Meet Brian

The Academy has Brian Blackburn, our school administrator visiting. He has been a teacher on board previous ships in the past and now lives in Texas with his family and works at the Mercy Ships base there. He keeps a blog of what he is up to - sounds like he had a good day yesterday- and if you read his blog entry you can see a photo of Tom in his classroom too

http://brianandwarrie.blogspot.com/2009/11/out-of-mouth-of-babes.html

turtle for dinner?

A few nights ago while we were having dinner we saw a little fishing boat just outside our window, a fairly normal sight, except that they had just caught an enormous turtle. Tommy went to get the camera, by which point they had moved further away from the dock and turned the turtle upside down and then we were slightly glad that we didn't have a better view of what happened next...you can see the upside down turtle being held by the men in the middle of the boat.

let there be fireworks and sparklers...

...and there was (sort of...)

Our friend Sarah had more faith in the local shops than the rest of us and had gone in search of fireworks...and found some - resulting in lots of excited Brits....then we had to decide where on the dock would be a good place...maybe not near the fuel tanker running a fuel line?....so the other way a bit....then we had to try and light the sparklers - matches and lighters not working due to the breeze...so we abandoned that plan for a minute and lit the first firework...and it lit - no bangs, whizzes, nothing shooting into the air, but just a little firework buring a few inches high!....so then the second firework....much the same - except this time someone decided to light the sparkler...and from that we lit all the sparklers and missed the little firework burning in the background....but it was ok - there was a third little firework for the grand finale, still no noise or drama, but a firework none the less....

Hope you enjoyed the 5th of November!

Pics here:

http://cairncrossclan.blogspot.com/2009/11/remember-remember.html

a reminder why we are here..

The UN's Human Development Report has recently been published for 2009.

The HDI – Human Development Index – is a summary composite index that measures a country's average achievements in three basic aspects of human development: health, knowledge, and a decent standard of living. Health is measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge is measured by a combination of the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrolment ratio; and standard of living by GDP per capita (PPP US$).

(as written on their website http://www.hdr.undp.org/en/ )

All of the 182 countries for which the UN has data are ranked in one of three tiers: Very High, High, Medium and Low Human Development.

Some highlights from the list:

1. Norway
...
21. United Kingdom
...
159. Togo (Our outreach for 2010)
161. Benin (Our outreach in 2009)
...
169. Liberia (Up from 180 last time and where the ship spent 3 of the last five years)
...
180. Sierra Leone
181. Afghanistan
182. Niger

22 out of the 24 countries ranked 'Low Human Development' are in Africa. Every West African country, except Ghana and Nigeria, are in the bottom tier. Plenty of work for Mercy Ships to do.

Tommy.

Academy open house

Joey showing little Josh the magnets, while Tom watches them set up the science demo

Big Josh and Joey showing Tom the pulleys, who looks significantly more interested than Uncle Sam!

Last night the academy opened it's doors to any crew who wanted to come and see what goes on...the boys had fun visiting their classrooms, showing us their work, visiting Tommy's classroom and seeing a video made by some of the 'big' kids, watching science demonstrations in the big room and some Judo on deck 7.

More photos of the Academy on a friends blog

http://thalexander.blogspot.com/2009/11/academy-open-house.html