Hubby and Wifey's Blog

It’s been 6 days since we didn't eat rice. We just eat bread, bread and bread. Its okay if we will eat bread and the crew will be having a light work like painting and chipping on deck. In our situation, light work is not applied to the helpless crew onboard our ship. The 4 Indonesians are working inside the ballast tank from 8am to 8pm then the Filipino crews are working aloft in bridge wings and other hard works that you might think. The Filipino works from 8am to 8pm same as the Indonesian crews.
You can see the faces of the crews. They are pale and they don’t have a power to work hard in a whole day basis. Bosun and Pumpman are asking if they can work for 8am to 12pm because they are already drain up because we don’t eat rice. But the 2nd in command always says it can’t be like that. They must work in whole day even they don’t eat rice. In 6 days suffering without rice the crew and officer of the ship gathers 3 times meeting in crew messhall. “Rice” rice is the topic of the meeting onboard the ship. The master asks a favor to the crew if they can manage not to eat rice in a couple of days because the service is much more expensive the price of rice. We don’t have a choice but to agree to the master statement to the crew. Days past and the agreement in rice delivery was finish so another meeting are held in the crew messhall. Same statement of the captain was spread to the crew but one of the crew insists to the promise of the captain. He cannot do it without rice. His stomach works badly and he is dehydrating that make him weak. The Indonesians want to speak and agree to the bosun but they don’t have a chance to speak because they are having a bad time speaking in English. Other officers like to buy rice right away but other officer want to wait till we berthed. Kanya kanyang hugas kamay at kanya kanya paling kung saan ang malakas “balingbing” in Filipino term.
The captain see the bosun status and he just agree to buy rice right away. If bosun is not sick maybe the captain will not buy rice in anchorage. The people cannot work anymore and the captain sees it to our eyes. He buy rice but through force of the Filipino. If the captain insist it to buy rice in that moment I think there will be crew will loose his patience and just hit the captain. All of us are weak and angry to him in that moment.