While working at a summer camp for teenagers last June, I met Daniel, a guy fresh off of sailing around the world and back. This season of adventure was held with Friend Ships, and fresh out of college Daniel had the opportunity to see the world, while helping to bring the most basic necessities to some of the world’s most impoverished areas.
Friend Ships, a humanitarian group founded in nineteen eighty-three, provides food, medicine, clothing, and other critical life support relief items to people in need, throughout the world. Organizations like these are focused on meeting needs for any nation in need ranging from LA to Haiti, and works to keep their name low-key, placing more emphasis on the aid that they provide then gaining any recognition for their work.
Aside from the adventure on the ships, Daniel’s time with Friend Ships was not always easy,
In that time I have contracted one tropical disease, Dengue fever, sailed on two different ships , been on three voyages, saw four countries, lapsed in and out of sleep for five days, while recovering from said disease and spent six months abroad. I have sailed across the Atlantic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Caribbean and the Mediterranean. (all in WWII era vessels) I went from being lost in Jerusalem to stuck in the Canary isles.
Recently, in response to the most recent disaster in Haiti, Friend Ships spent February in the devastated country providing all and any aid possible. Haiti‘s seven point zero earthquake in January injured or killed over five hundred thousand Haitian nationals. Three out of the nine million people in Haiti were affected by the earthquake, and three hundred thousand children under the age of two are still in need of nutritional support.
Support from the Friend Ships provided the Haitian people with medical attention on one of four twenty-foot mobile super clinics, shelter materials, and basic supplies like food and water. The ships were also loaded with twenty-four hundred pairs of sandals for the people. By providing shoes, they were able to help the Haitian people avoid issues like, a leading cause of disease in developing countries is soil-transmitted diseases, which can penetrate the skin through bare feet. Wearing shoes can help prevent these diseases, and the long-term physical and cognitive harm they cause. Also, wearing shoes also prevents feet from getting cuts and sores. Not only are these injuries painful, they also are dangerous when wounds become infected.
Infection and malnutrition should be obsolete in today’s world, but unfortunately its not the case. Friend Ships’s desire combat these devistating forces with as much intensity as they can where,
Friend Ships has delivered over 100 million dollars worth of supplies, equipment, food, clothes and medicine, both in the USA and abroad. People in war torn and natural disaster areas, children in orphanages, the elderly, the out-of-work, and homeless, all have benefited from goods supplied to them by Friend Ships.
Although many of those receiving life-saving help from Friend Ships never even see the ship that carried the help across the sea to their country or the hands of the crew who lovingly worked to make the delivery possible
The ships have a big mission with an refresing motto of, ” unloading the interity” to ensure that they keep what matters most, closest to their hearts.By volunteering with the ships, the crew is faced with discomfort and possible disease from foreign soil, but the desire to do something bigger than themselves brings them to serve on these” missions of mercy.” We all cannot take a trip like Daniel’s with an outstanding organization like Friend Ships, but we can look for new ways to reach out to those in our own communities. By providing some of the most basic needs in someone’s life we have the opputunity to make the world a better place.
* Photo Credit: Daniel Hudson
