The Overseas Situation Report Tuesday 15 February 2022
by Mike Evans
“There’s no place like home”
Dorothy, The Wizard of Oz
Since the pandemic first started, the world has had to rely on shipping to get goods and services delivered to all parts of the globe. These ships loaded with cargo are a vital part of keeping the majority of the world stocked up. The people who crew these ships have since the start of the pandemic been largely forgotten as an essential part of the supply chain and for some it has meant spending months on end onboard a ship without the chance to get off in ports around the world due to the fact that for many of them the opportunity to be vaccinated has not been given.
In this report we are relaying a couple of stories about this vital part of the world’s economic survival and what is being done to help the seaman.
Inside the gates of Victoria’s Port of Portland in Australia, out of public view, unfolds the plight of the international seamen who work aboard cargo ships importing and exporting goods around the world.
For the last two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, seafarers haven’t been allowed off their ships any further than this long, empty gangway. The Ocean Jubilee has been loading wheat grain from Victoria’s west for the past nine days.
But its crew of 20 haven’t set foot in the town or even in the port’s Mission to Seafarers centre, a special respite room for international seamen.
Kevin Hernando and his crew are Filipino and have been away from their families for seven months. “When you stay on board a long, long time, your mind becomes lonely,” he said. “You feel homeless, homesick.” During the months at sea, what the crew say they most look forward to is disembarking from the ship in each new port, to see the sights, buy a phone card to call home, and refresh their minds.
“Before, [when there was] no pandemic, you will go visit a seaman centre like that [Portland’s Mission to Seafarers], you will go sightseeing, shopping,” Mr Hernando said.
But for two years, the seafarers’ only link to Portland’s comforts has been via one man: Neville Manson. He runs the Mission to Seafarers centre inside the Port of Portland, just 100 metres from the gangway.
It temporarily shut at the start of the pandemic in March 2020 and has been closed since. “Seafarers haven’t been able to come to the centre … haven’t been able to leave their ship,” Mr Manson said. “The Port of Portland and the government have given us access to the ship’s gangway so we can deliver items to the ship,” he said.Mr Manson has been accepting orders from crews for fresh groceries, treats and items like phone cards.
He often makes several trips a day buying and delivering items and is showered in thanks from the men who would otherwise have no way of accessing these prized goods.
Port of Portland chief executive Greg Tremewen said the port conducted a six-month study of ships arriving at the city in 2021 and found that most ships had been out at sea for an average of 17 days.
After two years of their prohibited movement, Mr Manson is advocating for the international seafarers to be allowed an hour or two of recreation in his centre. “In Victoria, the vaccination rate is over 90 per cent. We want to see the same for seafarers,” he said. “If seafarers were vaccinated, then they should be able to leave their vessels again, that’s what we’re looking for.” Mr Manson is also advocating for seafarers to have access to vaccines.
He said he had emailed Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) and the Minister for Ports but received no reply. “These guys [the seafarers] are really low risk. They’ve been on the ship. They haven’t been anywhere,” Mr Manson said. “I’ve sent off letters to government ministers, to DHHS, and those have not had a reply at all, which is really frustrating.”
Mr Manson said some of the seafarers he met were desperate for a COVID-19 vaccine, telling him that supplies in their country of origin were low and they had no way to access protection.
“They know they’re not going to be able to come off unless they’re double-vaxxed and we wouldn’t expect them to come off unless they were double-vaxxed, as well,” he said. “But they’re more worried about getting COVID from us than we are from them. And they want to be vaccinated so that they can come ashore.”
Filipino seaman Kevin Hernando said while most of his crew were vaccinated, four of them missed out due to restricted supplies in the Philippines. “Supply is locked, there is a lack of suppliers,” he said. “We hope that when we go back [to Portland] again, we can go ashore, very much,” Mr Hernando said.
The DHHS declined to comment, saying it was a matter for the Department of Transport. Meanwhile the seamen continue to be locked out of the port.
The pandemic caused chaos within global shipping and crew members from some of the poorest nations paid a high price.
Among the hundreds of thousands of seafarers left stranded by Covid-19, perhaps none have faced an ordeal as extreme as that of the i-Kiribatis.
Finally at the end of December 2021, after a year-long odyssey across continents – shuttled between foreign nations and locked out of their homeland as waves of coronavirus closed previously safe routes – that ordeal finally came to an end.
In a palm-fringed courtyard in Tarawa, the capital of the small Pacific Island nation of Kiribati, tears and shouts of joy greeted 141 seafarers during an emotional reunion with families they had not seen for almost two years.
Temware Iotebwa, 39, said that at first, he did not spot his children – his son, Tawati, 15, and daughters Sherlene, 11, Eilene, 6, and three-year-old AyMe – in the crowd. But their shouts quickly drew tears to his eyes.
“When my younger kids first saw me, they were shouting and calling my name,” says Iotebwa, who last saw his children in February 2020. “Hearing their voices and seeing their faces brought tears of joy to my eyes. That Sunday was one of my happiest days. We laughed and we cried, and I got a lot of hugs.”
Iotebwa, an able seaman, had worked a month of a nine-month contract on the Hamburg Süd/Maersk container ship MV Monte Pascoal, when the pandemic was declared. He disembarked in Belgium, before being flown to Fiji.
He and his crewmates have spent the past nine months in limbo, sharing cramped hotel rooms and unable to tell their families when they would see them again.
Of the estimated 1.7 million seafarers worldwide, more than half are from developing countries such as Kiribati, a low-lying nation of 33 islands with one of the lowest standards of living in Oceania and a poor healthcare system. Concerned that it might not be able to cope, Kiribati responded to the pandemic in 2020 by closing its borders. The strategy successfully kept Covid cases at zero.
But for Iotebwa and his fellow i-Kiribati seafarers, it meant a year of hell, caught in the middle of protracted negotiations between the shipping companies, the International Chamber of Shipping, and a Kiribati government fearful of the risks of allowing the return of seafarers who may have been exposed to Covid.
Finally, in April 2021, after months of talks, the Kiribati government agreed to repatriate the seafarers, who would first be quarantined in Fiji. But then Fiji saw a sudden spike in coronavirus cases and the Kiribati government reversed its policy. After allowing about 60 seafarers back into the country, the authorities closed the border again, with no exceptions.
Iotebwa had just been told he was about to be flying home when it happened. It was his lowest moment, he says. “My excitement turned to hopelessness when I heard the news,” he says over a video link from Tarawa. “The waiting time turned from days to months. My kids missed me very much and I missed them.” His family were worried too; the Grand Melanesian Hotel in the Fijian town of Nadi, paid for by the shipping company, was overcrowded and uncomfortable with no privacy.
“It felt like a prison,” he says. “My wife, Takentemwanoku Matiota Iotebwa, constantly reminded me to be careful and to stay away from people to avoid getting infected. She was very worried. “They kept their spirits up by playing games of croquet and tug-of-war in the lobby.
He is happy now he is back at home, but there is sadness, too. One of his friends lost his father, another his wife. Marriages broke up under the strain of waiting and the ordeal has taken a financial toll on the families. The seafarers are often their families’ main breadwinners and a source of remittances. They stopped being paid in early 2021, and now worry about their employment prospects with borders remaining closed.
“I don’t blame anyone because this pandemic can happen anytime and anywhere,” says Iotebwa. “But if my government was smart, it could have found other ways to bring us seafarers home sooner. Other poorer countries arranged their seafarers’ return immediately while still on lockdown.”
As we start to see the end of the pandemic, we should all remember that there are many people around the world who are doing very important jobs to keep the economies of the world running who perhaps are forgotten by many when we tend to think about ourselves and how our own lives have been impacted by the pandemic.
Until the next time stay safe.
Total Cases Worldwide – 412,840,763
Total Deaths Worldwide – 5,836,943
Total Recovered Worldwide – 333,451,445
Total Active Cases Worldwide – 73,552,375 (17.8% of the total cases)
Total Closed Cases Worldwide – 339,288,388
Information and Resources:
https://www.worldometer.info/coronavirus/
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-02-14
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/