Life on the Africa Mercy is different than life at home.
We sleep, eat, work, and play on the same 500-foot floating box – having very little contact with what many people consider the “real world”. This combination of factors, as you might imagine, leads to a wide variety of highly improbable and somewhat bizarre scenarios. Often times, I find it amusing to laugh at the prospect of a similar situation occurring at home. Like last week, we thought one of our friends might have a maggot infestation in his foot, so we all gathered in one of the hospital wards to hack at it in hopes of witnessing a live creature crawling out. (Disappointingly, it turned out to just be a regular old infection, so our efforts were in vain).
But then other times, things happen here that make you feel just like a regular person, with regular relationships, pastimes, family, and social habits. Sunday night gave me that special sort of feeling. I don’t remember where the idea came from, but somewhere along the line, our little group of friends - who, in all honesty feel much more like family at this point - decided that, in honour of either Christmas or Thanksgiving (it never really became clear to me which of the two we were trying to imitate), we would cook ourselves a proper dinner. It took about 2 weeks of gathering ingredients and the creativity displayed in the process was creative to say the least (we even considered having a day volunteer buy, kill, and pluck a turkey from the market for us) but, in the end, we were able to prepare for ourselves a full-course turkey dinner with everything that a turkey dinner should have, pumpkin pie and ice cream included. The boys transformed our Queen’s Lounge (aka, the one fancy room on the ship – reserved mostly for the important people that come to visit) into a beautiful dining area, set the mood with Frank Sinatra, and served us fluorescent blue mock wine. We ate until we couldn’t anymore, washed dishes together, and played cranium until 11:00 at night. And I walked away feeling less like a girl a million miles away from her family, friends, and the life she used to know, and more like a part of something that feels a lot like home.
posted by Jenn
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Life on the Africa Mercy is different than life at home.
We sleep, eat, work, and play on the same 500-foot floating box – having very little contact with what many people consider the “real world”. This combination of factors, as you might imagine, leads to a wide variety of highly improbable and somewhat bizarre scenarios. Often times, I find it amusing to laugh at the prospect of a similar situation occurring at home. Like last week, we thought one of our friends might have a maggot infestation in his foot, so we all gathered in one of the hospital wards to hack at it in hopes of witnessing a live creature crawling out. (Disappointingly, it turned out to just be a regular old infection, so our efforts were in vain).
But then other times, things happen here that make you feel just like a regular person, with regular relationships, pastimes, family, and social habits. Sunday night gave me that special sort of feeling. I don’t remember where the idea came from, but somewhere along the line, our little group of friends - who, in all honesty feel much more like family at this point - decided that, in honour of either Christmas or Thanksgiving (it never really became clear to me which of the two we were trying to imitate), we would cook ourselves a proper dinner. It took about 2 weeks of gathering ingredients and the creativity displayed in the process was creative to say the least (we even considered having a day volunteer buy, kill, and pluck a turkey from the market for us) but, in the end, we were able to prepare for ourselves a full-course turkey dinner with everything that a turkey dinner should have, pumpkin pie and ice cream included. The boys transformed our Queen’s Lounge (aka, the one fancy room on the ship – reserved mostly for the important people that come to visit) into a beautiful dining area, set the mood with Frank Sinatra, and served us fluorescent blue mock wine. We ate until we couldn’t anymore, washed dishes together, and played cranium until 11:00 at night. And I walked away feeling less like a girl a million miles away from her family, friends, and the life she used to know, and more like a part of something that feels a lot like home.
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