Today officially marks ten months against my two year commitment to Mercy Ships. If you include training I’ve been here over a year, but they start your commitment when you actually get to the ship. So ten months it is! And I have no idea what to write about.

I haven’t been doing a very good job blogging, and for that I am sorry, but I feel like the difficulty comes from the normalcy of life. It’s not ‘normal’ for you guys, where I’m living and what I’m doing is probably beyond strange to many. I was visited by some close friends a few months ago and they were mildly astonished and relatively offended by my living situation. But to me, it’s become the usual.

The cramped and crowded living conditions of the ship, the overpopulated madness of Freetown. It took a couple of months, but I even like driving here now. Well, maybe “like” isn’t the right word, but it doesn’t faze me any longer. And trivia night is a sporadic highlight among others.

But it’s hard to figure out what to write about when you’ve lost your sense of what’s interesting. Are fire drills and photos of me geared up still interesting? Are photos of crowds and the countryside? I know photos of what I do for a job aren’t interesting in any context. I could post more patient stories I suppose.

I don’t know if you see my dilemma, but life normalizes wherever we are. Granted my neighbor is apparently vacuuming by hitting the wall as much as he can… that’s not normal. But the rest of it really feels like it. Even though I live in one of the strangest places on Earth. It’s bound to be, with 400 people of 35 nationalities stuffed into one 500-foot-long boat.

So if you could ask me some questions, like what you want to know more about (the ship, what we do, my life here, what I consider my perfect Sunday) that would be a big help. Perhaps I should just work on getting the 1 photo/day blogs back up and running. But man oh man am I behind on THOSE.

What would you like to see? There are over 300 of you that frequent this site every month. What do you want from it? This is your chance to tell me, because I have no idea what to write today. Granted, as I’ve gone back and added the photos I have some ideas. Perhaps they’ll spark some curiosity. But tell me: what do you want to know about? (in the comments below preferably)

Filed under: Reflecting by Jay