"Betrayal"

The families had to move camps from Waianai on the west coast to the other side of the island to a YWCA camp. This time we weren’t so remote. We were just outside the town of Kaneohe, on Kaneohe Bay. Even though the camp is right on the water, Kaneohe Bay is very protected with no beach and no waves.

Once again, there were cabins for the families to live in and, once again, I was in a tent. I graduated to a much bigger tent but had to share it with another teenage boy. We did have our own separate “rooms” within the tent, with a common area by the entrance.

Since we were near a town, it was easier to attend a church if we could get transportation. The leaders of the youth group at the Kaneohe Hope Chapel took an interest in us and would pick us up for church on Sunday and for youth group. At one youth group night, we had the opportunity to tell the group about the ship ministry and our life.

Once again, we did school in the kitchen/dining room building. At this time, most of my schoolwork was self-study. The second-oldest student was a girl named Teresa. She was a grade lower than me but we spent a lot of our school time together. In fact, I preferred hanging out with girls. Jan Applegate and I became best friends at that time as we discussed our hopes and dreams with each other. Then something happened that ticked me off. 

My brother, Samuel came to visit us at the camp. The team he had been travelling with on the Mainland had finished up and he was on his way to join FEET full-time in Hong Kong. Although I had never known anything about it, apparently he liked the girl I had liked since Greece and he took her out on a date!

I felt betrayed. Here was my own brother going out with the girl I had liked for all these years and she seemed down with it. It didn’t matter that I had never talked to her about it or even ever told Samuel about it or that I had liked other girls myself. I still felt betrayed.

Also, with Samuel around, I felt myself going back into my shell. Once again, he became the center of everyone’s attention and I moved back into the shadows. I didn’t mind but it was an interesting dynamic. He was only with us briefly before he left for Hong Kong and everything returned back to the new normal.

That summer, King’s Kids was putting on an outreach at the Olympics in Los Angeles. It was going to be the first time they ran multiple teams in one outreach and several of us from the ship wanted to participate. The problem was that it involved money. Despite very minimal contact with my relatives in New Zealand, I decided to send them letters asking for support. It didn’t work. Then, just at the right time, my dad decided to cash in some whole life insurance policies that he had taken out for us kids years before and give us the money. It hadn’t been a great investment but it was enough to pay for King’s Kids.

The smaller ship that my parents had been renovating in Jacksonville (which was now nick-named “the little ship”) had originally been a ferry in Canada. One of their other ferries had been badly damaged and the Canadian government had asked to rent ours until they could repair it. Mercy Ships agreed. In the meantime, my parents were asked to run the land office for Mercy Ships, which was in the Los Angeles suburb of San Pedro where the Anastasis had first arrived in the US.

Before I left for the King’s Kids Olympic outreach, I had a very unusual conversation with my dad. He said something that, if taken the wrong way, could sound bad. He knew there would be a lot of girls and he told me that I should spread myself around and get to know a lot of them (obviously not in the carnal sense that advice might usually be taken in). He said, 

“Why deprive the world of yourself by being exclusive with only one girl when you have something to offer to many girls?” 

He talked about how, when you’re a teenager, your emotions can be very fickle. You usually only like a girl for about three or four months. So why get all emotionally invested with a particular girl, knowing that it’s going to wear off soon? I arrived in Los Angeles with his advice in mind.