Snuggs on the loose: January 2011

Sauerkraut and tea and muesli!

Started cleaning the ship this week. Yay! ...........Not. Well, I guess it really is Yay, because it means that we are getting closer to redeploying the ship and heading up to Sierre Leone. I'm just not a big fan of cleaning. As I'm sure most people aren't. I mean, I don't mind keeping our living area neat, but large scale clean-up? I'll pass!

It hasn't been too bad though, kinda fun at times actually. But who wants to admit that cleaning is fun? Not me! The actual cleaning time is pretty short because we have to drive 2 hours each way which is included in our 8-hour work-day. I'm used to driving long distances, but there are at least 50 speed bumps along the way. Ugh! For real! cus, I counted them. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that South Africa has been overtaken with speed bumps, and we bah-bump along every day. I know that when plants and animals that are not indigenous to a place and are introduced, sometimes they flourish and take over. I think that is what has happened with the speed bumps. They don't have any natural predators here.

Anyway, so about the cleaning. I thought I was going to have to head up a team to clean the hospital corridors and wards on deck 3, and strip and wax all the floors down there, but the technical crew are still working and traipsing around down there, so it can't be done yet. Instead I was put on a team of four to wipe down walls in the classrooms, and then we ended up working on deck 2 emptying the gigantic freezers and putting everything on the dry storage shelves.

The freezers weren't on, and we could tell; they stunk! New shelves had been installed for all the dry goods, so they had been stored in the empty freezers until the freezers were needed again. So the title comes from moving all this stuff. The ship has to have enough food for the sail and for three months after arriving in Sierre Leone - in case there are delays in getting our food shipments through customs. But between the three items listed above, I don't think we'll starve, we just might not like what we are eating. Oh yeah, and the instant decaf Nescafe coffee. Not only did way too much decaf coffee get ordered, but most people drink it for the caffeine. Bad combo.

So first was the mountain of peanut butter. One of the other people working with me thought she would start with the peanut butter because it didn't look too difficult; after 45 minutes whe was still moving PB. It just didn't seam to end. I started with the sauerkraut, 45 cases of six cans each later, I was quite satisfied with my work. Then I went into the other freezer.............and there they were..........25 more cases. My next project was Symphonie in Gelb (German for symphony in yellow) tea. I neatly shelved four laundry baskets worth of boxes of 20 tea bags. Then we went into the refrigerator, and there smiling at me, was half a pallet full of more cases of boxes of Symphonie in Gelb.

Ahh, muesli.........does anyone actually like the stuff?? It looks really healthy, and from my experience, most things that are really healthy for you don't taste very good. But, someone obviously thought it was going out of style. Three of us moved muesli........for 45 minutes. Then, as we were putting it on the shelves in the fridge, we noticed the pallet of Fruit 'n' Fiber cereal was covered in a 1 1/2 foot deep layer of more bags of muesli. So we stacked that with the rest, because we figured it should all be together, for moral support you know ('cus nobody really likes it!). Actually though, when I stop and think about it, we really are so blessed, I have carried, pushed, and stacked more food than some people, especially in West Africa, will see in their

lifetime.

Well, that's a little 'taste' of what I did last week. Next time I'll tell about all the joys of stripping and re-waxing floors!

Here are a few pictures I took. It may not look like all that much but the shelves in these pictures are all about three feet deep.