In West Africa

Mercy Ships is an international organization with the vision to bring hope and healing to the poor of the world. A fleet of ships are used to bring a fully functional surgical unit to countries where the need for certain surgical procedures are high. We were on the Anastasis, and and later on the replacement ship- the Africa Mercy. The ships we were on focused on West-Africa, from Senegal around to Benin. It is an organization that consists of volunteers from all over the world that come to serve in different departments. We are part of the volunteers- Carl worked in community development, with the water and sanitation team and Ilne in health care services as a nurse on the ward. The area serviced by the ministry can be placed in three compartments-

1. Mercy ministries like free surgical care,community development, development of orphanages, old age homes, prisons, churches (mostly in crewmembers free time),dental and eye units-off-ship.
2. Teaching like training on AIDS, training of birth attendants, community health education, training in small business, such as beekeeping, snail farming, rabbit farming and mushroom farming.
3. Evangelism like empowering church leaders with conferences, discipling on the ward, adopting a patient- and taking care of them by all crew, screening of the Jesus film.

The countries we (Carl and Ilne) have been to are:

• Sierra Leone
• Liberia
• Ghana
• Benin

This is not an official Mercy Ships website, so all that is stated here is the opinion of the administrators of the website and was only applicable for the time with Mercy Ships- December 2003 until December 2007.»