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I was on watch yesterday, all day, and am in the “home stretch” now. Today is going to be a very busy day, with breakfast for the crew at 5:45 and a trip to Bunce Island after we’ve gotten all of our usual morning tasks taken care of.
Lately our focus has been on getting the ship ready for sea. We’ve been divided into two watches and I’m working with our first mate, Logan and our Engineer’s son, Toby, whose 22nd birthday we celebrated on January 31. Danni made a wonderful chocolate cake and we all sang and danced to a R&B version of Happy Birthday. We all got a real kick out of making up dance steps from some of the unique actions of shipboard life: Climb the Ratlines, Raise the Anchor, etc.
For the last two days, we’ve been tensioning the headrig, which has meant that several of us have spent several hours out in the rigging along the bowsprit, re-reeving the lanyards that hold the stays in place. We soap them up where they go through the deadeyes to provide lubrication and then haul away with 1/5 ton capacity chain come-alongs – it is hard and filthy work and we all come back onboard completely covered in tar and other dirt from the rigging.
On Wednesday, we had several visitors, including a German film crew who are making a documentary on Sierra Leone. They corralled Cia in the bow and interviewed her while Joy and I worked on the headrig in the background. Later, the cameraman asked if he could go aloft for some shots and I got to give him “Going Aloft 101.” Afterwards, as we were talking, they turned the camera on me, so it looks like I might possibly end up in their movie, shirtless and covered in grime, as I discuss my impressions of Sierra Leone and how we in the Western world are, voluntarily or not, complicit in the economic practices that keep Sierra Leone and other third world nations so desperately poor.
We shop at big-box discount stores and consider ourselves fortunate to buy things so cheaply, but we don’t consider the real costs of the items in terms of the impact on the environment caused by producing our plastic gee-gaws, the effects on the people who work in sweatshop conditions to produce them or the loss of well-paying American jobs because of the mega-sized stores that pay minimum wage to their employees. There’s a sermon in there next time Luke’s version of the Beatitudes comes around, “Blessed are the poor,” rather than Matthew’s more often quoted “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”
Yesterday afternoon, the ship was visited by a dozen or so folks from the European Union’s mission here in Sierra Leone. I was elected to teach the history of Amistad to the group and was amazed to look out at the group and see not only our guests, but our crew to be listening so intently. I was particularly tickled to have Quentin Snedeker, the shipwright who built Amistad, paying such close attention, even though he knows the story well enough that he wrote the historical section of Amistad’s crew manual. I guess it must pay to have a preacher on board.
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