As the YWAM medical ship, MV Pacific Link, prepares to head to Papua New Guinea following the completion of its tour of Australia’s east coast, DAVID ADAMS speaks with the ship’s captain, Jeremy Schierer, about his job…
Jeremy Schierer can still vividly remember the day in 2008 when he saw two men’s eyesight restored in Apia, the capital of Samoa. It’s one of the reasons he does the job he does.
The captain on the Youth With A Mission (YWAM) medical ship MV Pacific Link, the 35-year-old was aboard the ship in port one morning when he noticed the medical team were packing up early after only three of 10 people scheduled for eye surgery had turned up for their appointments.
Jeremy Schierer
“By one o’clock that afternoon, they were walking out of the clinic with their eye restored. They came back the next day, had patch taken off and they could see. That was a really amazing moment for me…”
He decided to head down to Apia’s main fruit and vegetable market to see if there was anyone else who they could help.
“So I literally ran out to the street and jumped in a taxi and went down to the market…” he recalls. “I was the only white guy in the whole market at that moment and making eye contact with everybody…And finally at the very end of the market there was a fellow sitting there whose eye didn’t look right.”
After finding a translator, he explained why he’d come and asked the man whether he would like his eye fixed. He did and so they went to find a taxi to catch back to the ship. They were walking toward it when another man tapped Mr Schierer on the shoulder. He couldn’t see out of one eye and asked whether he could come too. The three of them were getting into a taxi when a third man, who had also lost eyesight in one eye, asked if he could join them.
“So the four of us walked onto the ship about 10 minutes later and as we walked onto the deck, they were just finishing with the last patient at the clinic and those three gentleman walked straight in,” says Mr Scheirer.
While the first man’s eye was unable to be fixed – it had been ruined in a boxing match 20 years earlier, the other two men did have operable cataracts.
“By one o’clock that afternoon, they were walking out of the clinic with their eye restored. They came back the next day, had patch taken off and they could see. That was a really amazing moment for me…”
“There’s a parable that Jesus talks about – and I never really thought about this one too much – the rich guy who throws the banquet. I never understood it, I guess. The guy throws the banquet and the invited guests don’t show up and so he sends his messengers out…’Go find people, I don’t care where they come from, the banquet’s ready, bring them in’. And He said that’s what’s the kingdom of God is like.
“Through that experience I felt like I kind of understood that parable a bit more. We were all ready to go on the ship, we had everything available and people were invited…but for whatever reason they didn’t show up…And I think that’s something of how God loves us – He sends runners out to find people; He wants to bless us. In the same way I think people who come on the ship, they want to give their skills – whatever they have – to serve people. That was a specific thing I think I saw in that one example but certainly over the years I’ve grown in my faith in a number of ways.”
Mr Scheirer has been captain of the MV Pacific Link, a fully equipped medical ship complete with pharmacy and operating theatre, for five years. In Australia with the ship as it has visited cities all along the east coast in a mission to raise awareness of the work it’s involved in before heading north to Papua New Guinea (the ship is about to leave Townsville), he says it was the opportunity for travel which initially led him to a career on the seas.
Having grown up in a Christian home in Fort Worth, Texas – he can still remember when, as a boy of no more than five, he knelt by the couch with his dad and prayed a prayer accepting Jesus Christ as his Saviour, Mr Schierer says the several years he spent overseas as a child were a key factor in shaping his future work choice.
“For four years of my childhood – from age 11 to 15 – our whole family lived in Israel. My dad was working over there for an American company and it really gave me an interest in travelling…” he recalls.
Looking for a job that would enable him to travel, he started investigating the possibility of attending a military academy and it was then that he discovered the US Merchant Marine Academy. After a four year course – including time on board cargo ships where he had firsthand experience of their operation – he started working for a New Orleans-based shipping company but soon found himself wanting something more.
“I guess in the year 2000 I was really at a place where I was looking for something new. The company I was working for (occupied) the 17th and 18th floors of an office building. I had a floor-to-ceiling window and my cubicle had two world maps and I would look at the maps and look out the window and try and figure out what I was doing there with so many other places to go.”
Mr Schierer was at a Naval Reserve conference when he met a man who was working on a similar type of ship to the MV Pacific Link and he subsequently started looking at how he could become involved in similar sort of work. He came across the YWAM ship ministry, Marine Reach.
“It was an adventure, something exciting to do, but also it was a way to specifically use my skills as a mariner to serve the Lord and to serve other people.”
“It was an adventure, something exciting to do, but also it was a way to specifically use my skills as a mariner to serve the Lord and to serve other people.”
In 2001 he spent a few months on board the YWAM ship, MV Island Mercy (it was subsequently sold), as part of a Discipleship Training Course (DTS) and, after the completion of the course, went to New Zealand where he joined the crew of the new YWAM ship, the MV Pacific Link, as its chief mate. He then spent two years working on the ship before, after taking a year-and-a-half year break from it, rejoining the crew in August 2005, this time as its captain.
Mr Schierer is now married to Lori whom he first met on board the ship and who now has the job of being the ship’s purser, meaning she looks after the financial and administrative needs of the vessel.
Mr Scheirer says one of the things he loves about working on the ship, which was built in 1979 and is one of a fleet of YWAM ships visiting posts around the world, is the diversity of his job. The day Sight interviewed him, for example, the sewage system had gone down meaning his day was spent tracking down what parts needed to be replaced to get it working. Then there was the mysterious leak in one of the ship’s cabins. Other days can see him negotiating passage into a port, standing watch while on the open sea and running what must sometimes seem never-ending fire and man overboard drills as well as attending meetings and events both on and off shore.
He also loves the fact that his job allows him to meet and engage with people from all walks of life. And then, of course, there’s the travel – during his time as captain the ship has completed two tours of New Zealand and visited numerous island nations in the Pacific including Samoa and Fiji, where he’s so far visited 24 out of the 80 inhabited islands.
But it can be challenging, particularly when it comes to tasks such as negotiating the way into uncharted ports. At such times, Mr Schierer says he has to rely on both “old school techniques” – such as using a rope with a weight on the end to see who deep an area is – as well as the best modern technology can offer.
He recalls last year’s visit to a Fijian island only accessible by a narrow, uncharted passage through a reef.
“I was able to zoom in on Google Earth and see the passage through the reef and I found about a two sentence paragraph that said it was deep enough, so we were able to go in there.”
Living in the small confines of the ship – where 50 people live in an area smaller than a 747 aircraft with about half of the available space used for engineering and medical purposes – can also require patience.
“(W)e’re very close together and there’s a lot of stresses and tensions with weather and sailing into uncharted locations and working with people from sometimes 10 or 12 different countries,” Mr Schierer says. “All of that goes into the possibility of making life really difficult but I think when God calls us to a place like this…He gives you the grace to be there.”
Still, he’s regularly reminded of the unique nature of his job. He recalls a night when he was leaving an island in Fiji some years back.
“We had been there showing the Jesus film and there were five or six of us in the boat on the way back to the ship for the night. It was just a beautiful clear night and you could look up and see the stars and I thought ‘Wow! Here I am, a guy from Texas who went to the United States Merchant Marine Academy to learn how to operate ships and I bet I’m the only guy in my class who is doing something like this. And this is pretty cool’. That’s just another one of those moments that sticks in my head.”
FOR MORE ON THE SHIP TOUR:
~ www.ywamships.org
~ www.iwtl.org
