Rimke op Reis

It's already December and that means that (for now) it's time for my last update about my life on board the Africa Mercy. On the 11th of November I came back to the Netherlands. That was ten days before my initial departure date, so I was able to surprise my family. More about that later, but first: let me share some more stories from my time on board!   Work and more Of course the work on board continued as normal. I still worked in the dining room, but at the beginning of the month I switched teams. This was because of the longer-term staffing plan. My first team stayed quite stable, while in the other team everyone was new, including the team leader. I worked with this other team for two weeks, to help give them a bit more experience and help them get things running. At times, that was hard and exhausting, because a lot of things were done differently and I couldn't lean on the Dutch team leader I'd had before. Nevertheless, we had a good time together and had som...

  Even before I posted my last blog (about September), a lot changed on the ship, too much to still put it in that last blog. That's why I now have an extra long blog with newsupdates. Like I said last month, I've tried to put some more pictures in there this time. Enjoy reading! Restrictions on ship On the 28th of September the crew was called to come together in a mandatory meeting. In the hour that followed, we heard about what we'd been trying to postpone as long as possible... Because the ship is currently in maintenance, we have local contractors working on board during the week (and sometimes the weekend too). These people live on the island and have therefore always been at risk to be exposed to and then expose our crew to COVID. To keep the risk as low as we could, we always made sure to wear masks and keep a safe distance when we were around contractors. At the end of September we were told that one of the contractors had tested positive for covid and that changed...

I'll keep saying it, the month has flown by. Honestly I'm not even sure anymore what all happened in the past month, but I'll try to write a good blogpost. Get ready for September! Work I spend my days mostly with work, work and even more work. A lot of my hostess duties are still the same, but at the same time a lot has changed. The most important thing we do is getting cabins ready for new arrivals and then welcoming those new arrivals. Besides that, we get a lot of last minute, random tasks that no one else does and so we have to do them. At this moment there's only two of us in hospitality, which first of all means we have a very intensive work schedule (we have three days off for every two weeks) and it also means we never get all of the chores done that we should get done. Last week I had some help one day from one of the ship kids. In the morning we made some beds and in the afternoon we baked 100 cookies, which we then distributed amongst all crew. Baking cookie...

Now that I'm back on board and have settled in a little bit (more on that later), I want to pick up the monthly updates on this blog again. I know I've already written two seperate blogs in August, but here's a little overview of the month of August.   So much has happened this month! I'm going back just a little further, to the end of July. On the 27th of July, I received an email from the Dutch Mercy Ships office with an update around Mercy Ships. In this email they also wrote about some critical positions for which they needed more people in the coming months. At that moment I was already second guessing my choice to go to university and so I decided to contact my volunteer coordinator in Texas. I think it was already certain from the beginning that I would return to the ship, the only question was when. It took a bit of time to get all of the paperwork sorted out, but in the end I got the news that I was scheduled to arrive on the ship on Wednesday the 19th of Augus...

Today is Sunday the 23rd of August. Every day, I have to check a few times what day it is, because often I have no idea. In my blogpost from last week (right? ;-)) I wrote that I would fly out to Tenerife on the 19th of August and that went all well. My mom dropped me off at the airport early, because she still had to go somewhere else, so I've spent quite a while waiting there. Then I had a continuous flight from Amsterdam to Tenerife, where I arrived around 6pm. (Tenerife is in the same timezone as the UK, which is an hour behind Dutch time.) From the airport it would onluy have been a 15 minute drive to the ship, but first I had to go to the maritime immigration office in Santa Cruz, which was a 45 minute drive. I wasn't prepared to have to go there first too, but used our little drive to see a bit more of the island, which will probably not happen much in the coming months anyway.   In my last post I already said life on the ship would be really different this time and I th...

For four and a half month, it has been silent here on my blog. I wrote my last update (only in Dutch) at the end of March, when I had just returned from my time in Hawaii. When I think about how it’s already august, I can’t help but wonder where April, May, June and July have gone. I’ve been in the Netherlands for almost five months now and I think that may be a record for me. The last time I stayed in the Netherlands for this long at a time, was probably at the beginning of my last year in high school. Not a lot has happened in my life over the past few months, but there still are some things to write an update on. And don’t worry, my time in the Netherlands is almost coming to an end, but more about that later… I ended my last blog with a plan for the upcoming time (however long that would be). I still wanted to go back to Mercy Ships as soon as possible, partly because I knew that’s what God wanted, and therefore I would stay ready to go. In the meantime, I would stay home and if ...