be thankful for the small things. We see funerals every Saturday and Sunday here. Apparently, regardless of the day you die the funerals start on Friday where all friends and family wear clothes of red and black, on Saturday they wear all black and have the viewing of the body and by Sunday everyone wears black and white clothes and they party like there is no tomorrow with drums, dancing and words of praise as they CELEBRATE the life of the departed. It reminds me of the 3 days from the death until the resurrection, the first day with the blood sacrifice (red clothes) the second day where the disciples were in mourning and fear (black clothes) and the day of resurrection with the white clothes and the joyous celebration.

I may have said this before but Ghana truly is full of the nicest people you would want to meet. It is 63% Christian but with very visible signs of a Muslim population. The call to prayer is heard in town over the loud speakers, mats come out and there are several Muslim schools in our vicinity.

The Engineering Department is taking on a project to build a playground for a local orphanage of which Robert is really looking forward to be part of. He saw the drawings and Midland’s Fun Zone will be matched here in Tema. This one will have a jungle theme to it, thatched roof, natural woods, zip lines and towers.

Crew Services was visited this week by a pastor that needs some help with his bible school. He has already trained 2000 pastors and have sent them out to all the countries of West Africa. He lost the lease on his school. We are still formulating a possible plan of how we can help him so stay tuned for more information.

Robert feels very much called to have a ministry amongst the dayworkers or those Ghanians which the ship hires while we are in port to fill some of the jobs we do not have workers for. The other day during lunch one of them, Patrick, came to Robert looking for someone. Robert left his lunch trying to help him find this person. Small thing don’t you think. Later Patrick spent about 10 minutes with Robert telling him how grateful he was to him because he took the time to help him and didn’t just send him off looking in another direction as many people had already done. Patrick considered this a big big blessing – it makes you stop and think how small small things we do can effect another persons life and we don’t even know it. (In Africa there are more sizes than big, medium and small – there is big big, small small AND big small or medium) There are also more directions than right left or straight; there is straight straight, straight left and straight right. It’s got something to do with how soon you vere off to another direction but hang me if I can figure it out and I get lost everytime.

Susan and girlfriends went out to the market this weekend. Believe me it is not like Walmart by any stretch of the imagination but it IS more exciting. Some of the differences are the noise level, these markets are along the streets where everyone thinks it is impossible to drive a car without talking to you with their horn. Then there is the smell of VERY VERY freshly slaughtered meat hanging in the heat - - humm, nothing better than that! I pray everytime I go through there not to throw up and please Lord don’t let me see anything being killed. So far, so good. The fun part for me (not so much for Robert or most of the men; I guess that’s why the women go alone) is when you get off the streets and back into the “underground markets” - - it is just thousands of minature shops all jammed together so tight you think you are in a building but you are not. The people are very friendly and love to talk. You can play with their children while you shop so shopping can take a very long time. I get a real kick out of the kids running up to you almost out of a dare from the others just to rub your skin. We have been told we feel different and they are curious. The smaller they are the more wide-eyed they are when we bend down to talk with them. Some have never seen a white face and it will scare them at times. The girls were out buying fabric this day. One of the fun things to do here is pick out your own fabric and take it to a seamstress who will then make customized clothes for you for about $10. I’m going to see if they can understand the concept of an American swing jacket, something I love to wear back home as part of my business attire. Sometimes we get traditional African clothes made and sometimes we use African fabrics with Western ideas - - the real fun is in the communicating with the seamstresses, laughing about how they have interpreted your instructions and keep working at it until it works.

M y department is doing great, they have achieved so much this week by cleaning out all the public showers from personal items, all the freezers and refrigerators of old and unmarked foods and even the laundry rooms of personal items along with carpet cleaning one full deck this week. Carpet cleaning here is very difficult. First, we do not have a carpet cleaner and one buffer is ancient and hanging on and the other one the handle broke off and someone before I came put a wooden handle on it but it’s so short you have to bend over. Anyway, they have to throw down about a liter of soap water on the carpet, use the broken buffer to create the suds and then more rinse water (by bucket) and finally suck it up with a wet/dry vac.

The part of ship life that is not going very well here yet is our fire drills. Captain is not pleased with our performance so far so we continue to do them every week. This last time took us a very long time, we had one person not accounted for, someone fell and broke their wrist and although we were suppose to evacuate the ward of patience there were miscommunications and that never happened. We have a very effiencent and thorough Captain so I know these things will be corrected very shortly. It is all part of training a very new crew.

PRAY POINTS
Opportunities to minister to both crew and dayworkers on a daily basis.
God-appointed friendships with the local people
Continued health and safety

Thank you for your friendships, love and prayers. Your financial support over these past two years have made so much possible and we are eternally grateful for your faithfulness.

Our phone number on the Anastasis is just a phone call to Florida because of our satellite system. Our number is: 954-538-4258, home ext. 2020 and work ext. 2820.

Blessings,
Robert & Susan Blanchard
M/V Anastasis
Tema Ghana

CELEBRATE GHANA

I want to share with you some of Ghana this week. You may or may not know that Ghana's Football (Soccer) team made it into the World Cup and actually went further than any African nation has ever gone. There has been much celebrating in this country in the last two weeks. We've been caught in many spontaneous street parties which is a very noisy, exciting and colorful event. The people paint themselves in the red/gold/green colors of the Ghanian flag, wrap themselves in the flag, flags waving from cars, bells, whistles, drums, LOTS of dancing and conga lines! Ghanians have a lot to be proud of, not just because of the soccer team but because these are a warm and friendly people that are truly full of life and love. There is nothing more beautiful than an ear-to-ear smile from a child here.

Ghana's average annual income is about $390/year. You may say "Yeah, but that money goes further there than here". When the World Health Organization does their calculations they are saying that they make in a year what $390 would buy in a developed country such as the U.S. Just think of that! I spent $5200/year in groceries alone...hummm, that makes me stop and think! Ghana is 133 of 192 in the Human Development index which means they are more developed than most countries we have been in recently. Liberia, Togo and Benin fall under their number but yet 1 in 4 children still die in Ghana before they reach 5 years old. Life expectancy is 60 years and the average household is 5.1. The city of Tema, where we are ported has 1 million people. And they are all on the roads everytime I need to go anywhere. You can fit 5 United States inside the continent of Africa....hard to imagine and there are over 2,000 langues spoken here. I can imagine that because just as I think I'm getting the hang of understanding someone, it all changes and I'm back to square one.

Some families here believe they are under curses where their females will never succeed at anything, thus they don't allow them to attempt anything. Sounds like a really sad scheme of Satan to me to keep 1/2 of the population from ever achieving their God-given potential. They believe heavily in curses and that nothing can cure a curse so many will not seek medical attention. Many African leaders consult oracles to make sure their term of office will never end, often offering human sacrifices. We are very priviledged to witness the faith of our Ghanian friends. I honestly believe they have a very strong faith, stronger than most of us in the western world because they HAVE to trust God for most everything, something to eat everyday, roof over their heads, transportation, jobs. Speaking of my own life I can't say I was in that situation until the past few years and even then it's not the same because I can choose to leave.

PRAYER POINTS

• Discovery of outreach opportunities and how we can be most effective
• Delivery of critical pieces of equipment to the Africa Mercy - cannot do sea trials without them - causing another delay to Africa
• Intestinal problems for many crew members
• Thank God for our financial supporters and continued financial support