Thursday, July 8, 2010

Basic Safety Training Week

This week started out with a bang! We celebrated the 4th of July by riding in the Mercy Ships' van down the road to another Christian Ministry called FatherHeart. They had many activities for the kids to do including bounce house obstacle courses, rock climbing and a 'suds' machine. They also had food to eat, live bands and then wrapped up the night with fireworks. The girls especially enjoyed going into the 'suds' machine!

The next day started early with our Firefighting class. We learned how to put on an SCBA in under a minute with air flowing. I freaked out a little bit until the air started to flow and then realized how much easier it was to breathe!

And the next day started even earlier to get us through our firefighting practical before the hottest part of the day. Our first exercise was to put on all of our bunker gear including the SCBA and then rescue a 165 pound mannequin in a smoke filled room. The only thing was that the smoke machine was not cooperating so they blindfolded us all instead! That was a strange experience! Here we are getting ready to enter the container.

Here we are with our hats on.

Today we learned CPR and First Aid and became Red Cross Certified. Ray had fun splinting and immobilizing my arm. I'm sure he was wishing he could do that with my mouth so I wouldn't talk so much!

Tomorrow will be Personal Safety and Social Responsibility and then we will wrap up the week with Personal Survival Training with a water practical.

It's hard to believe that we will be on our way to Africa in 5 days!

2 comments:

  1. Oh, wow! So exciting! They really equip you guys well! That's cool to be Red Cross certified! Thanks for sharing! Will you be flying to Africa to meet the ship or actually sailing in the ship?

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  2. We fly to Benin then get driven into Togo where we will move onto the ship to live. Then mid-August we will sail to S.Africa on the M/V Africa Mercy :-)

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