The boy happily confirmed it, and the President called the crew together to apologise. "I cancelled your invitation," he announced, "because I didn't believe people like you existed today. It was too good to be true."Is it? It is hard to find criticism of Mercy Ships, even in the happily vicious environment of online newsgroups. The respected www.charitynavigator site, which rates NGOs for efficiency, gives Mercy Ships its maximum of four stars. Mercy Ships has persuaded plenty of powerful names to support it, including various heads of state.
"They come on board and watch the bandages being taken off children who've had their cataracts removed," says Stephens. (Later, he heard that the ship was rumoured to be a Trojan horse stuffed with terrorists who would mount a coup.) Anastasis diverted instead to Togo, where the government happily received them, and where, months later, the Ghanaian President Jerry Rawlings came to visit the wards. Three weeks before departure, the invitation (Mercy Ships only visit with state permission) was withdrawn with no explanation Maybe it was the spectre of slave ships, Stephens thought. Stephens had no maritime experience and no money, but he had common sense and good friends with banking connections.
And his arguments were persuasive: 90 of the world's biggest cities are port cities, offering easy access to people who were probably lacking good healthcare. If the crew were volunteers and paid their own board, it would be cheap to run A feasibilty study passed muster. The Victoria, an Italian luxury cruise liner, was bought for scrap value, thanks to a kindly Italian shipping minister, and transformed into the Anastasis. With the sister ship Caribbean Mercy, Mercy Ships has now performed two million services since 1978.But its success has not come without problems, technical and diplomatic.