A very merry Christmas from Wisconsin!

By some miracle, I arrived home on Tuesday, despite a beautiful display of frozen precipitation in Milwaukee, and will be here for another three days before heading back to the East Coast. Needless to say, I am Rather Excited about being back in the Midwest. It's funny - I could have pointed out a few cultural differences between Midwest and East Coast after moving to NY, but it took being plunged back into my culture of origin for me to realize how truly different the two places are. 

For one, Midwesterners talk so much! After a relatively silent flight from LaGuardia to Detroit (I swear, the only person talking was the 6 year-old next to me, who kept looking out the window at the clouds and asking which one was God), I was downright shocked when I boarded my plane to Milwaukee and found thirty total strangers jovially conversing as though they'd known each other all their lives. What? Talk to strangers? Unheard of, at least in the city of inhuman automatons!

Then there's the bit where everyone is polite. It appears that, despite my best efforts to maintain my Midwestern manners, the New York ethos has, in fact, rubbed off on me. I think it's a survival of the fittest thing - if you politely wait your turn in Manhattan, you'll never accomplish anything. You have to push and shove your way to the front of the line. Not so in WI. A few days ago, I was doing some pre-Christmas grocery shopping, and was exasperated with a woman who was dawdling and blocking the entire aisle with her cart. So I did the logical thing - I pushed. I shoved. The woman looked up at me with total consternation - not as though she was offended, but as though she was genuinely bewildered that anyone would behave in such a brutish manner - and said, "...oh, I'm sorry...did you want me to move?" Embarassingly enough, the thought of asking hadn't even occurred to me. It was kind of a revelation. And lets not even discuss the aggressive influence the New Jerseyans have had on my driving...I am heartily ashamed. 

So, good citizens of WI, I hope that you will pardon my unknowingly acquired East Coast mannerisms during my short stay here. I am all too delighted to consume your beer, rejoice in your unique pronunciation of vowels, drink from your bubblers, and play in your snow for a few more days. Cheers, and Merry Christmas!

Christmas at Sea

For the past six weeks, the focus of my ship-visiting has undertaken a dramatic change. I've gone from exercising a ministry of presence to one of presents (I'm so sorry, I couldn't pass that one up). One of SCI's biggest operations is called Christmas at Sea. Its mission is to collect hand-knit scarves, hats, vests, etc. and distribute them (along with other things like toiletries and playing cards and shoelaces...) as individually wrapped gifts for every seafarer that comes into port between November and January. It comes to some 20,000 gifts, distributed by the five of us chaplains. It has pretty much taken over our lives. 

Every morning, we load up our vans with CAS boxes and head off to the ships as usual. After staggering across the straddle fields with an enormous stack of heavy boxes (which, as I'm sure you can imagine, only exacerbates my perpetual fear of being squashed by a gantry crane), we deposit them at the foot of the gangway and look pleadingly up at the gangway officer in the hopes that he'll take pity on us and come down to carry them for us. And then the fun begins.

"What's this, mum? Provisions?" is the inevitable question. "No, no," we reply, "something better. Christmas gifts!" The initial response is always confusion. "...for captain?" "No, for everyone! One for each crew member!" The best moment is always watching the look of dawning comprehension as they realize that, in a world where 90% of people who climb their gangway only make their lives more difficult, someone has come to bring them gifts. There is, then, much excited jabbering (in whatever their native language is; usually Tagalog) into the radios, and a subsequent flood of people coming to see the gifts and ceremonially process them into the ship's office. 

A surprising number of times they'll carefully stow them in a corner and wait until Dec. 25 to distribute them. But every once in a while, there'll be a crew that rips open the boxes and excavates the contents immediately. Since each hat/scarf set is hand-made, there's always an interesting variety of colors, and watching them argue (usually amicably, though with exceptions...) over who gets what is like watching a flock of kindergartners bicker over crayons. "Does it look good on me?" asks a squat Filipino engineer, whose neon green hat clashes vividly with his orange jumpsuit. 5 seconds later, the green hat is snatched off his head and replaced with a rainbow striped one. Hats and scarves fly through the air as the seafarers swap again and again. 

The reason we distribute for three months instead of just one is simple: most ships have 3 month long routes (and others have no route at all, but just go wherever the business is). Even with the long distribution window, there are countless thousands of seafarers who get no gifts at all. In a consumer-oriented society where Christmas decorations arrive to storefronts the day after Halloween, it's a welcome change to be able to celebrate Christmas early for a very good reason. And, while I'll be the first to tell you how tired I am of lugging around all those f***ing boxes, I'll also say without hesitation that watching the seafarers light up with joy when they discover what's inside them hasn't yet gotten old. 

Israel meets Port Newark

Firstly, my apologies for the lack of posts lately - as is wont to happen in December, my schedule has turned absolutely insane, and I rarely have time to eat and sleep, much less blog. However, I've decided that the time has come to reward your patience with a particularly exciting ship visiting story from last Monday. 

It was an exceptionally busy day in port, and I had five ships to get to by the end of it. Consequently, I wasn't expecting to spend much time on any of the ships...but my intentions were transfigured from the moment I set foot on the Zim Mediterranean. I should preface with a note about Zim shipping lines: it's an Israeli enterprise but, as is the case with most lines these days, most ships that bear the name Zim are actually charters and have nothing to do with Israel. It became abundantly clear, however, that the Mediterranean was a real Zim from the moment I entered the accommodation block: the entire interior was a vision of blue and white. The ship's office was, if possible, even more Israeli in theme, with posters of the Holy Land covering most of the wall space, and Israeli flags draped over every available surface. I set down my boxes of Christmas presents (feeling kind of awkward about bringing Christmas gifts to an Israeli crew...), and settled in to wait for the captain. 

It's worth noting that I've been making a very haphazard study of the Hebrew alphabet, with the encouragement of my seminarian boyfriend and Old Testament scholar housemate. I've made very little progress, but can fairly reliably identify aleph and lamed (a whopping two letters, what success!). As I was sitting there, waiting for the captain, I made small talk with the first mate. At some point, I pointed to the Hebrew translation of the 'No Smoking' sign on the door, and made my linguistic efforts known. The first mate went ballistic with joy. 

At that precise moment, the captain finally walked in. The first mate nearly bowled him over with excitement, pointed at me, and exclaimed "SHE SPEAKS HEBREW!" Needless to say, having to correct this embarrassing piece of misinformation wasn't exactly the best way to start out the conversation with the captain, but no matter - he appeared to be a good-humored man and everyone had a good laugh. We continued to make small talk and, at some point, it was relevant to point out that I was half-German. Right on cue, he immediately began talking about the Holocaust

I can't begin to say how humbling of an experience it was to have a conversation with a man who could say: "I am only sitting here with you today because the Nazis missed my grandfather," and then proceed to list a terrifying number of ancestors whom the Germans slaughtered. All of the things that I might have said, like, "Well, you know, not all Germans were Nazis," or "Actually, my great-grandfather harbored Jews in his home," seemed horribly inadequate. On the flip side, I couldn't really say, "Gee, I'm sorry that my ancestors killed your ancestors; that really sucks." I mean, what do you say in a situation like that?? 

Just as I was beginning to think that my attempts at being as receptive and apologetic as possible were failing miserably, and that the captain was getting ready to forcibly remove me from his ship, he changed tactics completely. Leaping out of his chair, he threw open his arms and bellowed: "Come up and have lunch with me!"

It was hardly a request, and besides - who was I to refuse? An invite to the captain's private dining room is a rare treat indeed, and this particular occasion didn't disappoint. No sooner had we sat down to table, when the captain (I kid you not), rang a bell and shouted: "Steward! Bring the wine!" I thought Christmas had come early. The wine was excellent, the 3-course meal exquisite, the conversation fascinating. It was like eating in a 4 star restaurant. After the third time I refused to let the captain refill my wine glass, he ran off to the storerooms and presented me with a bottle of Israeli red to take home. We concluded the afternoon with a VIP tour of the ship including, but not limited to: the bridge, the outdoor nav deck, and the vegetable storeroom (of which he was far prouder than the bridge). 

It was a perfectly exquisite morning, and a good reminder of how multi-faceted the ship-visiting ministry is. Certainly, it's not all about gorging myself on Israeli food and having philosophical discussions with captains, but after weeks on end of seeing literally hundreds of seafarers who are dejected because they can't go home for Christmas, it was a refreshing change.  

On a much lighter note, all this ship-visiting has radically changed my restaurant preferences: I no longer have any desire to go out for ethnic food, since I can get the real deal aboard ship just about anytime I want it. Hooray for broadening my global palette!