m/v Africa Mercy 19-08-05 update no 2

Hey guys gals and others.

See living with 3 americans and now one Canadian has this affect on my langague. I have started extending my vowels, starting Saying Zee instead of Zed, having half a glass of ice in my pint glass before I pour in Coke which I never drank so much before! Every meal in our house seems to be sweet, never savoury. But there are some advantages. They can get me cheap stuff from the states sent over, the cultural differences (yes there are cultural differences between the US and the UK) are cool. They have even stopped saying pants when they mean trousers becasue I was getting all confused. But they have changes the spell checker on Word to English(US) so I apoloigse if some of my spelling is off.

So it's been exactly a week since I got here and sent you my first email update. thanks to the 20 or so people who took time to send me some good luck emails, sorry I probably won't have time to respond to you all individually but I will try my best.

Well tonnes have happened since then - surprisingly. Anyone visiting my blog has already had a preview of what I am going to write now, so please stick with me.

My first weekend I spent checking out this new city. Wandered round the city centre which is probably about 2 or 3 times larger than the fair city I left. then went to visit the MEtro sentre - a large shopping centre which has an indoor rollercoaster in it!! Found a cool church on sunday morning and evening which was quite friendly.

Monday morning at stupid time of 5:50, my alarm went off. made my lunch, which all my old workmates know I have never done before, unfortuantely I can't afford to buy stuff from the sandwich van every day. caught the minibus at 6:30. First thing we do every morning at 7:00 is have devotions. which normally we have a bible study or worship or someone gives a talk. It sets us up well for the day.

First thing I had to do was attend a safety talk. not the most interesting thing I have ever sat through, it didn't even have people getting burnt or sliced in half or showing people getting crushed by massive containers falling. the worst it got was when it showed someone lying on the floor at the bottom of some stairs. Boring!
Then had morning break at 9:00 till 9:15. First proper job was to clean up under Engine no. 6 where a considerable amount of oil had been spilt. easy job you may think but Ship ensines are not designed to have easy access and meant me and a colleague Matt had to become contorsionists to get through the mass of pipes and get the oil cleaned up so someone could come and Weld without a fire risk.

Then I spent the rest of the day moving spare engine parts from one side of the ship in the cargo hold down one deck, then into the stores. Another easy task you may think. well not when some engine spare parts weigh about 20kgs each and come in stupid shapes like gears and control units large pumps and are not easy to get down stairs let alone ship ladders.then once we got all of them we could lift we had to hoist the rest down to the engine room.

I had such a great day - came back feeling like I had actually done something good - and felt like I had done a hard days work as well and a little dehydrated.

The rest of the week I got to install medical gas pipework - which was a lot less physical work than my first day but more mind work trying to figure out how to get the pipes around all the bulkheads and structure on the ship. Something which I was used to sat behind a computer doing at my old job, but not used to doing it in practice. I was working with two guys Mark (from Winnipeg, Canada) and Dallas Logan (from Nevada) what a cool name though! I attempted at some Brazing which was cool, but I wasn't that fast and we needed to get it finished so I only did a couple of couplings. All this experience should be really useful for if I get back into my previous industry again.

Last weekend I went to a different church and meet tonnes of cool people and spent the afternoon playing gamecube and watching Cricket in the park.

This week has been the most exciting week ever. we have installed a CT scanner in the medical deck 3. 4 tonnes of equipment, fixing locations to the nearest 1/2 mm, had 9 people pushing the main gantry (or doughnut as we call it) through a doorway only 30mm bigger than the unit, up a step and onto screed that we couldn't run the gantry accross without 3/4" hardboard across it. We finished fixing most of the units this afternoon ready for 3 specialists coming from Texas on Tuesday to commision and set the CT scanner up.

I am going to the beach tomorrow for a new friends bday and then going to see High Contrast (a Cardiff drum and bass DJ/producer) playing at the uni here in Newcastle. Should be fun if I can cope staying up so late!

Well thats all me done and I have just realised how long this email is. What I will do is go back and highlight the key points in the email so hopefully people will read the main bits. Sorry for taking up so much time but I am really raving about what is going on up here and how much I am enjoying this new adventure.
Keep safe all.

Paulus 'the kid' - as my house mom calls me!