Nursery

Nursery is now 3 mornings instead of 2 with a fourth session for Joshua and one of his friends if we want. Joshua loves nursery, he is happy being dropped off (after a rocky start! Thanks to our friends who have been praying about this), loves playing with his friends and is happy when he is collected. They now have a lovely lady Miss Comfort (you'd think she was called Miss Comfy if you hear Joshua say her name!!) there everyday with us parents all taking a turn once a week. This is really a blessing to us, having the children happy in nursery and also allowing us time for visiting and other activities in the hospital, do a bible study with other parents one morning and the odd hour off completely to be able to email, learn french and catch up on jobs. It is a lot of fun leading nursery too - there are just four children now as one of Joshua's friends has gone home for a few months but they get on well and Joshua is always excited to 'see friends, see friends'. We play, have snacks, sing and dance (although if you choose a song they don't know you may be the only person dancing I have discovered, so I may choose to stick to their favourites - the washing machine song and the silly dance contest in future!!), do crafts, play more, have a story and then play outside with ride on cars, tractors etc. Oh and the odd , or not so odd trip to the bathroom - I do wonder sometimes if they just like visiting the friendly ladies that are usually in the laundry room!

Sarah

In port fire drill

Sometimes it's easy to forget that we live on a ship, we are pretty used to the slight motion whilst docked, now know that floors are decks, walls are bulkheads and places to live cabins.....anyway yesterday we had another reminder as we experienced our first in port fire drill where we muster on the dock. Fortunately by 3.30 it wasn't as hot as it sometimes gets outside and the children had finished school so we didn't have to worry about that. As with the on-ship drills our boys were very excited about the drill happening and enjoyed saying 'good afternoon crew, this is the Captain, this is a drill, this is a drill, this is a drill' or in Joshua's case 'this a dill, this a dill, this a dill'. When it actually came to it of course it wasn't that exciting as we only took one book out with us that neither of them wanted to read and Tom continually asked 'when can we go back on the ship?' We muster by surname so sadly didn't have Uncle Sam to amuse us either!

Sarah

Giving blood...

Because of the difficulty of storing blood, the ship does not keep a blood bank. Instead the crew sign up to be called upon to give blood when needed. I registered with the nurse back in January and yesterday I got a call from the lab to come down and have a couple of vials taken so that they can test my blood to check I am a viable donor. It will take 3 weeks or so to process the tests and then I will be added to the list of donors.

We are currently very short of B and AB donors so Sarah (who is O-neg and therefore a universal donor) will likely be in top demand! My O-pos is slightly less useful although I hope to get the chance to do my bit.

Tommy.

Family church

This week some of the families met on the ship for family church, it is very difficult to visit local churches with children as the services are typically 2-4 hours long, in French and without childrens activities. So we met together and talked about the story of Jesus washing his disciples feet. We talked together about how the roads were dusty and dirty, just like here in Africa and so their feet were probably very dirty, about how Jesus washed all their feet, including that of Judas who he knew would betray him and about how we also need to serve and care for people. With lots of bowls of water and towels we took turns washing each others feet. We then had brunch together and much cake was eaten by the boys!

As the patient visits start this week I hope our boys will be able to see past the skin colour, language barriers and disfigurements of some of our patients and be able to show love through playing with them just as they would their friends.

Sarah

deck 8

So the paddling pool is not yet up on deck 8 due to the deck dept still needlegunning nearby (see I am learning new words) so one has been created for the children to splash around in shallow (getting quite filthy) water! Deck 8 also has a climbing frame with a slide, and more importantly has the monkey bars that leads to the firemans pole. We can now play up there during the day as well as in the evening as a cover has been put over since we took this photo to provide shade. Yeh!