At Home in Senegal!

We’ve been in Senegal for almost a month now! The sail to Senegal was relatively calm, but I definitely didn’t feel great on the sail days. No kids or teachers were throwing up from seasickness though, so we’ll call that a success! We had several themed evenings during the sail, which are always great fun! We had a pirate and mocktails party, a sock golf tournament, and a movie night in midships (watching Voyage of the Dawn Treader, which is a 4D experience while sailing)! 

Our captain worshipping on the bow!

We got to visit the Bridge and check out the charts and maps the ship was following. 

We had school the morning of our arrival so we went to school as normal and waited for the captain to announce “all deck hands to your mooring stations” and then we knew it was time to head out to deck 7! We were getting close! We grabbed our crayon colored flags we had made earlier in the week and headed out for our first glimpse of Senegal! 

We passed multiple beautiful islands on our way in and as we neared our new dock space we could see the advance team waving from the dock in their matching African fabric for this special occasion. We waved our flags and sang “Jabulani Africa.” Sailing into a new country is always such a sweet and special experience! 

We finally got the ship tied up (and by we, I don’t mean to insinuate that my littles and I had anything to do with it) and we went back to class. That evening we had the welcome ceremony, which we got dressed up for and went out to the deck 7 to watch the ceremony taking place below. There were fingers, dancers, a red carpet, and lots of speeches! The First Lady of Senegal was there and welcomed us! It was as very joyful occasion! 

Over the course of this past month, I’ve had the chance to go out to Goree Island, which is one of the main locations that slaves were shipped out of West Africa. You can still tour the slave house where they were kept and the door of no return where they boarded the boats, never to return to Africa. It was a very sobering place, but physically so beautiful! It’s a small island so there are no roads for vehicles! You just walk everywhere and all the doors and flowers are so colorful! 

We have also had the Academy and Hospital Open Houses! Those are the two places onboard where general crew are not allowed to go, so we have big open houses for the crew at the beginning if the field service so the crew can all come through and see what happens in those spaces on the ship! During the hospital open house I got to learn how to empty a catheter, do cataract surgery (on an apple) and take a ride through the CT machine! And the hospital opens tomorrow!!! 

Whole crew!

*Tonight felt like a holy moment to be onboard. We all got to go down to the hospital and pray for every room...I even saw people praying over each bed! There were prayers that were quietly whispered, prayers that were shouted, prayers in many languages at the same time, prayers in song, and everything in between! It was a special moment to be a part of this crew, this family, walking the halls of the hospital seeing people laying hands on doors, praying over specific nurses and friends, and even praying over the stools where the patients will first sit when they get onboard TOMORROW! Pray with us! Pray for courage for these brave people who may have never been on a ship before or even in a hospital before. Pray for physical healing for each of our patients. Pray for spiritual healing and that they will meet Jesus through this family of crew members!

Las Palmas and Tenerife!

I am happy to announce that I am back in the happy land of wifi and I can finally post something! I feel like I’ve been back for so long now and quite a lot has happened so I will try to summarize the past few weeks briefly…

I flew from Houston back to Gran Canaria (which is the island where the ship does dry dock in the summers and is part of the Canary Islands) on July 20^th and proceeded to carry my 40 pound bag up the “tower of terror” which is the ladder we use to get onto the ship during dry dock! It’s 72 steps tall! 

My first week back was Academy Leadership Week which involved our Principal, our Assistant Director, the lead high school teacher and myself (the lead elementary teacher). We spent the week playing “musical rooms” (instead of musical chairs) as we took all the textbooks from certain classrooms out and into other classrooms because some of the subjects are switching classrooms this year. We basically have one week to prepare everything for Teacher Orientation Week and to get the Academy back to looking like an academy instead of like crazy storage units for all other departments, which is essentially what it had turned into during the summer. The AC doesn’t work during shipyard and, while the weather outside was cool and gorgeous, the temperature inside our metal box was hot! I took a shower every night just before I went to bed so that I could have wet hair as I fell asleep, which kept me a little cooler. On Thursday of that week the ship went back into the water, so we all had to get off and go into town because the ship has no power or water or vacuum system (toilets) while it’s being moved back into the water. The Academy team walked to the Boardwalk in Las Palmas and continued prepping in a little café on the beach while drinking our “café leche y leche!” Not a bad way to work!

On Friday all the new onboarders (including the new teachers) arrived, which was very exciting! On Saturday I got to be the one to go pick up one of our new families, the Newquists, who also happen to be great friends of mine from back home, who will be living onboard for the next two years! It felt soooooo good to finally have them onboard after praying for them to get here for the past year! On Sunday we all went to the International Lounge for our usual church service onboard only to find that since we were still in ship yard, nothing had been planned for a service like we had expected. Roger Newquist stepped up and started the impromptu service with prayer and then I started leading worship. Little by little people came up and got on guitar and drums and piano, and another friend asked us all to get into small groups to pray for the coming field service. Even though nothing had been planned, it turned into one of my favorite moments onboard so far as so many people in the community, some who had been here for years and some who had been onboard less than 24 hours, stepped up and came together as a community to worship!

The following week was Teacher Orientation week, which is really fun, but also involves so much information being aimed at our new teachers, kind of like a firehose of teaching info. We do our very best to not overwhelm them, but it’s really hard to not feel overwhelmed when teaching in a  new place with new people who have new ways of doing things, especially when that new place is a ship and the internet isn’t working so you can actually get the work done that you need to do for the coming school week!

Things that most teacher at new schools probably don’t have to deal with:

-       In port muster drills interrupting your work time

-       At sea muster drills interrupting your work time

-       Pirate drills interrupting your work time

-       PA tests which include blaring music for an hour while we’re attempting to have teacher meetings

-       Unsecuring your classroom to see what you actually have only to have to secure everything again for the sail at the end of the week.

-       No internet because we’re in ship yard, which also means no printing

On Friday of that week we finally sailed out of Gran Canaria and on to Tenerife, another one of the Canary Islands, where we spent a week for our technical crew who have been working so hard all summer to have a relaxing break. 

Relaxation was not on the agenda for teachers though because we started school this past week! We did get one weekend in Tenerife before school started during which I got to ride a cable car with the Newquists up a volcano, which had smoke coming out the top of it!

I have five kindergartners this year who are just as precious as they come! I have two from England, two from the USA and one from Congo/USA. We spent this week learning about each other, about Senegal, and how to behave in our classroom. We also walked into the town of Santa Cruz to just get off ship for a bit, which was lovely!

We had a lovely last morning in Tenerife on Saturday. Some friends and I went out for churros and chocolate and then slowly walked back to the ship because our shore leave expired at noon. On to Senegal!