Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
At the port, Christmas in a shoe box
VOLUNTEERS REACH OUT TO MARINERS
“We are grateful that someone remembered us.” Nemesio Alcala, Explorer chief officer
PORT EVERGLADES — About 20 crewmen aboard the cargo ship Explorer had just gathered in the mess for a lunch of rice and fish when three seventh-graders from a Davie middle school walked in bearing gifts.
“Merry Christmas,” the students from Parkway Christian School said as they passed out colorfully wrapped packages to the sailors, all natives of the Philippines and all momentarily bewildered by the unannounced visitors.
Before the end of the month, volunteers will have boarded about 110 ships in Port Everglades to help distribute 1,400 gifts to sailors as part of what the ministry known as Seafarers’ House calls Shoebox Christmas. The gift-giving began last month.
Each of the handwrapped shoe boxes contains an assortment of toiletries — soap, deodorant, shaving cream — along with a deck of cards and a pair of socks. “Thinking of you during the holidays,” reads an enclosed card.
“We are grateful that someone remembered us,” said Nemesio Alcala, 58, the chief officer aboard the Explorer, a 528-foot bulk carrier flagged in the Marshall Islands. “We are far from home.”
On this Wednesday, the schoolgirl Santa Clauses were Brianna Duncan, Peyton Lees and Christina Herrera, all 12 and all impressed by the thankfulness expressed by the mariners and by their first visit to a working freighter.
As the students climbed up the steep gangplank to the Explorer’s deck, a huge crane was lifting bucketloads of slag, a stony smelting residue, and pouring it into dump trucks.
“I feel bad they can’t see their families that much,” Brianna Duncan said of the sailors. “So getting these things they regularly use may remind them of home.”
Seafarers’ House is a nonprofit mission located inside Port Everglades, an onshore oasis for sailors that includes a convenience store that stocks a wide variety of snacks and flavored instant noodles, an electronics outlet that also sells luggage, a money exchange, a multireligious chapel, a small library and a pool table.
Chaplain Ron Perkins said Seafarers’ House welcomes about 150,000 visitors each year, and he and colleague Peter Lin, a Roman Catholic priest, also call on ships to provide counseling or religious services to those sailors who cannot leave the ship because they lack shore leave time or a U.S. visa.
The mission operates on an annual budget of about $800,000, with support coming from faith-based communities and the maritime industry, including cruise lines and cargo companies, Perkins said.
The mission began the Shoebox Christmas project nine years ago, modeling it on similar programs at ports in New York, New Jersey and Houston, Perkins said.
“We are always looking for opportunities to assess the spiritual and emotional health of seafarers, to listen to people and to share the human condition,” said Perkins, an ordained Orthodox Catholic priest whose calling is workplace ministry. “This is a way to remind people we are here.”
Leslie Duncan, Brianna’s mom, chaperoned the Parkway students on their volunteer mission to the Explorer and a second vessel, AS Federica, a container ship flagged in Barbuda.
Meeting the crew “opened the girls’ eyes to what work life is like aboard a ship, and how much is sacrificed to bring us all the products we enjoy here,” said Duncan. “I think we often forget that.”
After she walked down the gangplank to end her visit to the Explorer, Peyton Lees said the life of a mariner was probably not for her.
“It looks a little cramped,” she said of the tight living space provided the crew. “And I get seasick. I’ll stay on land.”