Ports of Call for the Clergy : Ministry: The Seamen’s Church Institute in San Pedro brings practical help and spiritual counseling to merchant seafarers.

It’s 10 o’clock on a weekday morning and the Rev. Kelly Crawford is on his way to call on some members of his congregation. But this is not a typical clergyman’s house call.

For one thing, the house in question is actually a ship--a 600-foot refrigerator or “reefer” ship called the Chiquita Tower, which is tied up at Berth 154 in San Pedro with a load of 275,000 boxes of bananas from Mexico. And the men on board are not necessarily members of Crawford’s church--Episcopalian--or of any church, for that matter. They are simply merchant seaman, some of them Greek, some Polish, some Filipino, who are far from home and may need help.

Crawford, a soft-spoken, gray-haired 46-year-old, is the executive director of the Seamen’s Church Institute, a fixture on the San Pedro waterfront for more than a century. And he is here to help the seafarers on the Chiquita Tower with whatever they need--making phone calls home, sending letters, getting to and from the K mart to go shopping, providing spiritual counseling if they want it.

The Chiquita Tower is not getting any special treatment; this is simply one of hundreds of “ship visits” that Crawford and his staff make every month in the Port of Los Angeles.

“We drop off magazines, talk with the crew members, see if any particular crew member is having a problem,” Crawford says as he parks the church institute’s van on the dock next to the ship. “The important thing is that we’re consistently present. The seafarers know we’re here if they need us. Most of the time it’s relatively mundane needs that we deal with--getting in contact with families, going shopping. But we’re also here when there’s a crisis.”

Crises do arise occasionally. In the past, Crawford has helped mediate labor disputes, helped arrange emergency leave for a Maldivian sailor whose wife back home had developed cancer, helped repatriate a crew of Indian sailors who were stuck on their ship for months while it was being repaired. Crawford’s institute colleague, the Rev. Peter Yu, once tried to help a Chinese seaman who attempted suicide because he thought he had the AIDS virus. (Despite Yu’s efforts, the sailor later took his own life.)

Crawford never knows what problems he may encounter when he boards a ship.

“Hello, nice to see you!” the captain of the Chiquita Tower, E. J. Kabiotis, calls out as Crawford steps on the main deck. Overhead a crane is swinging a pallet of banana boxes down to the dock, where longshoremen stack them in a warehouse to await shipment.

The Chiquita Tower, a Panamanian-flag ship owned by a Greek shipping company but leased by the Chiquita banana company, makes regular runs from Los Angeles to Puerto Madero, Mexico, near the Guatemalan border. There it loads about 12 million pounds of bananas into the ship’s four refrigerated holds and sails back to Los Angeles to unload. Then the ship and her 25-man crew--Capt. Kabiotis laughs when asked if there are any female crew members--immediately heads back to Mexico for more bananas. The entire L.A.-Mexico-L.A cycle takes about three weeks.

“It is a very good thing to see the church on board my ship,” says Kabiotis, an effusive 43-year-old dressed in sandals and an open-neck shirt. “At sea of course we have no church. It is, I think, a very excellent thing.”

Although Kabiotis, the son and grandson of sea captains, has been captain of this ship for less than a month, he says he remembers fondly the visits to his previous ships by Crawford’s colleagues in ports around the world.

The Seamen’s Church Institute is part of an international network of seamen’s centers in about 300 ports around the globe, operating under the auspices of the worldwide Anglican Church. They go by different names in different countries, but their shared symbol--a “Flying Angel” that resembles the figureheads on old sailing ships--is a familiar sight to professional sailors everywhere.

Although many religious organizations minister to seamen--including, in the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian and Baptist churches--the Flying Angel network is the oldest and largest.

After a chat and a Coke with the captain in the ship conference room, Crawford heads down to the ship’s mess where the crew is having lunch. He shakes hands all around, talks with the crew members and hands out flyers advertising the “Flying Angel Seafarers’ Center” at Beacon and 11th streets in San Pedro, where off-duty seamen can make phone calls home, play pool or darts, read magazines or visit the chapel. (Next month the center will expand its hours to remain open in the evenings six days a week.) Crawford asks the seamen if there’s anything he can do for them.

The seamen react to Crawford the way soldiers react to a visit from the post chaplain; they are respectful and friendly, but a little shy. One sailor tries to gently steer Crawford away from the stack of X-rated videos that a video exchange deliveryman has just brought aboard.

The on-board visit is a scene that has been re-enacted thousands of times by Crawford and his predecessors in previous decades. But the faces of the seaman have changed.

Forty years ago, when the U.S. merchant fleet was second only to that of Great Britain, there would have been a good chance that the sailors Crawford was speaking to would have been U.S. citizens. Now, with the U.S. merchant fleet largely a memory, and with the number of U.S. seafaring jobs only 20% of what it was in 1960, the vast majority of Crawford’s contacts are with foreign nationals.

“The demographics of seafarers have changed tremendously,” Crawford says. “Today, 80% of the seafarers who call here are from Asian countries, 50% of them Filipinos. Many Asian countries are exporting labor--seafarers--in order to get hard currency sent back home.”

The reason is simple: cost. A U.S. able-bodied seaman on a U.S.-flag ship (if he can find one) earns, on average, about $1,800 a month base pay; a Filipino seaman on most foreign-flag ships earns about one-third that amount.

Another change, Crawford says, is in the seafarer’s lifestyle. The swashbuckling, tattooed, girl-in-every-port sailor is, he says, largely a thing of the past.

“Seafarers today are mostly family men who are working hard to support their families,” Crawford says. “These aren’t people who are out there for adventure. They’re just trying to earn a living.”

Also, he says, because of changes in shipping technology that allow rapid loading and unloading, the modern seafarer’s sea time far exceeds his shore time; ship turnaround time in the Port of Los Angeles ranges from a matter of hours to a few days.

Consequently, Crawford says, “the seafarer’s sense of isolation is greater than ever before. The most important thing to them (in port) is to make contact with their families back home. The second most important thing is going shopping.”

Calling home and shopping are what is on the minds of the crewmen on the Chiquita Tower. For the past two days they have been stuck on board because of some mix-up with the Immigration and Naturalization Service concerning visas, but now it looks as if the problem has been solved. Crawford makes arrangements with some of the crew members to pick them up at the dock that evening, take them to the K mart and then to the Seamen’s Church Institute to make calls home.

The crew seems to appreciate it.

“It is very good to see him,” seaman Noriel Tiples, a Philippine citizen, says of Crawford. “He will help us to go shopping. I want to buy clothes and electronics.”

“He helps us very much,” says seaman Nolie Tugadi, also a Filipino.

It has been a more or less average ship’s call for Crawford. After a final courtesy call chat with the captain and a wave to the crew, he walks back down the gangplank.

His work is not finished, however. There is always another ship.