May 2001
I believe it was around the twenty-eighth of May when my brother Ben and I found ourselves in Victoria, Canada aboard the M/V Caribbean Mercy (where it was just starting it’s public relations tour down the west coast of America). Ben was to work for three months in the engine room and I, after a short time in the kitchen, was to start a Discipleship Training School (DTS) on board the ship. The ship in itself, when we got there, seemed huge. Two hundred and eighty feet of crisscrossed walkways and hundreds of rooms. At first we were lost in just getting from our sleeping quarters to the dining room and back again!
A few days before the DTS started the students started filtering in. A Canadian here, a couple from Germany there, some Swedes and of course a few more States people like myself showed up. All in all there was about nineteen of us all total for the school and outreach. We had three months of lectures and then two months working in Guatemala to look forward to. As the ship sailed down the West Coast of America on it P.R. tour we would be in our lecture phase, then our team would fly down to Guatemala to prepare for the ship that would get there a month later.
Each week, as we went with the ship south, we had a different speaker that would lecture for around four hours every morning (except for weekends). The afternoons were our work times where each one of us helped with running the ship. The speakers, for the most part, I found to be very good. They had some really good things to talk about, everything from marriage and dating to spiritual warfare. At the end of those three months I felt like my brain was going to explode with all the info that was being poured into it!
We left San Diego, our last port on the P.R. tour, a few days after the lecture phase to fly to Guatemala City. From there we took a very interesting bus ride east to the little port town of Puerto Barrios where the ship would be docking. For the first month that we were there we did weekly and daily prayer walks in the town. We focused on the poorer side of it where the population was mainly black people that were the dissidents of slaves that the Spanish brought over with them. We did street dramas and open airs and also went weekly to this little school for mentally handicapped children, that first month. We started a twenty-four-hour prayer session that lasted a couple weeks; I really think that that was the best thing we did down there. Having a truly lasting impact.
When the ship landed our life down there did a one-eighty and most of our time was spent working to get the ship ready for ministry other than working with the people. Many hot and sweaty hours spent down in the cargo holds!
The eighteenth of Nov. we found ourselves back in Guatemala City saying some tearful goodbyes and watching as our friends got into there taxies to head for the airport. Their homes in sight! Mine was still a couple weeks off though for I had a trip planned with my brother, friend and three other DTS’ers. We were planning on spending a week on the beaches of Belize and another week in beautiful Antigua, Guatemala. It was a wonderful holiday with a long flight and snowy Montana at its end.
-Abe