IT MIGHT seem counterintuitive but Mission to Seafarers centres, many of which are struggling to find volunteers, are starting to open 24 hours a day.
Speaking at the Seafarers Welfare Conference in Fremantle on 17 July, Ben Bailey, director of programmes from the Mission to Seafarers in London, said several centres around the world were now using technology with swipe cards to provide entry, rather than volunteers to keep the doors open.
Regional director Australia and Papua New Guinea, Sue Dight, told delegates there is a declining volunteer market at the moment.
“While we have that lack of staff, that lack of volunteerism, how do we work for the seafarers so that they can have what they need even if we’re not there?” Ms Dight said.
“Recently I applied for grants for Bell Bay, for Hastings, and for Burnie to become 24-hour centres. And those grants were requested through three different organisations and have been granted. So we’re in the process of turning these centres into 24-hour centres, just as Darwin operates.”
Darwin, along with New Zealand centres at Wellington and Nelson and other centres around the world are already operating as 24-hour centres.
Ms Dight said not having volunteers at the centre didn’t diminish their usefulness, providing a place for seafarers to rest and relax, or be awake and work.
“In some cases that I heard, seafarers are sleeping in the center because they needed time to decompress. And if we can offer that going forward in our centers, it’s a way of sharing and caring in a way that we just haven’t been able to in the past.”
Mr Bailey said there are now 121 Flying Angel Centres around the world.
“Some of them are enormous, such as the one in Hong Kong, which doubles up as a Mariners Hotel. And if any of you have transited through Hong Kong, you may well have gone to visit it. It has two stations. And at the moment, they’re going through a massive redevelopment phase, where the first 20 floors or so, are going to be part of what is the Mariners Club.
“The rest of it, they’ve gone into a partnership deal with a hotel chain. And that’s then going to be providing an income for the center. We have things that are in the middle in terms of size, such as the Mission in Mombasa, which is a colonial building, around 100 years old, and sits on a plot of around two acres, has a swimming pool, football fields, has a collection of around 30 tortoises that have been there, for nobody knows how long. “
Mr Bailey said the smallest centre was Port Talbot in Wales.
This little seafarer center has a small volunteer team, but it is accessible 24 hours, using a key code that changes every day.
“When the agents go on board the ship, when the pilots go on board the ship, they give the codes to the seafarers, who can then come ashore at whatever time of day they want. And quite a lot of them use it at night. They will then go and use this very, very small facility. But it’s got a couple of sofas. It’s got a small quiet area. It’s got a vending machine. It’s obviously got free Wi-Fi. And it’s got computers and iPads, et cetera, that they can use.
“The centres come in a broad, broad range of sizes. And I think what’s important is that we’re trying to diversify them.”
