Charity
Charity of the Month – The Mission to Seafarers
As an international mission agency of the Anglican Church, The Mission to Seafarers reaches out to the 1.2 million seafarers that man the merchant fleet with a message of love and hope in a harsh and often inhospitable environment.
In over 230 ports worldwide, Mission chaplains and staff visit seafarers on their ships extending a hand of friendship and help in times of crisis. In over 100 ports, The Mission to Seafarers operates seafarers’ centres. These are inviting places in the middle of dull, featureless docksides. Inside, crewmembers can make the most of their limited time ashore by replenishing essential items from the Mission’s shops, celebrating Communion and fellowship in its chapels and using its telephones and computers to keep in touch with their loved ones thousands of miles away.
Whilst the large majority of ship owners treat their seafaring staff well, there is still a rogue minority that do not. Seafarers have been stranded on vessels in ports with no idea how long they’ll be there. Some go for months with no pay, not enough food and fresh water. In these situations, local representatives of the Mission work with ships’ agents and other partners to bring resolution and comfort to crews.
When a serious fire broke out on a cargo vessel, the City of Berytus, in the port of Antwerp one night the Mission was on hand to arrange emergency accommodation and support for the sixteen-strong crew, who had to leave the vessel immediately with only the clothes they were wearing because of the seriousness of the blaze. John Attenborough, a Mission representative, took them to the Antwerp Seafarers’ Centre where a store of second-hand clothing was kept and provided them with a Mission to Seafarers telephone card so that they could phone their families and reassure them that they were safe. The Mission supported the crew members through their horrifying ordeal emotionally and physically and kept in daily contact with them until they were able to be flown home. This is an example of how the support of The Mission to Seafarers can make all the difference to the lives and working environments of merchant seamen. Its work is often quietly performed, but when emergencies happen the Mission chaplains are ready to step up and meet the need as required.
During July, please pray for the work of the Mission to Seafarers as it engages with seafarers in ports around the world and give generously towards the continuation and development of this work in the future.
A prayer for seafarers:
Almighty God, creator of the oceans and seas, bless and protect all those who sail the seas to bring us the food, clothes, necessities and luxuries we use in our daily lives. Keep them safe from storms, loneliness and many hazards they face in their lives at sea until they are reunited with their loved ones at home. Look after and protect their families as they wait for them and help us daily to remember seafarers with grateful hearts. We pray this in the name of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who stilled the waters of Lake Galilee and still controls the seas and oceans today. Amen
CMS Mission Partner – Alison Fletcher’s News
May was a busy month. It felt like there was something ‘big’ happening every week and there hasn’t really been much time to process or recover from one before the next one happened. I’ll give you a brief run-down of the goings on:
My kids
The latest bunch of people I jokingly call ‘my kids’, otherwise known as the students in our training schools, sat their state finals during the first week of May. I am always fascinated to watch them over the two and half years they are with us, to see how they change in skill and character. I have had a lot of fun with the nursing class that just finished, and I hope I managed to make up for the time I was away. In recent years part of my involvement with them has been to provide cakes at regular intervals, as incentives or morale-boosters for studying and getting to the end of the course, and some in this class were quite mournful at the thought of fewer cakes compared to what other classes received. I am however confident I redeemed myself in the six weeks between my return and their departure with a significant ramp up in frequency of cakes and sweets! I always find it quite unsettling when a class finishes, as generally I’ll have spent an increasing amount of time visiting and checking on them in previous month with, the peak of such visiting being the week of the exams, but following exams they leave within two days. Sometimes I have the opportunity to get to know certain individuals very well, often due to a problem or crisis that comes up for them, and I feel so pleased and proud when they complete their exams, having battled against so much. It is great to see them excited to be moving on to another step in life but for a couple of weeks after they go there’s a big hole for me! Thankfully I didn’t have much time to mope as there was plenty going on elsewhere...
The First Lady
May 19th was a great day in the history of Kiwoko Hospital, as our new maternity and NICU (special care baby unit) buildings were commissioned and officially opened. When I first heard that the First Lady of Uganda was to be the guest of honour, I decided it was a day for desk work at home, or perhaps not be in Kiwoko at all, knowing that the security and army presence would make it virtually impossible to move. But then I was informed that I was to be on the organising committee and that my job was to organise the lunch for invited guests! I still can’t quite believe the hours I spent discussing who should prepare the lunch, who should be invited to the lunch, what they should sit on and how they should be arranged, nor the hours I spent worrying about the mismatch between table-heights and chair heights (at one point I was dreaming about it), that the lunch would arrive from Luweero too early and be cold, or too late and be, well, late, and about where the First Lady was going to eat and would she eat our food. And that was all before the big day had even begun!
I often chortle to myself about the things I end up getting sucked into here, this being a prime example, and wonder what part of my physio training and scientific qualification has prepared me for such a task. It was a huge learning curve for me, not least in cultural protocol for such functions, who should sit where and who should introduce who for the speeches. It was fascinating to discuss with colleagues I don’t normally work with, and learn from them. For example...does the Buganda national anthem go before or after the Uganda national anthem? If the Bishop is present should he be the one to open in prayer or can the local vicar do it? Do we have to pay the policemen for their work that day (quite an ethical question really)? And so on and so on. Many of our discussions focussed on arrangements for the First Lady, but even a week before we still didn’t know what would be happening so we went ahead and planned who should sit with her, where she could eat lunch if not in my hall, which lavs would be available. We had banners announcing she was coming, and of course the plaque on the wall of the new buildings to commemorate the day. Have you guessed what I’m going to say next? She didn’t come! At the last moment she was stuck on a state visit in Karamoja, in the far northeast of Uganda, and there was no way she could make it.
Despite her absence the day itself was great, and we enjoyed the presence of members of the donor agency who funded it, and other special guests. I never cease to be amazed at how good Ugandans are at pulling things together at the last minute: at 9am I sat watching as the tents were moved and moved again, and as the decorators did their work with painstaking precision but at a painfully slow pace – it was chaotic and disorganised and at 10am I left to get changed wondering what it would be like when I returned. Amazingly, 30 minutes later, the place was ready and looked fantastic. Somehow everything falls into place and a bit of uncertainty until the last-minute seems to be ok – perhaps the sense of sheer panic is a helpful stimulus for action. During the reception I moved presents, sorted out sodas, liaised with the driver going to collect the food from Luweero, instructed ushers despite not having a clue what I was to instruct them on, dodged the rain and ran around in my high heels searching for soap and handtowels at, yes, the very last possible minute!
Well in advance I made plans to go away following this enormous day, and I was jolly glad to get away two days later, to go and rest by the Nile for the weekend. It was a relief to have a breather between this and the next big thing...
My Jimmy
Jimmy has been our wonderful physio assistant for almost 4 years. He has gained so much knowledge and skill, and he has a lovely nature. He is never late (unlike me), smiles all the time, is very obliging and is so good with routine things needing doing in the department. But there’s no career progression for a trained-on-the-job physio assistant here, so for a couple of years Jimmy has been making plans. He re-sat his O levels twice in order to get the right subjects and grades, and then last year was unsuccessful in getting into the nursing school here. He sat the entrance exam while I was in the UK earlier this year, and soon after I returned found out he had passed the exam but was on the waiting list. It has been an incredibly tough time for him – people love to give advice here so he received much conflicting advice as to how to approach being on the waiting list. He knew he would probably not know until the new class reported whether or not he had a place, and what made it even harder was that his brother was given a place. In the meantime he studied for the lab school entrance exam which he sat the day after the new nursing class reported.
One week after they arrived and the day I went to the Nile he called me, very excited, to say the nursing school were pretty sure there was a place and he should get ready! On the Monday he went to school first thing, received his admission letter, and spent the day running around preparing, before reaching school at 7pm, just in time to go and copy microbiology notes with his new classmates! He has now been there for a week and he is doing well, already serious with books and study. It is a tremendous opportunity for him, and I am delighted that his time has come at last. He will be an asset to the school, a very gentle-natured and balanced presence...but Moses and I are already missing him! Physio work has become quite busy and with Jimmy gone and me splitting my time between the HIV clinics and physio, we are half the team we were a year ago. We hope to replace Jimmy by the middle of next month, but it will be longer than that before they can be useful to us, and we realise that finding someone as good as Jimmy may be a tough remit.
Our Diana
As is so often the way here, great excitement sits alongside great sorrow too, and we were very sad to hear last week of the death of 12-year old Diana. She has been part of our Afaayo kids (HIV+) club and clinic for several years, but in the last year her health has really deteriorated, and she faded away from this life last week. Both her parents died some time ago and she stayed with an aunt just nearby to the hospital, but I’m told there were many complex issues going on at home which probably contributed to her demise. It seems that the family were just waiting for her to die so they could sell off the land her father had left her – she has no siblings either. Sometimes the only solution would be to remove the child from such a situation, but there are no formal options for hospice care, for fostering or emergency help in this area. Diana was buried at the family home, about 5km from the hospital, and I was able to attend with some colleagues. It was a shocking occasion, with family members so disrespectful to her body: at one point two men said the priest was taking too long so picked up the coffin roughly and marched towards the burial site behind the house. It was a horrible moment. It is also hard to know how many of the family mourners were genuinely sad she had died, after all I had heard from those involved in her hospital care, and witnessing this has reinforced to me the importance of our clinics and clubs, in giving these kids somewhere to go and feel safe, to be able to talk, to not be excluded or ignored.
This is perhaps the longest letter I have written to you all, but I hope it gives you a flavour of all that is going on here. As well as all of the above, the usual things – like work – continue, and my new role in the HIV department is starting to take shape. In the next month I will continue working on this, while trying to help Moses with physio patients as much as I can. I hope I’ll still be smiling this time next month!
Alison
