"Typhoid Clinic..."

Mercy Ships has wonderful donors. For example, ALCON is an company that make tools and items needed for eye surgery. The company donates all the surgical tools, etc that we need. The employees of the company, on their own time, package everything into surgery kits. That saves us a lot of time and worry. Without them we would not be able to do the 3500+ eye surgeries we did this service period in Benin.


Now, we can't show you these surgical kits in action, but we can show you how we used a recent donation.


We received a donation of Typhoid Vaccinations. They blessed us with enough doses of vaccine, that after the crew was taken care of, we were able to pass the blessing onto our Day Volunteers from Benin by offering them a free Typhoid vaccination. Many of the Day Volunteers have never had any type of immunizations. Here are a couple of picture of the over 140 vaccinations we administered. Deb, while filling in as the administrative crew nurse, checks in a day volunteer.
Dr. Craig, the crew doctor, administers a shot to a Beninoise.

Many don't know about the extra ministries that we do while we visit a country. The exceptional quality of people that come to serve on board Africa Mercy from all over the world are not content in "just doing their job". They want to get involved in other aspects of ministry. We have people who visit the local prison every week; others are deeply involved in local churches; some visit the local mental health facility every week, still others visit orphanages. We have a group that every week leave about dusk, set up a screen on one of our land rovers and show the "Jesus" film. We have not taken advantage of the opportunity to go to a "Jesus" film yet, but it sounds like they have a "packed house" every week.

Things are hopping on board Africa Mercy. As the medical aspect of our outreach draw to a close, the ORs are quiet, the wards started closing down as patients, now healed, have gone home. The technical crew (maritime crew members) have gone into high gear preparing for our sail to Tenerife, Canary Island where ship will get some much needed work. We will be participating in drills to prepare us for possible emergencies at sea. They are also responsible for preparing the topside areas for sea. Everyone will be going around the ship making sure that we are "secured for sea" that is everything tied down so it won't go flying when we start rolling.

For the families who worry about the ship sinking (it won't) but we have lifeboat drills so everyone knows what to do if needed.

This is truly an exciting time as we prepare to get underway. Mike can't wait to back to sea and was elated to find out his at sea emergency station is on the bridge. Well enough for tonight.

As we look at our flag counter, I pray for and think of all our unknown friends throughout the world. We would love to hear from you, drop us an email - we will answer back.