Ship to shore

For the men who shepherd cargo between nations, each job means spending the better part of a year gazing at open water and the same 20-odd faces, a tedium punctuated by only a few hours docked at strange cities.

In those brief shore stops, sailors want to stock up on comfort supplies to last them until the next port. And they want to make calls, send e-mails and wire money home.

Dressed in nylon jumpsuits and smelling of diesel fumes, they wander over to a cream-colored trailer facing the ships at the Wando Welch Terminal in Mount Pleasant. As one Filipino sailor, 26-year-old Christopher Lopez, put it: "Me, I look for the flag."

Inside home base for the Charleston Port and Seafarers' Society they find three computer stations with telephones, Scripture in 28 languages and at least one or two locals ready to sell them a cheap phone card or give them a ride to Walmart on the white mini-bus or its fire-red companion they've nicknamed "Satan."

The group of more than 50 volunteers is an eclectic crew, a few from within the maritime community but mostly not: a retired military agent, a retired engineer, a retired Episcopal priest.

Their mission transcends denominations within their ranks and transcends faiths within their service. Because Muslims, Buddhists and Jews need rides to Walmart, too.

A deck at a time

The Seafarers' Society launched in Charleston in the early 19th century when ships called at ports for a week at a time and the men onboard needed somewhere to stay.

Thanks to a grant from the Pinckney family of U.S. Constitution fame, the sailors found that space on the corner of East Bay and North Market streets. The old Seamen's Chapel today houses Mad River, where tourists dine on done-up pub food at lunch and local 20-somethings drink and dance at night.

However far removed from its original use, the space still houses a pulpit shaped like a ship's prow.

Father Len Williams, who took over the society six years ago, said sailors no longer need that kind of lodging. Within eight hours or so, visiting seamen return to the water.

"As Christians, we're called to minister to the world," Williams says. "The thing is, the world comes to us."

So they meet the world one container ship deck at a time.

Climbing up to the bright orange Hamburg Sud ship Cap San Raphael one recent morning, Williams shows his seafarers' badge to a Polish watchman and then heads for the crew's mess. Inside a smiling man from the small South Pacific islands of Kiribati (pronounced Kee-ree-buhss) offers him coffee.

Williams accepts and sits on a couch while Ruka Tokaman disappears into the kitchen to boil water as a plug-in radio plays Jimmy Buffett's "Margaritaville." The cook serves up a tray of Danish butter cookies and Nescafe instant coffee while his shipmate, only a few months away from finishing his first voyage, tells Williams that being away from family is the toughest part of the job.

Nawerika Kaierua, 24, has a fiancee at home but only sends money back to his parents since his older brother, also a sailor, went to prison in New York. Federal officers boarded his brother's ship, found drugs in his cabin and arrested him. Kaierua doesn't know many details, only that his brother picked up the contraband in Venezuela.

Jobs are tough to find in Kiribati, a place where most people live in thatched huts and a place the English-speaking crew describes as being "three and a half hours from Fiji" to draw a recognizable reference point. Williams just nods as Kaierua speaks of his brother, explaining later that he hears such stories about sailors from poorer countries a few times a year.

Before leaving, Williams invites Kaierua and his shipmates for a Walmart run in a few hours and thanks him.

"We appreciate what you do for our country, our economy," Williams says. "People have no idea how much we depend on seafarers for our way of life."

Safe harbor

Once a month, the Seafarers' Society meets for coffee, biscuits and fellowship in a Mount Pleasant church hall.

Williams tells the group at its May breakfast that he plans to have another trailer set up at the Columbus Street Terminal downtown later this summer.

"We read in the paper yesterday that container volume is down," Williams said. "I want you to know our ministry is expanding."

A registered nonprofit, the society relies on support from local churches and, increasingly in this economy, the maritime community that so needs the seafarers.

Society Treasurer John Cameron, a former U.S. Coast Guard captain of the Port of Charleston, says the group requires about $140,000 per year to support the Internet connections, phone lines (and more cards) and gas to power the Walmart shuttles.

The State Ports Authority provides the prime real estate to the group at no charge. And it provides a flavor of access to its facilities virtually unknown in this hyper-secure, post-Sept. 11 world.

Cameron says that works well for both parties: Seafarers' volunteers reach visiting sailors quickly, while sailors find people they can trust in a strange place. He said one taxi company charges crewmen $50 for a ride off the terminal and even more to take them shopping down the street.

"Fellowship and prayer and outreach and friendship are far more effective than anything they're doing at (Project) Seahawk," he said, referencing the high-tech federal security initiative based in Charleston Harbor.

Sailors "are probably going to tell you about things they're suspicious about before they tell anyone else."

Winding down the Seafarers' meeting last month, one retired volunteer named Curt Pitts shares with the group the story of a crewman who handed him $470 in cash with specific instructions: "I want you to take this and feed the hungry in Africa."

Pitts says he accepted the money, and the society found a charity that would do just that.