Welcome to my Cabin!

I realized the other day that I have never really showed people pictures of where I live. It is a little hard to get good pictures of smaller spaces, but I hope you can see where I live. Right now I am in a 4-berth cabin on Deck 4. Since I moved in in August, I have been sleeping on the top bunk of the second cubicle, but hopefully in about a week my cabinmate will be moving and I will be able to move down. I have gotten used to the top, but it will be nice to be able to fall into bed instead of climbing in.

Welcome to the Cabin!

(standing outside in the passage and standing just inside the door)

When walking into the cabin, the first door on the right is the bathroom - very nice to have one in the cabin that you only share with three other people. On the ANA, most bathrooms were shared and limited in their use. Notice that there are no cockroaches either!

There are two cubicles, each with a bunkbed, 2 closets and a small 'desk'. Karen and I share the second one back. My closet is the one closer to the camera with all the pictures hanging up.

The special part of a 4-berth is that the back part of the cabin is actually a small sitting area. In a 6-berth, this space has another bunkbed and in a 3-berth, each cubicle is used by one bed. Right now in our cabin, we have three seats, 2 cupboards, a bookshelf and a couple mirrors. There is not that much private space on the ship, so this space can be nice for watching movies with friends or just having a place to sit and talk -- although you just have to be careful to keep your voice down if you don't want the neighbors to hear what you are saying :)

If You've Lived on a Mercy Ship, You'll Understand

I found this the other day while cleaning up some papers. Anyone who has lived on a Mercy Ship will understand and smile, I am sure. I am not sure who wrote it, so maybe some of you have seen it before.

How to Mentally Prepare Yourself for Living on a Mercy Ship

1. Sleep on a cot in the garage.
2. Replace the garage door with a curtain.
3. Three hours after you go to sleep, have someone whip open the curtain, switch on all the lights and mumble, "Sorry, did I wake you?"
4. Renovate your bathroom. Take out the bath and move the showerhead down to chest level. Keep four inches of soapy cold water on the floor. For a more realistic ship bathroom experience, stop using your bathroom and use a neighbor's. Choose a neighbor that lives at least a quarter mile away.
5. Don't watch TV except for movies in the middle of the night. Have your friends vote which move to watch and then show a different one.
6. Leave a lawnmower running in your living room 24/7 for proper noise levels. Have random kids bang on pots and run around.
7. Keep moving locations. Drive to a new town once a week and give yourself two hours to find a supermarket.
8. Get 50 friends to come and live in your house for a weekend. Have then line up for food at exactly 6.30, noon and 5pm. All meals should have tomatoes and cucumbers.

'And the Lord said, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I answered, "Here am I, send me.' Isaiah 6.8

The Engagement!

As many of you may already know, I am now proudly wearing a ring on the ring finger of my left hand :) On Tuesday, Marcel proposed and I accepted (of course). Many people here on the ship said it was about time, but I think it was the perfect time for us. I guess I can tell the whole story here :)

We first met within a day of my coming to the Africa Mercy in April of last year. He was tall, generous and someone to speak German with :) The night before he asked me if I would want to start dating we spent two hours talking together speaking German together - just about life and our thoughts about our own plans at that time for the future. The night he asked me out was about 2 weeks after we first met. He asked me if I would want to go walking on the beach which was across the road from the port in Blythe. A bit chilly, but a really nice place and a great place to talk together. A bit to my surprise, I found myself saying yes to dating someone I had just met -- and feeling excited about it.

The past year and a half has been a lot of learning for me. This is the first real relationship for both of us - I have been figuring out lots of things that I have never been faced with before. Learning about being a better commuincator, what each of us apprecites and what things are different, reading '5 Love Languages' and realizing that we have completely different languages, and learning how to trust are just some of the things. I think -- no, I know -- that living on the ship also holds its own challenges. I think most dating couples have to work to find time together, but here on the ship, I think many times the challenge is to find time apart and make sure you are working on relationships with other people as well. Also, having so little time to actually be alone changes a lot of things. But on the other hand, a year and a half dating on the ship is like 5 years of knowing someone in 'the real world.' It has forced me to face issues that I may have been able to ignore or push to the side in any other place but here you need to talk about or it just becomes bigger. Dating and living on the ship is not for everyone, but I have heard others say that God gives grace to those he wants here - and I believe it. He gives the desire and ability to those he wants here - and even has them grow and change :)

Anyhow, to the engagement -- I did know he was going to ask, he had actually asked a 'pre-proposal' question a few weeks ago to see what I thought about getting married as soon as January. I had told him I did not want to wait very long after getting engaged, and he took me seriously :) We had some logistical things to work out with things here on the ship and getting a ring (not so easy in Liberia) and such, but everything fell into place without any problems. I did have an idea what the ring would look like because he asked me what I thought before he ordered it - which I actually liked. I do not wear rings and jewerly, so if I am going to wear something for the rest of my life, I want to like it. I dropped a hint at one point that I thought a beach would be a nice place to ask - sort-of bringing everything full circle from when he asked me out for the first time in England. On Tuesday, he invited me out to dinner and we ended up at a restuarant called Golden Beach. They have an open, covered part of the restuarant and also tables out on the beach. With a little luck, it actually had stopped raining for the first time in about a week, but when we got there, there were no tables out on the beach part because it is rainy season. At first it seemed that it would not be as romantic as hoped, but we noticed that the waiter was letting some people out to look around, so after we had eaten, Marcel asked if it would be okay to go out. We were able to go out and it was actually nice because instead of a crowd with tables, we were the only ones there. We stood together by the water and he asked :) The rain even head off for the time we were off ship - later it started raining again.

As soon as we got back on the ship, we met two friends in Reception and within a couple hours, many people knew. In the next 24 hours, I would say at least half the ship knew :) On Thursday, our managing director, Ken Berry talked at the community meeting. Ken and his wife Ann have know Marcel and I since England, so I did not mind when he announced it to the crew. I especially liked the way he did it - whenever he talks, he has a time where he says the best rumor he has heard that month and then also has a question and answer time. Well, Marcel and I were the rumor of the month this month :)