PENANG #4 The 'Logos Hope' Visited

There were two ships tied up at the Georgetown wharves. One was a large cruiseliner which did not appear to move the whole time I was in town. The other was in town for all of my stay but had more activity around it.

This was 'Logos Hope' and it is run by Mercy Ships, a Christian Ministry. This is the third or fourth vessel the group has opperated and most have been old. One was able to claim to be the world's oldest working passenger liner. The current ship is an ex-Farroe Island ferry.

What the Mercy Ships do is bring a Book Fair to each port and invite locals to visit and hopefully make a purchase.

So, as the ship was moored close to the guest house I went along to see what it was all about.

The first thing I noticed was the lack of a crowd. Sure people were coming and going but only in ones and twos.

On board the welcome includes watching a short video on the history of the ships. Not very long and there was also a photographic wall display of the history as well.

Then there was the book fair. All you havre to imaging is going into a large well stocked book shop and not actually all that large. Just part of one deck. In fact I had expected more than this.

Almost every title I glanced at appeared to be from the USA. The only exception was a stand of books in what appeared to be Hindi. There were a few 'classics' a lot of 'relationship' titles including how to get along with your husband, wife, children, teenager, workmates and so on. I recognised several authors as being fairly conservative US Christians. Cooking books also seemed a bit out of place.

I did wonder how American teaching (and cooking) would fit into a different culture such as that of Penang? There would be economic differences as well. There was a poor collection of DVDs and plenty of CDs but I don't know much about the performers.

All stock was for sale and they had an interesting pricing system. Every book was given a unit price and that would be matched up with a local currency. I can not recall the exact ratio but suppost that 50 units would equal RM15. A simple system which saved each book having to be repriced in each country.

There were also grab bags of reduced price titles. Leaving the books took me into the cafe where I thought a cup of coffee would be welcome. No espresso but then this is an American ship who think drip or perculated coffee is the way God intended it to be. I guess that's an over generalisation.

What I do know is that at RM5 it was way higher than on shore prices. Same with the muffins. So I paid the inflated price to give the cafe staff something to do, sat down and waited. Now the Mercy Ships approach is to have staff engage cafe customers in conversation and perhaps evangelise.

Pretty soon a young Korean lad came over and I made it clear to him that I knew something about the ship its organisation and for that matter about Korea as well. He did mention a disappointment with the low numbers coming. They had just come from ports in India where they averaged 13,000 visitors a day with one day of over 16,000. He agreed that it was really impossible to move easily in the book area.

When it was time to leave and make other visits my Korean staff member escourted me to the gangplank and wished me well. And I do not think he said “Have a good day”. But then he wasn't an American.