Original subtitles

On this season of The Mercy Ships

I have to take this guys, one second.

Waking up at 3 a.m. every day definitely isn't easy.

In emergency situations,

the blood is still warm from a crew member,

and it goes into the patient.

We're going to do one of the kids favorite things,

and that is do a Nerf war.

Oh, that's not good.

These children from the blind school.

They are a choir.

What do you think if we ask these children if they want to sing on our track?

Obviously, I love this idea!

This is my volunteer option.

I've come here to make drinks for people and serve the crew.

So my husband, Thomas is the head chef on the Africa Mercy.

But we've actually been apart for quite a long time, and I miss him.

The hardest thing for me is being away from my family.

Well, the secret is that Beth’s sister, Kate, her twin sister,

is coming to the ship.

Hey, can I sit here?

What the heck?

Heavenly Father, guide us in this dive, keep us safe.

Uh, the divers still haven’t come up.

This is The Mercy Ships.

For more than 40 years, thousands of volunteers

from over 60 nations have come together with one driving purpose.

They are everyday people who’ve left the familiar behind

to serve where the need is greatest.

Together, they have become a family with the mission to bring hope

and healing to the world's forgotten poor.

Amidst the tears and the triumphs, the setbacks and the successes,

they press on, driven by the unwavering belief

that hope can conquer even the greatest of trials.

In every act of kindness,

every hand held, and every life saved,

they find their purpose.

A journey of faith and love

that transcends borders and transforms lives.

Every story real,

every moment unforgettable.

Join us as we uncover the extraordinary journeys of those

who give their time, their hearts, and their skills.

As you come aboard, The Mercy Ships.

Okay, Lawrence,

- if you want to take it away. - Good morning, number 11.

Rejoice, Africa.

I like to say that I started training to be a seafarer when I was 17.

So that's 50 years ago.

My name is Richard O'Shea

I'm from Dublin in Ireland, and I'm the captain.

I like to think that God was preparing me to be the captain on here some day.

He spent 50 years training me to do this job.

♪ Jesus, river of life ♪

♪ To a thirsty land ♪

♪ To a thirsty land ♪

♪ Saviour ♪

♪ Reaching out with your mighty hand, with your mighty hand ♪

As the captain on board,

you don't have to be a pastor or anything like that.

You're not required to to preach on Sunday's,

but you are required to be mindful

of the context of what we do here from a spiritual aspect.

It's not something that normal ship captains are used to doing,

but it's something that I've learned to grow into.

♪ Africa ♪

By no means do I see myself as a counselor or along those lines,

but I guess there's a counseling element involved with all the jobs.

♪ Jabulani Africa ♪

♪ Jabulani, jabulani Africa ♪

I feel a real privilege to just play a small part in that.

To me, it's just coincidental that I happened to be the captain on here.

Because I feel that everybody who's on this ship, brings

the same message of hope and healing, regardless of your role on board.

There's no other ship in the world that has a cargo of hope and healing.

So it's a huge honor

just to be in that cohort.

And you can see the dramatic effect

that this has on people who receive surgeries here.

I love to see the little kids that come in board for the orthopedic surgery.

They can hardly walk up the gangway.

When you see them, after they've had their particular surgeries,

they are kicking little plastic footballs around in the corridors on the ward.

And that's why I'm here.

Being a photographer on Mercy Ships,

our main job is to follow the patient's stories.

My name is Joshua Chau, and I am a photographer

aboard the Africa Mercy in Madagascar.

We meet all the patients who come aboard, and we see who's story would be something

that's really compelling that we want to share on behalf of Mercy Ships.

Then we ask them, hey, would it be okay if we followed you

through your entire surgical process from beginning all the way to the very end?

If possible, we go to their homes first to see what life was like before

they had the surgery,

and then we follow them to the Hope Center where all the patients stay

before they meet the doctor.

Then to like the surgery room into the OR,

then take them back to the wards where they go through this like long

healing process.

And all the nurses take really good care of them

and they get stronger and stronger and stronger.

And then we take them all the way back to their homes.

The last one we went to, there was like, I think almost 150 people,

just like all gathered together to celebrate the healing of the patient.

Yeah. So it's really, really cool experience.

So you remember Vavitsara?

Hey yeah, my favorite!

I thought she already had her surgery?

Yeah, yeah she did.

And she's doing really well, actually.

And I learned the news that she's having her wedding next week.

- No way! - Yeah.

And you've worked so closely with her.

And she appreciated all you've done.

So she wanted to extend an Invite for you to her wedding.

- No! - Mm-hm!

Okay, you know, in the countryside, photos like aren't that common to have.

And so do you think it would be a possibility

to maybe bring my camera along and take some photos as a gift for her?

I think you absolutely should do that.

- She's going to love that! - Okay.

Can you check with her to see if it's cool for me to be her wedding photographer?

Yeah, yeah. I'll try to find that out for you, like, as soon as possible.

- Yeah, okay. Sweet! Bye. - Thanks, Josh. Bye!

There’s this patient,

her name is Vavitsara.

When we first met her,

she was a little bit shy, a little insecure about the goiter on her neck.

She wasn't very secure about the way that she presented herself to the world.

So much so that she didn't actually get her identification papers renewed.

Because she didn't want that goiter that she had to be immortalized

on a piece of paper.

♪ Once upon a time, she hid her face ♪

♪ In the shadows, ♪

♪ Oh, what a lonely place ♪

♪ Dreams of love, ♪

♪ Felt so far away ♪

♪ But mercy whispered you’re gonna be ok ♪

Beautiful.

Once she got out of surgery,

we took her immediately to take passport photos

and get everything like laminated.

And she had, like, the card and we had the whole photo shoot.

She was so excited.

She really is one of my favorite patients.

I really want to do something special for her.

Sebastian, Connor!

- What's up? - Yo.

What's up, Josh? What are you doing here?

You know how we go to visit the patients for communications?

- Yeah yeah. - Take some photos,

videos and stuff. Yeah.

So, one of our patients, she's having a wedding next week.

- Word. Okay. - Yeah.

She's been really looking forward to this, and I was wondering,

I wanted to, like, give her some sort of gift.

Also going to bring my camera as well,

I'm going to photograph.

- Oh okay, word. - For the story,

maybe give her some photos afterwards.

- Print them off. - Mmm.

Yeah. What do you think?

If you just give me some dimensions then we can make up a frame,

and then you can give that to her as, like, a gift.

Yo, I love it.

We could probably go into town and find some,

find some wood to, like, build it out of.

So it's a little bit more authentic.

I mean, when is, when is the wedding?

Yeah, it's going to be next week.

So if you guys can get it together in the next couple of days?

For sure, yeah. We'll make a trip in and then we'll be able to--

- Yeah. We'll be able to get that done. - Okay. Cool.

- See you later. Bye! - Sweet man. I’m stoked for this!

I honestly feel like you figure out

some of the rhythms of the country that you're in,

so that you can make a better connection to the people who live there.

I'm Bambi Hawkins, and I'm the executive assistant

to the managing director on the Global Mercy.

The dynamics of how people move about in the Freetown area,

especially because it is a busy, busy city.

I've noticed there's just this almost magical flow

of how people intertwine and weave in and out of each other.

I arrived on the Global Mercy in March of 2023.

From age 18, when I was getting ready to go off to college,

I looked at West Africa as a place I felt like I was supposed to be.

So I became a paramedic for 30 years.

Mercy Ships itself,

I saw on a commercial late night television, working as a paramedic,

and it was a ship going to West Africa.

And I thought, that's the ship I'm supposed to be on.

I'm a connection point for pretty much anybody on the ship.

So Rachel said, there is a place

that she has gone before that she wants to check out.

I'm looking for a piece of material, everybody...

The café is where I choose to volunteer

because I thoroughly enjoy a few things about it.

I come here to serve the crew.

That is what I feel God brought me to Mercy Ships for.

They're doing all of this work for patients, for people in the country,

and I get to serve them.

So I started asking a question when I opened up the café.

Saturdays, I ask a simple question.

This past Saturday, it was,

if you were a color green, which color green would you be?

Then on Sundays, I tried to go a little deeper.

It typically is something, that when I've been doing

my Bible study for the week, I then ask the community

and I put it out in a post and say, come have your morning coffee.

And here's your question.

Inga! Hi, honey.

You're my second single shot already this morning, so...

people must have slept well with the coming rain last night.

Wow! Look at this.

Oh, no.

Oh, no. Is Margareta okay?

Guys, we need to go help her.

Are you okay?

You okay?

Oh, yeah yeah. Okay.

Okay.

I'm going to have to change my clothes.

Oh my word.

You guys, we should get the ones on this side too before they blow away.

There's more over here.

It takes a family mentality and a family

that you really want to stay connected with, to be a part of this.

I get told that I'm kind of a mom.

Oh, I'm soaked.

with Christ as our head

and that being the family that we truly all connect through,

it makes it a much more peaceful family than what I've seen elsewhere.

When I was in medical school in 2003, an anesthesia registrar came

and talked about Mercy Ships, and said it was one of the best things

that she'd ever done.

And, just immediately applied

because it was one of the things I was desperate to do.

My name is Sarah Kwok.

I'm from the UK

and I'm lead anesthesiologist

for the Global Mercy.

And so when the opportunity came to be a long-term volunteer in 2019

as the anesthesia supervisor or head of anesthesia, I took it.

So this is OR three.

And this is the max fac’s room.

And despite the fact that we're in OR three, it should all look the same.

I was overseeing all of the operating rooms, taking care

of all of the visiting anesthesiologists who would come every 2 or 3 weeks,

orientate them to the space and also to the people.

And so we need to bring everyone together to work in the safest way possible.

And so that's why we standardize our care as much as possible.

Mercy Ships has two strategic pillars, direct medical services

where we provide surgical care.

But also we want to train and educate the local

health care professionals in the countries that we visit.

We didn't want to be here eventually, you know, in 20 years time,

we want them to be able to provide their own surgical care to their population.

In 2018,

I came for two weeks and I honestly feel like I was transformed.

I've never met so many people who were willing to help.

I've never worked in such a friendly environment

where it was encouraging, where no question was stupid.

There were people who came and supported me.

- Oh, I see it. - Yeah.

I just think it's just such an environment

where you can grow as a person and you can grow as a professional.

You see tangible change and like,

futures transformed,

right in front of you on a daily basis.

And I honestly have to say, it's hands down the most fufilling job

that I've ever done in my life.

So my husband, Thomas, is the head chef on the Africa Mercy.

Very soon I'm going to be heading back to Madagascar.

And I'm super pumped.

We've actually been apart for a couple of months and it's been tough.

Like, we're newlyweds.

We're still in the first year of marriage,

and he's in Madagascar, and I'm in Sierra Leone.

So I'm really excited to go.

I miss him.

Coming up on The Mercy Ships:

So I started asking a question, when I opened up the cafe.

When you're face to face with God,

how do you anticipate you will experience that?

Bambi, you know how to get me in the morning.

Okay, folks, as you can see from the screen behind me

that they're doing a lot of surgeries this week in the hospital.

That means there’s going to be a high demand for blood.

This is your chance to step up today and contribute to the very necessary

work in the hospital.

Hey, Breanna.

Hey. How's it going?

You know that patient that we discussed

last week where we asked for two units of blood?

Mm-hm?

I'm afraid we're going to need five units of blood ready to go in about two hours.

We got the two units ready when you guys asked for it yesterday.

But so you'll need another three?

The surgeons think that, there's going to be some extra bleeding.

So they just want to be cautious.

I mean maybe put in an overhead to the, to all the crew.

I'm so sorry about that.

- We'll get right on it. - Okay. Thank you.

My name is Breanna Charleson, and I'm from Aurora, Ontario in Canada,

and I'm a medical laboratory technologist.

I had looked in the past, into ways to volunteer as a lab tech.

There's not a lot of options because it's a very equipment-reliant role.

As a medical laboratory technologist,

we do pre-op screening tests, so every patient who comes on this ship

gets bloodwork done to assess that they're healthy enough to withstand

the stress of surgery on their body.

In hospitals at home, We have blood banks

with people from the local population giving blood,

and it's just a bank you can tap into whenever you want.

On the ship,

because we're off the coast of West Africa,

we don't have that luxury.

And actually the crew are our blood bank.

In emergency situations where we need blood quickly,

the blood is checked

once with the lab tech and then another time in the operating room.

The blood is still warm from a crew member

before it actually goes into the patient.

On a given day, if we need blood in the OR, then

what they'll do is they'll call up the specific crew member,

and they will come down, give their blood, usually a pint.

Hello?

Hey, are you busy today?

Yeah, kind of.

Would you be able to sneak away for a bit to help us?

We need some blood for a big surgery.

Uh, yeah, sure. I'll come.

Okay. Thank you. As fast as possible.

I’ll be there soon.

See you.

The OR, The main thing we do with them is we give units of blood.

So we're responsible for collecting the units of blood and, like,

testing the blood type.

But I think I first came because I love the thought of being able to use

my knowledge and talents in a very practical way to help others.

But I think the reason that I stayed is

I kind of just fell in love with the work environment we have here.

Like, I think it's very rare that you're surrounded by people

who are all motivated by the same cause and are all working together

for the same mission.

So I find that, yeah, it's a really cool team to be a part of.

D Ward, this is Dieke, good morning.

When there's children on the ICU, I will be just focused on

that child on the ICU.

Monitoring their every breath, basically.

My name is Dieke Van Tuijl.

I'm from the Netherlands, from the city of Rotterdam.

And on the ship I work as an ICU pediatric nurse.

When there's no children on the ICU, then I work on the maxillofacial ward,

we treat people who had surgery on their face, mostly up until like this area.

What makes this work

so beautiful is that people who come in have a deformity that is really visible,

so they are very traumatized or sometimes cast out,

and then they come to us and they receive surgery

and it's a whole super intense process of healing

and really sticking together with your patient,

affirming them that things are going to be all right,

help them on their way to healing, and a face that is more like other faces.

♪ Yeah yeah yeah ♪

♪ Yeah yeah yeah ♪

Music is everything to me.

Especially worship music is really my way of communicating with God.

Bringing him the honor and the glory that he deserves.

Raximo!

How are you?

I’m good.

Longtime no see, man.

Yeah. I'm around though.

Andrew Amoraxin Momoh

Popularly known as Raximo.

I'm from Sierra Leone and Guinea.

I work in the OR, in the sterile processing department.

Our duty is to collect all the dirty instruments

from the OR, to the Decontam, and make it clean

and new for surgeons to take care of our patients.

There are things I like to do outside work

Like music.

I do music, all of my time is music, yeah.

Music, to me, is a God gift.

I can be doing something and something can just speak in me.

And I started meditating over it.

And at the end of the day, I find it to be music in myself.

Putting it down.

Yeah, that kind of... I got inspiration.

The first few months that I knew Raximo,

I didn't even know he was into music until I came back, this time in Sierra Leone,

and I met him again.

I found out that Raximo did music,

and then he actually told me that for a few months

he had already been working on a song about Mercy Ships.

Yeah, had a title, and I was working on a song.

Like, hope and healing in a reggae fashion.

♪ Bring that hope and healing ♪

♪ To the world’s forgotten poor ♪

♪ Bring that hope and healing ♪

♪ Yeah ♪

And she would go, oh, yeah, we can do this.

So we started talking about that.

And, we are actually now in the process of writing this song.

About the vision and the values of Mercy Ships.

And now he asked me to,

you know, work on this track with him, go to the studio with him and record it.

So, you know, I guess that’s what we'll do!

So I started in Senegal

asking a question when I opened up the cafe

and I put it out in a post and said, come have your morning coffee.

And here's your question.

On this ship, it's so diverse

and everybody is so accepting because of mostly being,

I believe, a family that is based on Christ.

So the question, did you hear what it was or did you read what was?

Why don’t you tell me?

The question is,

When you're face to face with God, how do you anticipate

you will experience that?

Um...

Early, it's quite early to,

to talk about those things.

It’s early for a question like that?

Bambi, you know how to get me in the morning.

If you have a friend that,

you are really well connected with,

and then you get to see that friend once a year, and the moment

you see the person, it's like like you never been away.

I hope it will be like that.

Me, I'm going to hug Him.

I do imagine that,

but I'll just be flat on the floor.

It's love for me.

I'm hugging Him because it's love for me and for humanity

it’s really profound and indescribable.

I'm just gonna hug Him and say, hello.

- Okay, flat on the floor. - Flat on the floor.

What makes you flat on the floor when you experience God face-to-face?

Just the awe, just the awe, I think.

You know how we always say awesome?

- Yeah. - Just in regular life

and just in normal life, we always say awesome, and we never really

understand the true meaning of it.

And I think that it's going to be,

Awe!

I feel like it will be just pure happiness.

- Yeah. - It'll be like a sunrise.

- Let’s say. - Ooh, like the sunrise.

Like I got this takeaway from someone who I met in Australia.

I'd always ask her, are you--

Are you doing okay? Are you happy?

If she wasn't doing very well,

she'd be like, oh, I'm a six out of ten.

And then I'd be like, oh, so how would you get better?

She was like, oh, if it was a 7 out of 10, it’d be this.

If it was 8 out of 10, it’d be this.

9 out of 10, it’d be this.

If it’s a 10 out of 10, I'd be hugging Jesus right now.

And I was like, that's a very good answer.

When, there'll be a day where there's a ten.

And that will be when I get to see God face to face.

♪ One day we’ll see Him face to face ♪

♪ In His embrace we’ll find our place ♪

♪ With love, ♪

♪ We sail through every sea ♪

♪ Together with Christ ♪

♪ We are a family ♪

Alright, this is

- Breanna interview number two. - Wow.

This is Wednesday. That's not a... drill?

All emergency teams muster at the Bravo staircase.

Repeat, muster at Bravo staircase.

Fireteams are proceeding to the location of the fire.

Guys, there is a fire in the carpenter's storeroom.

Go inside, assess the situation, and recover the injured.

EMT, please proceed to deck two.

Carpenters storeroom.

Got the hose?

Ready?

My leg is stuck!

Oh oh! Ow!

EMT, EMT, this is on scene command, proceed to deck 2 storeroom.

We have one major injury.

What’s the situation here?

Bambi, What's happened?

I hurt so bad...

Coming up on the next episode of The Mercy Ships.

We are in a rural part of Freetown.

And we are here to record a song.

♪ Only God can turn it around ♪

The Hope Center comes with a lot of challenges.

Power outages, limitation in the water.

Constant drama!

Good morning!

I got so close with a patient and their family.

You don't talk about all

the things that are going wrong. No, we are talking about hope.

Every day is something new.

I’ve got a job for you.

How long will it take you to fix them?

We have a new stage...

We’ve got one more job...

They're confident that I can pull this off.

I'm not sure yet.

How are you doing there, Bambi?

You still with us?

Bambi, can you hear us?