"Dirty" seems to be the key word for today. Well, perhaps a better word is "messy."
Andrew and Erin Boone spent the day helping with the book fair. Andrew assisted customers when they entered the ship. He said it was wall to wall people. The ship allows 800 visitors on the ship at a time, so if more than that show up, the rest have to wait in "queue."
(By the way, during our lunch break, Mark and I enjoyed a little sun and fresh air after working in the bowels of the ship all morning (more on that in a minute), and we estimated the queue to be about 30-60 minutes. Several school groups were in the queue, so it was a full day for the book store. And now back to our regularly scheduled blog post...)
While Andrew was assisting at the entrance, Erin was assisting on the other end. It was her job to make sure things stayed organized and controlled as people left the ship. One male Rastafarian wanted to take Erin home with her, and school children were overly excited. Needless to say, the day was fairly "messy" for the Boones dealing with the crowds, but a good messy, because these are people who heard the gospel several times in various forms while on the ship.
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Jay and Kandy, on the other hand, had a different type of "messy." They got to experience an "E-day" (experience day) with a team from the ship. The Schlichting's team partnered with a local group... that showed up an hour and a half late! And that's only the beginning of the "mess."
The prison wasn't a very welcoming environment. The prisoners (both male and female) were kept behind bars in one courtyard while the ministry team did their presentation on the other side of the bars (they were allowed to hand literature through the fence). While waiting for the local ministry partners to show, the Logos Hope group asked for a room in the prison to pray in. They were led to the police office in the prison - complete with a full bar and "dirty" pictures of unclothed women decorating the walls. Amazingly, the head of the prison was thrilled to receive the literature for the prisoners and promised to hand the extra out to new prisoners when they arrive.
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Back at the ship, Mark and I endured a completely different type of dirty. We were assigned to the engine room. Eleanor from Texas was our leader, giving us safety instructions upon our arrival, and then informing us of our job. And that job was completing the work another vision team had begun - removing the old paint and rust on one of the sewage tanks so it can be repainted. Our tools mostly included electrical wire brushes, while looking beautiful in our nearly-impossible-to-see-through eye protectors and oversized work gloves. Mark, Eleanor, and I received a lot of stares when we emerged from our work zone! So here are the "dirty" pictures, beginning with Eleanor and our tour of the ship's bowels:
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