Emily’s ship

An ecumenical ship: that’s how the “Doulos” could be defined. It’s a boat that could be considered a floating book fair. It contains 500,000 books, of which roughly half are of Christian literature. The others are divided between science, sport, hobbies, cooking, economics and medicine. Purchased in 1977 by “Gute Bücher für Alle” (good books for everyone), a non-profit charity based at Mosbach in Germany, the vessel is crewed by a team of 300 volunteers, aged between 18 and 65, who come from the Christian churches of forty countries and spend two years on board the ship. Over eighteen million visitors have visited the Doulos since it set sail. It has made stops in five hundred ports in over one hundred countries in all continents. The charity runs two other ships, the “Logos 2” and the “Logos Hope”. NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE. Cleaning the blood off the walls of a hospital in Djibouti; distributing roses and cookies among the prostitutes of Thailand, to try to explain to these children, already slaves of the sex trade, what they are really worth; trying to restore houses amid the ruins left by the tsunami in Sri Lanka; or bringing help to schools in the Middle East, where it is permitted to teach English to Muslim children so long as you keep silent about the fact you’re Christians: just some of the aid projects conducted by the volunteers of the “Doulos”, the boat run by the German aid organization “Good Books for Everyone”, which sails round the world every year to bring education and the Christian message to the poor and needy. By serving on the crew of this ship, the twenty-year-old English girl Emily Fennell has become an adult. Departing in January 2005 when she was only 18, this blond little girl with blue eyes had never left home before. Her mum and dad are Americans, social workers in Leicester, a town in the English Midlands; she has an elder sister. Emily had always been a little rebel at home. “I always said no to everything. I was often angry, and wanted to have nothing to do with the faith of my parents, Christian Evangelicals of the Baptist Church”, she explains to SIR. Things changed gradually when Emily’s father suddenly fell ill with a brain tumour and the little girl, only nine years old at the time, asked God for the first time to prove his existence. Her father survived the very difficult surgical operation to remove the tumour and came out of hospital almost cured. Emily then began to go to church where, she said, “she felt the stronger presence of the Creator”. When she finished her compulsory schooling and her parents asked her what she wanted to do in life, Emily replied that she wanted to organise an airplane that would bring humanitarian missions to countries all over the world. “You know it’s impossible”, said her mum and dad. “Nothing is impossible to God”, replied Emily, who then decided to take “a little time out to pray for her vocation”.VERY HARD WORK. The idea of working on board the “Doulos” was suggested to her by some elderly ladies at a conference held by her parents’ church. “A search on the Internet confirmed it was just what I was seeking”. Bought by the charity “Gute Bücher für Alle” (good books for everyone) in 1977, the “Doulos” is the oldest passenger liner that still plies the oceans, a record that ensures it a place in the “Guinness Book of Records”. Apart from books, it unloads at ports throughout the world a dedicated team of Christian volunteers. “You need to pay to get a berth on the vessel”, explains Emily, “because money is needed to run it. I didn’t know where to find the 10,000 pounds I needed. I prayed to God to help me and, as the months passed, relatives and friends offered me the necessary money”. Emily set sail in January 2005 and for twelve months had the job of cleaning the toilets on board the ship. “It was very hard work”, she recalls, “because outside the Western world practically no one knows how to use a WC, and yet I enjoyed it. By cleaning the filth of others I felt I was cleaning my own life of so many mistakes I had made without thinking”. “And God, I must say, has a strong sense of humour, because at times some visitor would offer to help me and some one else wanted to take a photo with me in those dirty toilets, to keep as a souvenir”. THAT LIGHT IN OUR EYES. Emily, like the rest of the crew, worked without cease, over eight hours a day because there was always something to do. In the Middle East, with her friends, she helped in schools without being able to say they were Christians. “The local people asked us, ‘That light in your eyes, from where does it come?” Only then could we speak of what it was that inspired us”. “When I left my mum and dad I said to the Lord: ‘now it’s only you and I” and so it was. Love for God made me overcome homesickness, physical and also psychological strains. On the Doulos I learned to know myself, the power and mercy of God that permit the very existence of the ship which has survived to this day, in contrast to others built in the same period”.