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CREW JOURNALS By Paul Kawika Martin Hello, my name is Paul Kawika Martin and I am the Radio Officer onboard the Amazon Guardian. I thought it might be interesting (or boring depending on your point of view) to tell you what a day might be like for me.
At 7:15 AM some one wakes me up. As I am not a breakfast eater nor coffee drinker I stay in bed until close to 8:00 AM then get up, go to the bathroom, and head up to the radio room. The radio room on the MVAG is one of the nicest in the Greenpeace fleet. It’s about 12 x 6 feet with floor to ceiling windows half way around the room. The windows have revealed the rainforest for the last few months. I’ve seen pink and grey dolphins, a multitude of birds, a plethora of insects, small huts and villages, people in canoes and other forms of water travel, and green—every gosh darn shade of the color you can imagine and even some you can’t. One of my first morning tasks is to download the email. With our satellite system we can connect at 64K with an ISDN line. That’s a bit faster than the fastest modems you can get at home--pretty impressive for being anywhere in the world. Inevitably, someone will come around and ask “Have you downloaded yet?” Don’t get me wrong email is very important to Greenpeace campaigns. After all communicating environmental woes is what we do. And email gives us the tools to do this effectively from any where in the world. Nonetheless, some on the ship seem a bit addicted and always want to know about the download sessions. Of course the next question follows “Did I get any email?” I used to know this because all email would come to one address and I would have to sort through and distribute love notes and campaign updates accordingly. (You can imagine the disasters I caused when I mixed the two up!) Alas, now we have a heralded “black box.” Most work places know it as a server. Everyone gets their own email address and the server automatically sorts all incoming and outgoing email. Quite advanced technology. People forget that we are on a ship in the middle of the Amazon and we have more technical abilities than some small offices in a big American city. Only a few years ago ships depended on paper mail. 10:00 AM Time for a break. They call it smoko because some people smoke during this time but I don’t so I call it a well-deserved break. Often, Amanda our amazing Swedish chef bakes us some cookies or bread. After the break, I download again. Download, connect, Internet, and email represent overused words in my occupation. All through out this time we receive phone calls. I answer with a pleasant “Amazon Guardian, this is Paul.” Then I have to hunt for the people who the call is for. This can take some time as the ship stands 5 levels tall with many compartments and alleyways (hallways). 12:00 PM Lunch! Amanda always creates some nice vegetarian fare for me and the other vegetarians. After eating, I head to my cabin to read. I’ve already finished Shakespeare’s Caesar, Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and now I’m working on a book called The Amazon Journal by Geoffrey O’Conner. Several pages later, I doze off into my afternoon nap. People dot my day and evenings with various trouble shooting duties: How do I make a phone call? Fax? Print? Attach? send an email? Breathe? You get the idea. My favorite is when a campainer’s cup holder on his laptop broke. It turned out to be his CD-ROM drive (just kidding). Meanwhile, I’m supposed to keep track of who is on board and when, peoples’ phone calls and email passwords. Another break comes in the afternoon. I indulge in some sort of snack and conversation out of the heat of the Amazon sun. If all this isn’t enough, sometimes I need to baby sit the airplane. When our Cessna takes off someone needs to monitor our radio system until she lands. I think we do this just in case an undiscovered teradactile attacks Fernando our pilot in the jungle. 5:00 PM work is over (supposed to be). If we’re anchored I might go swimming with my American roommate, Bryan, the 2nd engineer. We jump, dive, and flip from all heights of the ship even though our Brazilian campaigner Paulo warns that a person-eating catfish may swallow us whole. He’s serious. 6:00 PM OK, Dinnertime. After which, if I’m not winning the happy dishwasher contest I’ll decide what to do for the evening. If we sit anywhere near a town the answer is simple: go out and dance! After my weekly shower, I figure out when one of our inflatables will taxi us ashore. We will first stop at some clichéd bar where I hope to score a caipirinha—limes, sugar, ice and sugar cane alcohol called cachasa. When it gets sufficiently late enough, we shoot for a place to dance. Usually, they play a mixture of Brazilian pop and folk music. The age of the dancers are quite young compared to a western club. Don’t be surprised if some young kids boogie down right next to you and if young women in their teens ask you dance. I catch the last boat back. It’s more likely that we will be sailing down some river on some mission to save the rainforest. That’s why we’re here, right? In that case, I’ll need to choose another form of entertainment.
Who to play at a game of chess? The computer…no it always wins. Dave…no he’s been beating me a lot lately. Manuel…yes, he’s funny when he loses. Or, maybe a game of backgammon. I love beating Alice. I know, Ping-Pong! Oh, I forgot, we broke or lost every white piece of technological marvel called a ping-pong ball. Even though we can shoot broadcast quality video footage, edit it into a nice shot, digitise, compress, and send it 38,000 miles up to a satellite and back down to a computer half way around the world, we cannot fabricate the likeness of one of these balls. Oh, the humanity! There’s always the obligatory movie. We have a great theatre: big screen, high-tech LCD projector, and big stereo speakers. Alas, I’ve seen all the movies onboard. Of course, we can have a few beers or some other concoction like our Canadian videographer, Todd’s, Monkey La Las and sit around discussing the solutions to all the injustices and “isms” plaguing the universe only to forget our genius in the morning. I end my day as I began it: another download.
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