When you’re packed into a tight space with the same group of people, sharing three meals a day, and going through the same intense experiences together, relationships accelerate at warp speed. Friendships that might take years to develop on land happen within weeks on a ship. At one point, someone told me that more than three hundred couples had gotten married after volunteering together on the Mercy Ship.
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t all rainbows and roses. Dating was far from my mind at the time, especially since I shared a tiny cabin with two guys and a squadron of cockroaches that scurried into hiding every time we flipped on the lights. When roaches crawled up from the shower drain, we’d stamp and yell, “I got one!” and then make a new hash mark on a piece of paper Tony had tacked to our bathroom door, each tick representing a successful kill.
I met Tony and Danny a few weeks into my assignment with the ship. At first, I’d been put in an even smaller cabin with two African shipmates who didn’t speak English. We smiled a lot at each other, but it was lonely. Then Tony and Danny, who had a free bed, invited me to bunk with them—although they weren’t so sure about me in the beginning. They were all-American, khaki-wearing, yes-sir-no-ma’am Christian boys, and I was only a few months removed from nightlife. They’d heard rumors that I’d shown up hungover my first day on the ship, and it probably didn’t help that I left my designer shirts and jeans in piles all over the cabin floor, or that I name-dropped constantly.
We’d be watching a movie, and I’d say, “See that guy? I saw [insert name of famous celebrity who shall remain anonymous] in our club once. He was drugged up out of his mind, and we had to carry him out.”
“Cool,” they’d reply without skipping a beat. “That must have been right after you broke up with Jennifer Aniston.” Tony and Danny always gave it right back to me.
Tony was twenty-three, a premed and philosophy graduate, who grew up in small-town Indiana. He wore a lot of hats during his three years on the Anastasis: deckhand, helmsman, forklift operator, and water engineer. As if those roles weren’t enough, he was also in charge of patient transport. When patients came out of the operating room, there were no elevators to take them to the recovery unit, one flight below. Tony was one of two strong guys who would carry them on stretchers to a series of pulleys and ropes, and then lower them down to the recovery ward. He made sure that nobody ever got dropped.
Danny was nineteen, from Florida, and taking a break from college to figure out who he wanted to be. When he applied to Mercy Ships, he said he’d do any job, an offer he soon regretted. They stuck him in the kitchen, where he sliced oranges and made mashed potatoes for 350 people every day. Danny, I soon found out, was a budding videographer whose talents were going to waste.
When I’d first arrived in Benin, I bought an old Suzuki 550cc motorcycle from a deck hand for a few hundred bucks, purchasing the freedom to come and go as I pleased without having to sign out a ship vehicle. On Danny’s days off, I’d take him with me, and he’d ride on the back of my bike filming local color. We explored the countryside, shooting hundreds of photos and videos: women walking home from the market with their shopping baskets balanced on their heads, farmers tending to cassava crops, barefoot children playing soccer in wide-open fields.
I like to think that Danny found himself on the back of that Suzuki. Years later, he started his own video production company, and I reached out to my old friend when I needed help shooting and editing.
As my roommates and I grew closer, they came to embrace my eccentricities. One day, Danny mentioned that he liked the style of my designer cargo pants, so I found a tailor in Benin and brought him back to the ship. He showed us fabric samples and took measurements. A couple weeks later, Danny, Tony, and I had new pants and dress shirts. We were the sharpest guys on the ship.
I knew some people thought I was crazy. Really? Custom-made pants, Scott? But in my former life, going to a great tailor in London or New York City cost at least a thousand bucks. Here in West Africa? Less than $50, all in.
Always pushing boundaries, soon I was studying the crew manual to find ways to work in a little fun for me and my friends—without breaking ship rules, of course. For example, alcohol, tobacco, and gambling were forbidden on the ship, but the rulebook said you could drink beer or wine in moderation off-ship, provided you were also eating a meal in a proper restaurant. So, my roommates and I started an epic poker game, Texas Hold ’Em, in a private room at a local restaurant. Tony went to the carpentry shop and painted pieces of scrap wood red, white, and blue and then sawed them into little square chips.
The buy-in was about $5 and Tony would always sweat it out. “I gotta win this hand,” he’d say, rubbing his last pennies together. We laughed hard and bluffed even harder.
Finding the fun in work has always been important to me, whether it’s tying a balloon to a mop, making people wear pajamas to a fancy club, or treating my roommates to the Savile Row experience in Africa.
Pretty soon, a friend of Tony’s named Lafe started hanging out with us. He was a lanky, soft-spoken guy from Colorado. The four of us would scout the flea markets of Benin for cool clothes—vintage American jeans ($1), screen-printed T-shirts of teams that had lost the big game (GREEN BAY PACKERS, 1998 SUPER BOWL CHAMPIONS) (ten cents), and once, a pair of vintage Pumas that smelled like urine and took months to air out ($3).
Lafe ran the Mercy Ships team that helped build wells in the villages. Occasionally, I’d join him in the field to take photos. The earliest pictures I have of Lafe show him working with a group of African teenagers who are shoveling a hole ten feet deep and wide. At the time, wells didn’t mean much to me. I didn’t understand how life-changing clean water could be or why a bunch of people would put in hours of backbreaking work to dig a giant hole in the ground. So I snapped some pictures to pad out the Mercy Ships archives, and then spent the rest of my time photographing a little boy chasing a bicycle tire with a stick.
It was only much later, when Lafe showed me the actual dirty water people were forced to drink, that I’d get the significance of clean water. Eventually, I’d even come to appreciate why a village would work day and night just to find it.