Silly Girls

After six months in Los Angeles, our next destination was New Zealand. There were still some bad feelings from when we had lost the previous ship there years before. They wanted to take the Anastasis to try to assuage some of that. First though, the ship was stocked up with relief supplies for the people of Guatemala. The president, Efrain Rios Montt was purportedly a Christian and had appealed to the ship ministry to bring relief for his people after years of civil war.

The ship ministry had been running DTS’s during our time in Greece and while most YWAM DTS’s average about 30 people, the ones on the ship had usually been quite a bit bigger. Now, with all the publicity we had been getting, the DTS they started as we left L.A. had about 150 students. With that and many new crew members, the ship became quite a bit more crowded.

A lot of people came to see the ship off and as we were leaving, two teenage girls started waving intently at me. As I looked closer, I noticed something written on their hands - I love you. I don’t remember ever seeing these girls before and I was kind of embarrassed, yet flattered.

Our mail service was kind of spotty because (of course) we couldn’t send and receive mail at sea. When we got to a place we could receive mail, one of the girls had sent me several letters and included a picture with a declaration of how much she loved me. I can’t remember how she got my name. I wrote her back, giving her my philosophy/theology of girlfriends/boyfriends and about how much trouble she could get into by being so forward. 

When we got to the next place we could receive mail, there were several more letters waiting for me which she had written before she got mine. Our letters finally caught up and we continued to write briefly. Then maybe the romanticism of “loving” a sea-going teenager wore off because it ended. Hopefully she learned something from our correspondence and her life turned out different because of it. But I certainly learned how very shallow some teenage girls can be.

Leaving Los Angeles, we sailed to Guatemala to deliver the donated relief supplies. We had to anchor offshore and offload the supplies onto boats to take ashore. The seas were a little rough so they could not pull any launches alongside the ship for people to go ashore. If we wanted to go, we had to be lifted by crane on a netted platform into a waiting launch. 

We were going to be there a few days so I decided not to go ashore the first day so I could finish some schoolwork. The next day the seas were too rough to even do the crane thing. So Guatemala is one country I could not add to the list of countries I have been to. It turned out that a lot of human rights atrocities were carried out during Rios Montt’s presidency. Who knows where that aid really ended up.

On the next leg of the journey we got to experience our first storm and consequently, seasickness. It’s hard to do anything when you’re seasick. We greatly empathized with the guys in the hot, smelly engine room. They would have to throw up and carry on. We, on the other hand, got to lie around in the Aft Lounge where we nibbled on crackers and played games if we were up to it. 

The Aft Lounge was on the deck that was most centered and so had the least amount of movement, which is all relative on a ship in the middle of a storm. Meals weren’t a big feature during a storm but when you’re not nauseous, the movement is actually kind of a cool sensation, especially lying in your bunk. Thankfully, the storms were few and far between as I usually did not do well. 


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