Ben's funny story from Ghana

my friend, ben cubbage, is a missionary with Mercy Ships. He's been in Ghana, Africa, now for a little over a month.


check out his AWESOME story he shared with us back in early December. it's hilarious. :)

So.

A few days ago I was getting a tour of all the secret nooks and crannies of the Mercy Ship called the "Anastasis," all the holds where we store stuff, the engine room, and the dark recesses of the ship where we put all the extra medical supplies and ropes and sailing doo-dads.

Then (it was about 1 am, since the night watchman at the time was showing me around) I asked if I could see the "bridge," that's the part of the ship with the steering wheel and that fancy brass nautical stuff where you look over the bow from a huge window. So we go up there. And the night watchman proceeds to tell me all about the history of this 50-year old equipment. We play with the steering wheel and the big compass.

I walk over to the window and look out into the harbor. And what catches my eye but a big red lever. Hmmmm?.....What is this? A red lever. I wonder what it does?.....

So the curiousity is too much. And before the watchman can tell me it's not such a good idea, I pulled it!

And then sounded the loudest noise I've ever heard! A foghorn, usually meant for alerting ships several miles away that we may be a crash course. But instead we were in harbor, in the largest port in West Africa, and it was 1 am. And then the captain and all the engineers got up and ran around trying to figure out how to turn the darned thing off. They apparently were unsure about how to go about doing that.

Needless to say, I think I may have woken up almost the entire boat. That's about 300 people aboard a giant hospital ship: patients, doctors, engineers, deck hands, community development folks, you name it. And from outside it sounded like the foghorn reverberated across the whole harbor (which is full of lots of HUMOUNGOUS cargo ships from all over the world)! So I don't even want to know how many people were cursing me under their breath in some foreign language.

But, finally after 20 minutes they turned the valves off for the foghorn's air supply and there was once again silence. The only problem was that the whole ship was awake and the captain was not so happy. So he took me in his office and we had a little chat. He was stern - but gracious. After that I decided to never again touch another mysterious lever.

So - I hadn't been in Africa, or even on the ship, for a week. And I've already gotten to meet the captain. The circumstances were a bit abnormal - but maybe I'll be able to look back on it and laugh :)