This blog is about me (Tim Benson) and my time spent on the Africa Mercy working as a volunteer for the organisation Mercy Ships in West Africa. Everything here, however, is my personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. Opinions, conclusions and other information expressed here do not necessarily reflect the views of Mercy Ships. For information on how to support me please click here.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

Generators

One thing I would like to bring up that is needed here on the ship is the fact that we are in need of some new generators to replace the ones we currently have, which we are constantly having problems with. The way things are set up in the engine room on the ship is there are 2 large generators which we call the harbour generators and then there are 4 smaller generators called the Fricks generators (spelling probably wrong). In order to have enough power to run everything on the ship we have to run 3 out of the 4 Fricks generators or the 2 harbour generators or a combination of both. Now we don't have any major problems with the harbour generators, but the Fricks have been giving us lots of problems. So why not just run the harbour generators you may ask well you see the problem is that the harbour generators while running cause alot of noise and vibration through some of the hospital wards and even some of the operating theaters. So therefore we try and run the fricks generators as much as possible so that none of the hospital needs to be shut down. Except when we have problems with the fricks we need to run the harbours and thus the hospital is not going at its full potential. So the plan you see is that we are hopefully going to get 4 new generators to replace the fricks, about the same size but slightly more powerful so that it only takes 2 of them running to power the ship and then the other 2 can be on standby and maintenance. The plan was to hopefully do the change at the end of this year, but due to lack of funding it has been postponed until hopefully the end of next year, because it is quiet a process as a hole needs to be cut in the side of the ship to get the generators in and out. So I would ask that you pray for this, That the money would come in over the next year so that this generator switch is possible and also pray that the generators last for another year without giving us too many problems and don't hinder the running of the hospital at all.