I Spent 6 Days on The Worlds Largest Hospital Ship

I had no idea what to expect as I walked up the gangway of the Global Mercy, a floating hospital ship docked in Sierra Leone.

I’ve spent a lot of time on ships in the past, but this experience was completely different from anything I’d ever imagined.

I’d travelled 5000 miles to board the ship, and we arrived in the middle of the night. I was so excited but really nervous too.

I knew that the Global Mercy was a ship run entirely by volunteers who live onboard and provide free surgeries to those who need them, but I had no idea how that could work in reality.

I had so many questions in my mind, What was it like to live onboard? What kind of care did the ship provide, and why here, in Sierra Leone?

I had no idea who I’d meet, where I’d stay, what I’d be eating. I didn’t know anything, really, and I’m glad I went into this without knowing too much. 

I spent 6 days onboard finding out the answers to these questions, and nothing could have prepared me for the reality I’d find.

For the last couple of years, we’ve been fundraising on my YouTube channel for the charity Mercy Ships by selling toys of our mascot, Captain Hudson. It started as a small project, but to date, we’ve raised over £100,000 this way. 

It was a regular Tuesday when I received an email asking me if I’d like to see how the money was being used onboard.

I have to admit my first reaction was Sierra Leone? No way! I don’t know anything about how to get there, I’m not sure about travelling so far with strangers, and I am totally unprepared for what it’s like in one of the poorest countries in the world.

The more I thought about it though, the more I knew I couldn’t turn down this opportunity. It certainly wasn’t something that happens often, and I knew I’d regret it forever if I didn’t go.

I wanted to show you just how the money we’ve raised has helped, and the chance to meet the patients and see inside the hospital was not something I could miss. 

As soon as I walked into the ship, I instantly felt more at home. The reception area could have been on any cruise ship without a problem, and we were greeted straight away by friendly faces.

I’d meet so many incredible people on this trip, staff and patients, but at this point, I didn’t know any of them. I was travelling on this journey with people who were, at this point, just strangers to me but who would become great friends over the week. 

I was just happy to be checked in and to have some dinner. The Mercy Ships staff very kindly saved us some food from the buffet.

We’d been travelling for 21 hours by this point, seeing Captain Hudson waiting for me on the door of my cabin was the sweetest thing ever, it was such a relief. 

By the time we headed to bed, it was around 2 a.m., and I knew that we had a Monday morning meeting scheduled for the next day at 7:45 a.m.

I don’t think it’ll come as any surprise that I decided to skip breakfast to prioritise sleep instead. We’d started our day at around 3 am the day before, so we certainly were tired and slept well. 

I was staying in one of the guest cabins but I did have a chance to have a look around the family cabins and twin cabins later in the trip.

These were the cabins that people lived in for years or sometimes even decades. 

I was only meant to be onboard the ship for 5 nights, but we did get delayed and ended up staying an extra night.

Our schedule was jam-packed full of events, and this meeting really kicked things off in style. There are over 600 volunteers living and working on the Global Mercy, and in this meeting, they talked a little bit about things going on around the ship this week. 

They told the story of a man who had a surgery onboard last week and got very unwell very fast during the night.

The volunteers managed to stabilise him and everything was okay in the end, but he wrote a note that was shared in the meeting. It said “thank you for saving my life” which really reminded me just how important this ship is.

Mercy Ships was founded in 1978, and since then, they have completed over 120,000 surgical procedures and trained over 56,000 people. 

I found out later that if a patient desperately needs blood, the crew of the ship will donate it right there and then. Not only is everybody giving up their time, but sometimes literally their blood.

It blew my mind then and it still blows my mind now, I don’t think I’ll ever get my head around there being such good people in the world,but I’m so glad there are. 

The lounge that this meeting was held in was very impressive. It displayed the flags of the nationalities that volunteer onboard.

The Global Mercy is a purpose-built hospital ship, meaning that she was built for Mercy Ships and never converted from anything else. 

For the purposes of imagining the ship, she is similar to a really big ferry. Instead of having car decks at the bottom, she has a full-on hospital with 6 operating rooms and wards – everything you could ever need to run a hospital: X-rays, pharmacy, rehab.

I got to see it all, including a real surgery happening.

I’ve actually been on a regular cruise ship which was smaller than this ship, but of course, that one didn’t have a hospital onboard. 

The hospital part was hard for me to wrap my head around at this point, but what I could understand was things like the cafe, the dining room, the shop and the library.

These are areas I’m very used to on cruise ships, and I don’t think that any of these spaces would be out of place on a regular cruise ship at all. I was honestly quite blown away by just how nice these areas were, given that people live on here for years, I’m so glad that they are nice!

We visited just before Christmas, so there were lots of hand-made Christmas decorations around.

It really felt welcoming and fun. I guess when you’re working on such an important and difficult task, it’s important to have fun, and there was no shortage of that on this ship.

There is one big main dining room onboard, which is very similar to a cruise ship buffet. Meals are served 3 times a day, and you can always make yourself a sandwich or something if you don’t fancy a full hot meal.

By default, I was about to say, “This food is included in the cruise fare,” but there isn’t a cruise fare. What I mean is this food is all free for the volunteers to eat.

They do have some extra snacks they can buy in the shop, for example, if they really want a chocolate bar or something, but you don’t have to go out and buy your own food if you volunteer on here.

The menu is available ahead of time too, which is nice.

I was very impressed with the quality of the food. I had no idea what we would be eating on this trip, but there was always plenty of choice and it felt very nutritious.

There’s not as much food choice as a cruise ship of course but the difference here is that if people want something specific they can just cook it themselves in the big kitchens.

You definitely can’t do that on a cruise ship, and I wouldn’t trust everybody to tidy up after themselves. 

In this main dining room we all put away our own plates and wiped down the tables. The ship was always spotlessly clean and it felt like everybody played their own little part in that. 

The cafe is another place where the volunteers can buy a drink or a snack if they’d like to.

I mostly just drank water on this cruise because we were given these incredible massive water bottles and there were water fountains around the ship. It was very rare that I didn’t have this bottle on me, and we took them when we went out and about in Sierra Leone too.

It’s estimated only 10% of people in Sierra Leone have access to clean, reliable drinking water. We never had to think about our access to water on the ship, and I certainly won’t take that for granted again. 

I spent quite a bit of money in the shop buying souvenirs to take home, many of which are made by people who work onboard.

The Sierra Leone money is something else entirely, but more about that later. 

One thing that you will never find on a regular cruise ship, though, is a school. When I was onboard we were able to meet a few teachers and have a tour of the school.

There are 70 children who live onboard at the moment, and these are the kids of the volunteers. I met families who had been volunteering for years and even some people who grew up entirely on ships like this one. 

They follow the American school system onboard, so they have kindergarten, middle, and high school. In some of the classes, they only have a few children, so I’m sure the quality of teaching is much better than it would be at a big public school.

You certainly couldn’t get away with forgetting your homework, though, and you couldn’t use an excuse like “My dog ate my homework”.

I can’t imagine bumping into your teachers at dinner or in the local shop, but I suppose the kids are used to it. They have their friends around all the time too, which must be really nice. 

Mercy Ships is a Christian organisation. Not all of the volunteers are Christian, of course, but the school, for example, is a Christian school.

You will see religion popping up quite a bit in this video. It’s something that’s very important to a lot of the patients and volunteers. 

The above video is set up as a fundrasier so if you’d like to support Mercy Ships that way, please do!

At this point, I was starting to see that the ship really is like a floating city.

On the surface, it wasn’t too different from a cruise ship but I’d not been in any of the medical areas yet. We were given a tour of the engine room, which was exciting, that isn’t something you can ever see on a cruise ship. We also went to the Bridge. 

The ship isn’t actually sailing again until next summer, but there is still a lot that is needed to keep a ship like this running.

It definitely isn’t like the Captain is just the person who steers the ship – they are in charge of the entire ship, everything that happens onboard.

Our Captain told us about how he’d been volunteering with Mercy Ships since the 80s and how he was so grateful that now he could FaceTime chat with his grandchildren back at home. 

I’m happy to say that Global Mercy does have free WiFi for volunteers, and it worked really well. I even managed to do a live stream from my cabin which I wasn’t expecting. 

My cabin was much bigger than a lot of the cabins I’ve had on cruise ships, and I even had a window.

Check out the view from my cabin. It really felt like being in another world to the one I’m used to. 

There were two beds and loads of storage space. As I was cruising alone, I let Captain Hudson take the other beds. After all, it was because of them that I was onboard. 

The bathroom was a good size, and if this was a regular cruise ship, I’d only deduct one point for having a shower curtain instead of a door.

That said though, this is literally a floating hospital in Sierra Leone, so I don’t think we can judge this ship as if it was a regular cruise ship.

There were a few things that were better about this cabin than on cruise ships. For example all of the doors on the wardrobes locked so they wouldn’t rattle around if the ship was in bad weather. I love that, why don’t they do that on regular cruise ships?

My cabin had space for a sofa, and later on, I’d get to tour a few cabins where the volunteers lived. It was so interesting for me to see how people turned these spaces into their homes. 

We headed to dinner in the main dining room next, and here I found chicken tenders, these were my favourite food on the ship, although all the food was good.

It’s hard enough to imagine making food for this many volunteers, let alone all the volunteers PLUS all the patients – many of which have to be on special diets because of the types of surgeries that they are having.

Mercy Ships performs many facial surgeries, such as tumour removals, correcting bowed legs, cataract surgery to fix eyesight, and treating hernias.

When speaking to people, I really realised just how much variety there is in terms of the volunteers onboard.

I knew before about all the medical roles, but they do have people doing all kinds of jobs. Everything you’d find on a regular ship is needed here. In total, in a year, there are over 2,500 volunteers; it’s mind-blowing. 

I met a carpenter, an audiovisual technician, people in communications – you name it, there probably is a need for it onboard.

Whoever was baking the bread is somebody that I’d like to thank personally. I’m a big fan of bread and it was always brilliant. 

I met a great guy onboard called Jody who volunteers onboard and runs a YouTube channel called “Where Jody At”. We had a little chat about what life was like onboard for him and the time that he spent in Madagascar.

He has a very interesting job onboard because he spends a lot of time off the ship meeting people and creating content.

Mercy Ships currently have two ships, the Global Mercy, which I was staying on and the Africa Mercy, which is currently in Madagascar.

The Africa Mercy was a converted ferry, and it was interesting for me to hear from volunteers who had stayed on both about what it was like.

The volunteers on Global Mercy always told me how much they liked it, and each person showed me something new.

I got to see areas like the lovely peaceful library and the little rooms which are all over the ship.

I love the idea that these rooms are here, if you live onboard you might not always want to go to the big public spaces to hang out with other people, but you don’t want to be in your cabin either so these spaces are a great option for that. 

This isn’t a cruise ship in that there is no daily schedule with shows to entertain you. That said, we weren’t bored for a single minute. One day, the children from the school put on a nativity play for the volunteers and also for some of the patients who were well enough to come and watch. 

Another day we watched the muppet’s Christmas Carol, I love that film, and we even had a variety show put on by the volunteers.

When I heard variety show I was thinking maybe half an hour of people doing cover songs, maybe a bit of comedy – but my goodness it was fantastic!

It was almost an hour and a half in total and I laughed far more than I ever have at any cruise ship comedian. Different groups of people had put together different funny skits. There were some brilliant singers, great dancers, and the kids were included too. 

They also announced the winner of the door decorating contest, and it was so much fun to see them all around the ship. The winner’s door was Monsters Inc. themed – which is genius. 

Everybody was so supportive and happy for each other. It was great to see.

I was – and still am – surprised that everybody onboard has so many talents. They’d say something like “Oh yes, this my job – Oh, and I’m also a concert pianist…”

Incredible people and the next day I’d see why this was needed.

We started our day up on the top deck with the deck crew to sing a few songs, mostly hymns and a couple of Christmas songs. It was lovely to have everybody together, and the energy was great.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t too hot. We did visit in the dry season, and having seen videos of Sierra Leone in the wet season, I’m so glad that we did.

On another day we actually went to do the morning devotions on the wards, we got to see the patients and have a sing along.

The kids were playing the best they could, and this quick look at what Mercy Ships were doing really bought it home to me. I was so excited for our full hospital tour. 

At the morning meeting the volunteers spoke to the patients and told them that it was important that they ate all of the food that they were given – and that they didn’t try to take it home.

That really stuck with me and it’s something that’s really tricky to comprehend. The people who were quite literally in hospital were more worried about their families at home not having enough to eat than they were about themselves.

Of course, you do need to eat a good amount if you’re having surgery and recovering and making sure that the patients are safe and well has to be everybody’s priority. 

As we had gone all the way to Sierra Leone it didn’t make sense not to spend time visiting a few of the top sites of Freetown.

I’ve never visited anywhere quite like this before and just driving around and looking out of the windows was fascinating.

I saw people carrying the most amazing things on their heads – one lady was carrying a full-on bench – I’m not even kidding. It was amazing.

Seeing the condition of the roads and the vehicles certainly bought home to us all just how little the people of Sierra Leone have.

Despite that though, every single person we met was so lovely. When we had our Mercy Ships t-shirts on they’d always thank us for the work of Mercy Ships, and share stories of the people that they knew who had been helped by the charity. 

We visited a Chimpanzee sanctuary which is top of every Freetown must-visit list. We learnt about how they were protecting the chimps habitat and about why they are endangered.

At one point our guide taught us how to speak Chimpanzee and he went through calling out the phrases on the board. 

Interestingly, no chimp ever replied to him until he said the one that was something like ‘does anybody here speak chimp’ when he said that he got an instant reply so he must know what he was talking about! 

We went back to the ship for lunch and as we had a bit of free time we decided to go up to the top deck to check out the pool.

That is a total normal sentence for me to say in one of my cruise review videos but I never expected to be saying it here.

There is a little pool on the top deck along with a climbing frame and other things for the kids, there were lots of toys and Captain Hudson even decided to give it a go.

There were so many Captain Hudsons onboard the ship, everywhere. I went I’d see him just sitting in an office or doing something.

We even had a Captain Hudson photo station set up onboard so that people could take photos with Hudson, he really was a celebrity. 

As everybody lives onboard there are a few things that they need, the first is a gym which really was surprisingly big and the second is a laundry.

Because we were delayed coming back from the trip by a day I did actually do some laundry, it was very easy and the volunteers can come here anytime to book a slot on the machines. 

Next, we went to the local market where we bought more souvenirs and a dress.

Where I’m from in the UK we don’t haggle for things so that was a little strange but it was explained to us that if we did just pay the higher prices that would drive up the prices for everybody else so we should always haggle to meet in the middle.

The dress sums up Sierra Leone perfectly to me, its so colourful. 

I was so unsure what to wear when visiting a place like Sierra Leone, luckily for me Mercy Ships were available for me to ask any questions I had to before the trip.

Most days I just wore trousers and a t-shirt, and that was perfect. Long skirts or dresses would have worked too.

I didn’t think much about what I looked like on this trip, and that was really nice. The issues being dealt with her certainly make any worries about fashion dwindle into nonexistence!

One question that I did have before this trip for Mercy Ships was what do I do in terms of spending money. Sierra Leone has a closed currency meaning that you can’t buy it outside the country. 

It seemed as though most people bring US dollars to convert, but I was able to get my money converted by the ship.

I almost couldn’t believe it when I was handed this wad of cash, 1 pound is 27,000 in Sierra Leoneon Leons. Thid means if you want to buy anything, you’ll be carrying around a massive pile of cash.

I can’t imagine buying anything that’s really expensive, you’d need a wheelbarrow!

One evening we did eat out on land and this is the pile of money that we used to pay the bill. I’ve never seen anything like it and it still makes me laugh. It feels like it can’t possibly be right, but it is. 

We went to the dinner in Mercy Ships jeeps, and there were absolutely vital for getting around. I’m not sure if there were any rules of the road honestly, and if there were nobody seemed to follow them. 

Luckily for us we always had incredibly knowledgeable drivers who could navigate the roads and everything that goes with that. 

Mercy Ships are so well respected in Sierra Leone we’d often have the police let us through when they had closed off the roads.

I felt totally safe being with the other volunteers and the Mercy Ships jeeps had seat belts which felt like such a luxury compared to the other cars around. 

It made me think about how in the UK, we never think twice about the fact that if we get into a car crash, an ambulance will come and take us to the hospital. We will be fixed up without having to pay anything, and that is just not the situation here. 

There are some government hospitals in Sierra Leone but they dont have the equipment to do the things that we’re used to.

They do have some private hospitals too but even those don’t have a lot of resources and they are really expensive.

The average salary in Sierra Leone is $40 a month. That’s why the money goes so far there. If you have $40 to spare, I have set up the video as a fundraiser, and 100% of that money goes to Mercy Ships.

During our time on land, we visited a place called the HOPE Centre. This is where patients come before, after, and sometimes during their surgery.

It means that the patients have a place to stay during their treatment when they don’t necessarily need to be on the ship but can’t go home.

It might also be that they need to have their weight increased before surgery or something like that. 

It’s quite hard to get your head around, but before people come here, some people haven’t ever used a proper porcelain toilet, so literally everything is new to them.

I can’t even imagine how scary, but also exciting this must be. A lot also aren’t used to things like air conditioning. 

HOPE stands for the hospital outpatient extension, which works perfectly as Mercy Ships’ tagline is “Bringing Hope and Healing”.

When Global Mercy leaves Sierra Leone, they’ll hand the building back to the community.

Some of the families who volunteer on the ships have decided to take on and decorate parts of the Hope Centre, which is lovely. I was so impressed by how bright and welcoming it felt.

I’d learn a lot about what Mercy Ships do beyond the surgeries (as if that wasn’t incredible enough).

They provide training and resources that mean that they always leave a country in a better place than when they arrived. 

There are already so many amazing, smart, hard working people in Sierra Leone but without the opportunity to train they are stuck.

When Mercy Ships says it brings hope it’s not just to the patients but also to the people who can now go on to provide more hope long term. 

One evening we went to the HOPE centre for Christmas carols and it was so much fun. There was such energy here and it was both volunteers and patients who attended.

I was so excited to get to go to the hospital tomorrow to see things like the little intensive care ward and the rehab centre. 

We took a bag of our Captain Hudson’s to the HOPE centre to give out. I gave one to a patient who had been there for a long time and he was so excited to go home to give him to his sisters child.

It’s amazing how a bright orange cat with a hat on is understood universally, I saw kids playing with him going meow meow meow and it was so unbelievably cute. 

It is incredible how much money everybody who has supported this project has raised and I’m not sure that I can ever thank you enough.

If you’d like to get involved head to EmmaCruises.com/HudsonToy

There you’ll either find where you can buy your own Hudson, or there will be the waitlist for the next version. 

Here is Captain Hudson near the funnel of the Mercy Ship which I think is very iconic.

I was worried about mosquitoes before I took this trip, even though I was taking the anti-malarial tablets as advised by the hospital.

I actually didn’t get bitten though, probably because of the time of year and we spent most of our time inside the ship, some ants did bite me actually but I wasn’t so worried about that. 

Given that I knew that some people would be spending years onboard the ship I was very interested to see what the cabins were like. 

The Global Mercy has what are called family cabins and all the families onboard are here for at least two years. I’ve stayed in plenty of cruise ship cabins before with my parents and brother, and I could not imagine doing that for two weeks let alone two years.

I was happy to see though that these cabins are nothing like what you’d find on a standard cruise ship, they were more like cruise ship suites with a big living room, a separate bedroom for the parents and little bedrooms for the kids.

The bedrooms are small, of course, but still, I am very glad that the kids get some privacy.

The cabins do have a little kitchenette, so you can make your own breakfast or a snack without having to go to the dining room. 

There are double cabins available for couples that are married and twin rooms too, these have a very clever layout so that both people get privacy, much more so than in a standard cruise ship.

It was amazing to see how homely these cabins felt. I didn’t film of course I saw that people had decorated the walls and had things like plants, which of course they did it was their home, but still my brain was in cruise ship mode so that was a novelty. 

Our hospital day started by visiting the simulation room. Mercy Ships do a lot of training on models like this, and having access to high-tech equipment isn’t something that can be found in Sierra Leone.

I’m not entirely convinced that the dummiess needed to blink, I did find that a bit scary but even still it’s amazing.

The chest moved up and down, she can make different noises – and I wouldn’t want to be the last one in this room at night with her. 

Moving on we went to have a look at where they do all of the x-rays. There was a massive wall here filled with before and after photos of some of the patients.

Mercy Ships do a brilliant job of making sure that they always have local people working onboard who can translate, they hire lots of day workers from the local area.

It must be so scary for the patients having never been to a hospital like this before, or a ship. A lot of them did speak English but even still, having somebody who can translate things like the culture is very important.

Somebody like this can explain to the patients for example that they don’t have to ever have their photos taken if they don’t want to, it doesn’t affect their surgery or anything.

If it was the volunteers asking they might feel more pressure so Mercy Ships are very conscious of things like that. 

We met volunteers from around the world working in the hospital, some from America, Australia, Germany, The Netherlands, South Africa, we met some brits too which was lovely. 

Looking at these photos I got a real insight into the type of surgeries they do here.

They do operations that we would take for granted and treat conditions that would get fixed very quickly in the UK.

They do a lot of facial surgeries too, where somebody has a tumour that might be squashing their eye and making them go blind, or stopping them from breathing.

Mercy Ships really is a last resort for the people who come here, they have tried everything else but the medical care just doesn’t exist. It isn’t a case that these people can’t afford it or find it, it doesn’t exist at all.

After getting changed into our hospital clothes we were able to walk around the areas that you never normally get to see.

We could see a surgery being done through the window and got to see the patients in the wards.

I can’t even imagine how difficult it must be to organise running a hospital here. I’m sure it’s always hard to organise the rota of staff in a hospital but here new people are coming and going pretty much every week. 

You might have a surgeon coming in for a month and then somebody else coming, for example.

It takes a lot of planning and everything has to be organised so far in advance.

At the Christmas nativity play, for example, the kids were wearing outfits made from Ikea rugs that were bought way back last summer when the ship was in Europe for maintenance. 

I’ve not spent a lot of time in hospitals, and it was strange to see people with so many bandages and lines and whatever else.

We went to rehab and here they showed us how they make the casts for people, they have this magical material that is flexible when warm and when it cools down it goes hard, this means that they can make perfect casts for peoples arms or hands or whatever they need. 

These are used on kids who have burns that have healed in a way that causes problems. Their hands might be fused together, or their arms stuck to their side with scar tissue, for example.

By fixing things like that it really gives the person their whole life back. It’s not difficult surgery, it’s doable, not by me though…

They had a couple of dolls here too to show the patients what it was going to be like after their surgery, I thought that was a really sweet touch and it must be such a fulfilling job to work in this part of the hospital seeing people get better and get more function. 

I met a little boy called Ibrahim onboard one day when we had some outside time with the patients.

He was 10 and was having surgery on his hands, I’ll never forget him or the other patients that I met.

We played games with them like Jenga and Connect Four, the type of games that don’t need language.

That said, though, most people seemed to speak some English, and almost everybody spoke multiple languages; it really puts me to shame speaking only English. 

For the boy I met, he now has proper use back in his hands. He has a future where he can look after himself, work and do whatever he wants to do. It really is life-changing and life-saving. 

I’ve shown you a little bit about what our Captain Hudson project has done, but to understand how we got to this point and how Captain Hudson came to be, you’ll need to watch this video next.

See you there in a couple of seconds and please donate to our fundraiser if you can, it makes such a massive difference. 

Before You Go

Cruise ships are completely different from Mercy Ships! Find out about the fourteen weird and wonderful things you won’t believe exist on cruise ships here:

14 Crazy Things You Won’t Believe Exist on Cruise Ships

Find out about the most expensive cruise ship restorations that have been carried out here:

http://the most expensive cruise ship renovations