Original subtitles

Previously on The Mercy Ships.

All emergency teams muster at the Bravo Staircase.

Repeat, muster at Bravo Staircase.

Fireteams are proceeding to the location...

EMT. EMT.

This is on scene command, proceed to deck two storeroom.

We have one major injury.

Bambi, what's happened?

I hurt so bad.

- She’s bleeding. - Guys, can we get some pressure on this?

Bambi I'm gonna have a look underneath this, okay?

I'm gonna look at your leg.

You’re doing really good Bambi. You’re doing really good.

I repeat, low blood pressure.

Okay, so her blood pressure’s 70 over 30.

We've had a degree of massive blood loss,

and we've also got a head injury.

How are you doing there, Bambi?

You still with us?

Bambi, can you hear us?

- Angie, it's on your call. - Okay, great. One, two, three.

So there's no obvious bleeding or hemorrhage from this side.

Guys, you can just roll her back on. On your count, Angie.

Ready, steady, up.

The injury victim has been evacuated from deck two, over.

All emergency teams.

The drill is ended.

I repeat, the drill is ended for all emergency teams.

So you can see we've done the drill this morning.

We practice these because we have real life emergencies.

And we've got to provide the care for all the crew.

The scenario was somebody was in carpentry

and they had multiple injuries,

including a head injury,

hemorrhaging arm and a crush injury to the leg.

So as a team, we have to initially assess,

stabilize, and then make them ready for transfer.

Alex surprised me with getting to be the casualty this week.

You get the makeup from Heather and she does a fabulous job

of making it look real.

To see our fire crews,

practice is essential because you get the anxieties out.

You get the team coordination in

when we actually go out there for a victim,

we're ready.

It is fun.

Isn't it?

Sure, yeah. It's fun.

I’ll give one to you Bambi!

On this episode of The Mercy Ships:

Good morning.

I get so close with a patient and their family.

You don't talk about all the things that are going wrong.

No, we're talking about hope.

And we're talking about healing.

We give the wrong blood to the wrong person,

we can cause a reaction which might result in them dying.

They installed a new transformer.

The electrical cables were not mounted very well.

So I think that we're totally off of the grid now.

For me, it's really enjoyable to see progress

in your work from the beginning of the day to the end of the day.

...shoe finished!

Oh!

This is great.

There's a lot about Anton that I like.

So when I went home

after that short stint as a two weeker, I kind of said,

how do I bring a piece of the ship back

to where I work?

And then as soon as you get back into the mundane day to day work of the--

in the UK it’s the NHS, I just couldn't capture it and I didn't know why.

As I started talking to other Mercy Shippers,

I just realized that it's probably not possible to bring that back over.

And so it actually made me want to go back to the ship.

I have my suitcase

and it's pouring with rain,

so I'm pretty happy that I'm leaving.

I'm really excited.

It's going to take about 12 hours, but in 12 hours I'll be in Sierra Leone!

Made it through into Heathrow, through security and everything.

On my layover in Brussels.

This is the flight queue for Freetown that heads on to Monrovia.

It's a big queue.

So we’re at hour 14 of travel and I mean, look at this place.

It's pretty amazing and pretty. A nice sunset.

African sunsets are the best.

Oh yeah.

As I transitioned

into being a long termer, I still thought I could do everything.

And so then I just kind of learned that as someone who,

needs to bide their time, you kind of just need to work on a slower pace.

I went out less. I took more care for myself.

I read some books, I spent more time with Jesus

and now I feel like I have a more balanced life.

Look at this place.

We're like playing pickleball in Freetown on deck 11 of the Global Mercy.

It's a great way of relaxing and chilling out,

releasing some of that tension and stress from the work downstairs.

We get to do pickleball,

there's also a basketball court, there's a swimming pool.

It's pretty cool.

Very soon, I'm going to be

heading back to Madagascar and I'm super pumped.

I mean, there are big differences between the ship,

but the most important thing for me is that Thomas is on the African Mercy.

So I'm really excited to go.

And Madagascar is an incredibly beautiful country, as well.

Good morning. Howdy, buddy.

So yeah, this is the one that we filled up.

My name is Erik Jan Beerlage,

I'm from the Netherlands and I'm serving

here as a Hope Center manager.

I've been now roughly one and a half years with Mercy Ships on this vessel.

The Global Mercy.

I'm responsible for the land-based facility that we're operating here

in Sierra Leone.

There's a bed space capacity of 164 patients.

And this is where they can have their accommodation before and after surgery.

My name is Anton Ericksson.

I'm from Sweden.

My commitment on the ship

is as a Hope Center facilitator.

Good morning.

As a Hope Center facilitator, I have a wide range of tasks.

There's usually 2 or 3 of us at the Hope Center with a larger team

of day crew, which, are locally hired staff for Mercy Ships.

It's a little bit of like a work leader.

We delegate a lot of tasks to the team.

We keep track of all the patients, all their next appointments.

If they have any issues, they come to us.

We solve problems that come up.

We make sure they have a place to sleep and that we order food for everyone.

The Hope Center is located in the middle of Freetown.

It comes with a lot of challenges.

Limitation in the water,

frequent power outages.

Because since yesterday, I noticed that the electrical power cables

they’re hanging low.

And so I think that we're totally off of the grid now.

They installed a new transformer.

All the while, the electrical cables were not mounted very well.

So the next day when we were around, we all of a sudden see

another truck trying to pass.

Someone climbs up the

truck and tries to get the power cables away.

It's crazy scenarios that you wouldn't see back home.

At that moment, our generator kicked on,

so you need to check on the fuel.

Well, actually always something going on.

It's part of the experience of being more off ship.

Coming up on the Mercy Ships.

I was kind of struggling with lyrics, so I just decided to talk to my patients.

I want to learn to understand what life was like before you knew

you could get surgery.

That really inspired me, that only God could do this.

Together with God's input, we need to make this song.

Today we are in a more rural part of Freetown.

Here's a studio of a guy called Wise.

He is a incredible producer.

So we drove here all the way from the ship,

and we are here to record a song.

So what I love about this environment, it's

a very different from what I'm used to recording in the West.

We got dogs walking around. We got chickens.

We always have to keep the door shut

because everything runs on a generator here.

Because the electricity supply, the light supply is not steady.

So that's why we run everything on the generator.

You hear it right there.

Real life.

But I need something more, groovy.

You know, that kind of...

I will take it to 100.

Yeah, I was working with Raximo for a couple of years now.

You know, we met in Conakry.

We worked on a couple of songs.

Yeah I love music, of course.

It's the only thing that makes me feel happy.

If you don't love it, you don't make money out of it.

You got to give it your time first and see what comes after.

So all my time I've been giving it to music and I feel it's a blessing.

♪ Look at me now ♪

♪ Look at me now ♪

♪ Only God can do it for me ♪

♪ Only God can do it ♪

To be very honest with you,

When we drove here this morning, I was still like, okay, I'm not sure

how I'm going to find myself in this situation.

Because we're working with Raximo and Wise.

Those guys are musical geniuses.

So they already have the track.

They the lyric, everything in their mind, which is a gift.

But for me, it's sometimes hard to tap into like, okay, what are you thinking?

What are we doing?

So a few days ago, Raximo told me, Dieke, it's like this.

You have to trust me in this one.

We're going to go to the studio, and there I will speak my mind.

I'll tell Wise what I need and what I hear in my head.

And he's going to he's going to make it a real thing.

I like this.

I like this.

It is Wise man.

That’s how-- yeah, we cook. We cook here very well.

So that happened today.

To me, that is truly a miracle because for me it was nowhere yet.

But for Raximo, he knew we were going to do this right now.

And it's great.

- Wise man! - Wise man, he cook man.

This is good for the verse.

This guitar, this is nice.

And the part leading up to today.

I was kind of struggling with lyrics, to be very honest with you.

I was really praying about it.

I was trying to find inspiration, because I really want

to create a certain feeling that my patients are going through.

I was still struggling with the words and how to find the right feeling.

So I just decided to talk to my patients.

For example, there is one guy, he's 16 years old, and because of an infection

that he had in his youth, a big part of his nose was no longer there.

So what we did on Mercy Ships is we kind of gave him a new nose.

So I talked to him yesterday.

I said, I want to learn to understand what life was like for you before you knew

you could get surgery.

Like, were you just as happy? Because he's a bright kid now.

He said, no, I was I was not happy.

I was always inside.

I would never go. In Krio, we say waka waka.

I would never go for a walk.

And then he said, Didi.

But now when I go back to my village, I'm going to waka waka!

I'm going to walk. I'll be out there.

That really inspired me, that only God could do this.

And we need to make this song.

During recording,

Raximo came to me that he felt like something was missing on the track.

And then he had this idea.

Wow, this is beautiful.

Obviously, I love this idea.

When a patient is seen in pre-op,

we normally estimate how much blood loss they're going to have.

And according to that, we order some units of blood.

When this patient was seen in pre-op,

we estimated that they would need

two units of blood.

When the surgeons reevaluated, they realized that there was

a high bleeding risk.

And we might need five units of blood.

- Hey, Breanna. - Hey.

We just finished getting our fourth unit ready.

Fourth one? Awesome. Thank you so much.

And we've got one more coming?

I'm about to collect the fifth unit.

Do you think you'll need more?

No, no, I think we're pretty good, actually.

- But, should we do a quick ID badge? - Yeah.

So the SLF number is 09187.

- Perfect. - And it’s O-Negative.

We always are very vigilant with our checks.

We do two checks,

one with the lab tech when we collect it, and then once again in the O.R.

And the reason why we do these checks is because if we give the wrong blood

to the wrong person,

then we can cause a reaction which might result in them dying.

So it's really important that we do these checks.

We're looking really good, but we are definitely going to need them all.

So this is great. Thanks. Let me just sign this.

- Okay. - Perfect.

- See you soon! - Thanks so much.

Hello?

Hey, would you be able to sneak away?

We need some blood for a big surgery.

- Yes, sure. I'll come. - Okay. Thank you.

As fast as possible.

Anton? Hello.

I realized I hadn't even signed up to be a blood donor yet,

so I thought I might do that to help out in the future.

It was Breanna who ended up being the one to draw my blood.

During the whole encounter,

since it was during the time where we kind of just had a crush on each other.

Just before that even happened, she was really nervous.

I had done phlebotomy and stuff, which I'm used to drawing blood.

But when you're drawing a unit of blood, it's a much bigger needle.

Like, you should see the size comparison between the two.

So one thing I hadn't quite mastered was that you don't have to put

a tourniquet around their arm quite as tight as I usually would.

So that by the end, though,

you had a whole trail of blood down his arm, pooling underneath his arm.

And it looked, it looked a lot worse than it was, I think.

So definitely after she squirted blood all over my arm,

she was even more nervous and probably a bit embarrassed about it.

Um...

Collected it very successfully.

I did a great job.

Despite what he might claim.

I ended up taking a picture of it just to tease her with it in the future.

But we laughed about it then, and we still do now, so.

Stay sitting for a minute, okay?

We can get you a juice and a snack?

Here you are.

Thank you.

Much better this time.

You have a nice rest of your day.

Yeah. Thank you for stopping by.

- I'll see you later. - Take it easy.

With the help of the

crew donors today we were able to complete the surgery.

The patient was able to

remain in stable condition

with the transfusion of five units.

And we were able to remove the maxillofacial tumor,

and without further complications.

There's a lot about Anton that I like.

- Hello. - Well hello!

How was the rest of your day?

He's very patient.

He's very kind.

Always willing to help people when they need it.

In the last couple of months,

I got engaged.

Coming up on The Mercy Ships:

And every day we visit the patients in the most lonely places.

Good morning.

They always nod their head, like, oh, I'm so sorry.

And I'm like, no, it's amazing.

All good?

Yeah. How's it going?

Yeah, not bad, not bad, just--

Trying to fix this in place.

So this is the actual size they wanted was three pallets high.

So this is being used off the ship?

It's more of an examination bed.

So the idea is the patient or whoever's coming to the hospital

will lie down there, and then they can also have it up like this.

I'm going to build a wee arm on here to hold it in place so they can examine them.

It's like a wee examination bed.

My name is Cameron Arbuckle.

I am from Scotland

and I'm a carpenter

on board the Global Mercy.

So yeah, just going to put these hinges on

going to put these nice covers on and then got to put an arm in it.

Mainly, the reason I came here first was I love boats.

I love doing carpentry and I love working for Jesus.

And I just this is all I want to do here.

Being a carpenter, I want to do

work that actually means something and actually doing some good in the world.

I work with another carpenter from America

He's a very cool guy.

He's really knowledgeable of the ship.

He's been here longer than I've been here.

And I, when I've got a problem or I need help with stuff,

I ask him a lot of questions.

My name is George Beinetti.

I'm from Rochester, New York,

and I am a carpenter on the Global Mercy.

I've been with Mercy Ships for two and a half years.

I first found out about Mercy Ships from a friend that I had just made,

and he had just returned from the Africa Mercy.

He had been there for two years, I think.

All he could talk about was Mercy Ships.

At the time, I was studying abroad in Rotterdam in the Netherlands.

And Abigail, she saw a ad on YouTube.

So the same week we both heard about it, different sides of the planet.

And, it was definitely, a seed had been planted in both of our minds.

A couple years later, we were married.

We had jobs that...

were okay.

But Abigail in particular was really looking to do more with her

videography skills.

She knew that Mercy Ships was a good option

to be able to come do film work.

It's really enjoyable to see progress

in your work from the beginning of the day to the end of the day.

And the nice thing is it's, I've not fixed together yet, so we can quite easily

- take it to bits, put it in the car. - Oh yeah.

and hopefully I'm just going to screw it together.

So it means if they want to change or alter it that can easily unscrew it.

and do what they want with it.

As a carpenter, I like to say that I am responsible

for the health and safety and welfare of the crew and the patients on the ship.

That looks like safety and security requests from the captain

and the officers. Even built surgical instruments to help with

specialized surgeries, to help me make improvements around the ship.

In the dining room to make things easier,

more enjoyable for the crew or building shoes for the patients.

Every day is something new and very, very unique work.

- Hey George! - Hey Ori!

- Hey, is shoe finished? - Yeah.

Oh!

This is great.

This will work out with his one centimeter

- leg length discrepenancy. This is-- - Yeah, Let me know if you need--

- What, can I color this black? - Oh, yeah.

Yeah, he'll probably like that.

Alright, I'll let you know how it works.

And if we need anything else with it.

- But thank you. - Yeah, you're welcome!

There's so much I love about being here.

I love the work we do, bringing the hope and healing to people who don't have it.

And it's so much fun and variety

in what I get to do here.

Hello?

- Morning! Morning, Cameron. - How’s it going?

What's up?

I got a job for you.

Ahh! Of course you do.

Palliative care I think is...

one of the most special

departments on the ship.

My name is Willianne,

and I am from the Netherlands.

And I am the team leader

of Palliative Care.

So the patient journey starts, when they come to the ship,

and then the doctors find out.

We cannot help this person because the tumor is malignant

or it is very dangerous to operate.

So when a patient cannot be helped, then they come to the palliative care team.

We have the opportunity to go right into the community

and be part of the community.

And every day we visit the patients

in the most lonely places.

Good morning.

When I say I'm a palliative care nurse,

they always nod their head like, oh, I'm so sorry.

And I'm like, no, it's amazing.

And what a lot of people don't realize

is that we laugh more with the patients and sing and dance with the patients.

You don't talk about all the things that are going wrong.

No, we are talking about hope and we're talking about healing.

Healing is not just physical.

Healing is also, how are you doing mentally, and how are you doing

in your heart?

How are you doing with your family?

How are you doing with God.

That is also healing.

In the beginning,

when I meet a patient and their family, there is no hope.

They are depressed, they are anxious, and they are mad.

But during weeks, months that we are there we see people change.

We see people heal in their hearts, and their connection with God.

So Sinneh, how is your week this week?

Sinneh, when I first met him,

he was very devastated because for years

he was waiting for Mercy Ships.

He didn't go into the community anymore.

He isolated himself.

We see as a people when we first meet them they don't feel like a human anymore.

We visit sometimes twice a week just to say you are valuable

and the sickness that you have is just a little part of you.

And now, because we come there every week,

A lot of people from the community also visit.

So he doesn't feel alone anymore and he feels valuable.

That is actually the most important thing of our job

is just being there and loving them.

A typical visit what we do is we look at the physical aspect.

How are the symptoms going?

We look at how are they doing mentally and we look at the family.

So how is the family doing?

What does the family need.

And we look at their spiritual aspects like how are they feeling towards God.

Dear Father in heaven,

as we come to you today, Father, we want to also lift up this family.

Leave your spirit behind.

Leave your peace behind.

Leave your strength behind.

Death is something so intimate.

I get so close with a patient and their family,

so it doesn't feel almost like a patient anymore.

It feels like a brother or sister is passing away.

And when we are there, when the moment is there,

you pray a lot over them.

We gather around, we hold hands, and we thank God.

It feels like the job is accomplished.

Someone is passing away peacefully, knowingly going to God.

♪ In Your love divine ♪

♪ Peace is what I find ♪

♪ Ready now to go ♪

♪ Heart is full and free ♪

♪ In Your love I know ♪

♪ You'll remember me ♪

Coming up on the next episode of The Mercy Ships.

We’re going to go try to find some wood to make that frame.

I was driving by and I saw this lumber yard.

Don’t film me doing this, my mom would kill me.

Cesar.

Come see this.

This temperatures is creeping up again.

Yeah, yeah.

This is ongoing problem.

So we're going to have to find something to try and improve on this.

I do love my job,

but there's a lot of random

things that come up.

Hello?

We need you back on the ship.

We need you ready to dive.

Okay. I’ll be there soon.

Constant drama.