Ship family

Tonight has been "Ship Family Night" so I thought it might be nice to introduce you to our ship family. 

Every one who joins the ship for more than a few weeks will normally be put into a family so they have a small group that they can bond and interact with. As with any large community, like a church, it is difficult to get to know everybody well. So the ship families give us all the opportunity to get to know a small group better. For the Packwood family, it is about having fun and creating an atmosphere where young people far from their relatives can feel at home.

This is our ship family. 

At the back from left to right are Wendy & Frank from Arizona, USA - Wendy just left yesterday and Frank leaves in 2 weeks. They will return next Spring. Naomi from Japan, Rob from Australia who is my IT Manager, Paul from South Korea, Heather then Mel from Canada.

Next to me at the front is Reuben from Mexico and then Jael from the Netherlands is on the far right.

We normally meet for supper together and will then do some kind of activity together. Sometimes it will be watching a movie or playing a game in our cabin. One week we went for a mystery tour in a ship van, driving around Kiel before ending up at McDonalds. Tonight we played the game sardines all over one of the decks.

Every couple of months we also have our weekly prayer night in ship families, giving us chance to pray for each other.

Ship families are a great part of ship life and it is interesting having 8 or 9 kids in your family.

The coming weeks are going to be very exciting. This coming weekend we are going to visit old Doulos friends in Sweden. Then on 20th our best friend Colin arrives from Edinburgh to help celebrate Heather's birthday on 22nd November which we hope to spend at Tivoli's Christmas celebration. Then before you know it, we will be opening up the ship to the public for 3 weekends for our "Christmas around the world" spectacular. 

Watch this space for all the updates.

Ship life is never boring

Sometimes it is easy to forget just how different life is when you live on a ship. Things that we accept as quite normal are probably not normal for all of you living onshore. 

This past weekend, a group  of Danish teenagers came onboard for a "Teen Street" Reunion.

Teen Street is a huge week long congress put on by OM for teens every summer with over 5000 participants from across Europe and beyond. So this was an opportunity for 50 Danish teens to come and spend 2 days on Logos Hope, experiencing life onboard and having a great reunion.

On Saturday they took part in a wide range of games and activities that included - a race using a fire house to push life rings along the quayside, another race that involved dressing up in an emersion suit, throwing heaving lines at a target and dressing up in a fire suit. 

These are not the kind of activities your average teen gets to do in their church youth group.

On Saturday night they had a huge praise party which at Teen Street is called The Throne Room, which many of the ships company joined in. This was a great chance for one of our bands to really have fun and also put our new sound and light system through its paces.

Later on they had hot chocolate up on deck 9, then sat up watching movies.

They then had the joy of sleeping in some of the great new dormatory cabins that have been built especially for teams of young people coming to the ship.

For this group of Danish teenagers, living on a ship for a weekend was a fantastic experience and most did not want to leave at the end.

In other news - the new sewage treatment plant came into service this week - sorry no pictures but it is another step towards finishing the ship. The official opening of the staff and school library's took place last week. As a ministry known for our books and our training, it is important to have good resources onboard. 

The opening of the school library included a special reading time for the children where one of the teachers read out stories the kids had written. Here Kara's teacher is reading out her story.

The plans for Christmas opening are well under way. We plan to be open the last weekend in November and the first 2 weekends in December. One highlight will be a live nativity and we have been given permission by the captain to have live animals so we are currently looking for sheep, goats and a donkey to be part of it! We are not sure yet what we will do with them all overnight!

On Monday night there was a special evening where many of the ships company who have been learning different creative ministry skills such as drama, mime, story telling, clowning etc, got to demonstrate what they have learnt to the ships community. Heather has been teaching mime to a group and it was encouraging to see 2 of her pupils perform.

Last week, Heather and I decided to begin having Spanish lessons. Not sure how much we will actually learn in the coming weeks but as the kids are already well ahead of us with their Spanish, we thought we should give it a try. 

And finally, Heather was shocked today to receive an email from Amazon confirming the order for a Peter Pan DVD. The only problem was that neither Heather nor I had ordered it.

Somehow, Kara had managed to get onto the Amazon website, find the DVD, put it in a shopping basket and then order it. We think we have a future computer geek on our hands.

However, we had to cancel the order because it wasn't done through this blogsite so we wouldn't get any commission! Don't forget to come here first before YOU order anything from Amazon.

Do your Christmas shopping right here with Amazon

Have you started your Christmas shopping yet? Maybe you have finished it.
If you live in the UK and would like to shop the easy way, why not do it online with Amazon and at the same time help support the Packwoods on Logos Hope.
As Amazon Associates, we can get a small commission for every order that is placed via our blog site. All you need to do is remember every time you want to buy anything from Amazon.co.uk to come here first and click on a link on the right.
You get your presents delivered to your door at great prices, and we get some money towards our support. Everyone wins. So please do remember us when you are doing your Christmas shopping or at any time of year.

Life gets busier

This past week has been fairly hectic. Life is certainly getting busier for many of us onboard, but particularly for me - Steve.

After much discussion and reviewing of all the work required to obtain our PSSC, we have come to the conclusion that we will definitely not be sailing before the end of the year. So we are now planning for Christmas here in Koge. We as a family had already made the decision to travel back to Edinburgh over Christmas as we need to return our car to Edinburgh before the ship starts sailing and I need some dental treatment over several visits which I can't get here onboard. So we will be in the UK from 20/12 to 4/1.

As the ship will be here for Christmas, we really want to open up the doors and invite the people of Denmark to come onboard so that we can share about the hope of Christmas and also give them the opportunity to buy our books and music in the bookshop.

Because the person overall responsible for the area of Public Ministries (Bookfair, Events, Visitor Experience etc) just doesn't have the capacity to take on this project, I have agreed to run it.

There will be a lot more to share about this in the coming weeks but basically we have 5 weeks to get everything set up and publicise the opening to get maximum visitors.

Also this week, our ships director, Mike, left for 10 days and for some strange reason decided to make me "acting director." I keep telling everyone that Mike does the directing and I do the acting.

Remarkably, as Mike was walking off the ship on Thursday morning, a group of highly influential Christian leaders from London were walking onboard for a days visit. So of course, I had the privilege of helping to host them for the day.

The ship is planning to visit London next summer, and this delegation visited to get a better understanding of what the Logos Hope is all about and how they can help facilitate the visit.

It was a remarkable visit as this group have so much vision and passion for the London visit and are so well connected that we are all very excited about all the posibilities.

We hope to have some definite dates for the UK visit soon, but of course we remain dependant on getting our PSSC and being able to sail.

Also this week, an old cabin mate from my early Doulos days arrived onboard for a visit and it was great to catch up. He encouraged us to shout a bit more loudly about all the work that has been finished because many people still think the ship is a building site.

The video below helps to show just how much has been completed.

This week the ship and children's librarys have been completed and the official opening is on Monday with yours trully having to give a speech and hand out the thank you gifts to the American team who have spent hundreds of hours sorting and cataloguing the books. Pictures to follow next week.

This week saw our first ever Vision Team coming to spend a week experiencing what ship life is like. A group of young German girls from Kiel came and stayed in our special dormitary style cabin and took part in training, work and ministry opportunities. We hope many more Vision Teams will come in the months and years to come.