A Place to Drop Anchor : Seafarers’ Center Assists Merchant Shiphands on Shore Leave

“Today is one of the worst days in my life,” the exasperated captain of a Turkish freighter complained to Virginia Sharma, director of the International Seafarers’ Center in the Port of Long Beach.

He suspected that two of his crew members had jumped ship in the port and he knew he would be fined thousands of dollars by the U.S. Immigration Service.

Sharma listened as she sat in the cramped captain’s quarters of the rusting ship. She had come on board to lend a sympathetic ear and to bring the captain two shopping bags filled with National Geographic magazines that would be perfect reading on long ocean voyages.

The visit was all in a day’s work for Sharma. As director of the center for the past year, she has done everything from ferrying crew members to a shopping mall in downtown Long Beach to placing long-distance phone calls home for the visiting seafarers.

The Seafarers’ Center is in a nondescript one-story building encircled on Pico Avenue by a winding ramp leading to Ocean Boulevard.

The structure, which was donated by the port, has a decidedly nautical feel. A huge, gray anchor--rumored to have been the Queen Mary’s at one time--graces one side of the parking entrance, and a freighter’s former mast (complete with crow’s nest) sprouts from the roof. A sign at the door greets visitors in eight languages.

Inside, colorful signal pennants brighten the white walls of a large hall. Crew members play pool and Ping-Pong, watch television, lounge in a smoking room or buy toiletries, candy bars and postcards from a small corner shop.

There is a Christmas tree decorated with flags from all over the world. “This can be (the seafarers’) only contact with land during the holidays, so we make it special for them,” Sharma said. “Once they go back to sea, it’s the same old thing.”

The center, in operation since 1984, is one link in a chain of facilities in nearly every major port city. And like the other clubs, it is a member of the International Christian Maritime Ministry, which has its headquarters in London.

Crewmen of all faiths are welcome at the center’s modest chapel, said Sharma, who is Lutheran.

The only comparable facilities on the West Coast, the director said, are in Seattle and Tacoma, Wash. This winter the Seamen’s Church Institute will open a similar center to serve the Port of Los Angeles. The Long Beach site currently serves its sister port.

The facility operates on a modest budget of $62,000 derived from fund-raisers, private donations and occasional grants from the maritime union--the International Trade Federation--and from corporations such as Atlantic Richfield Co. The three paid staff members and seven volunteers welcome 7,000 seafarers each year, mainly from the Philippines and other Asian countries.

Lately, there has been an influx of Russian crew members. “They want to go to our churches and visit our homes,” Sharma said. “No other nationality has ever approached me just wanting to experience this country.”

The center is a welcome sight to crews that have been at sea for weeks. During that time they see the same faces, reread the same magazines and books, and, if the ship has a VCR, see the same films over and over.

“Being at sea is like being institutionalized,” she said, “except there’s a chance of drowning (if you try to escape). That’s the definition I like.”

One evening a 25-year-old seaman from the Greek freighter Atlantic Statesman was visiting the center. The young man, who simply identified himself as Gregory, maintains the ship’s engines. “It’s hard work,” he said, holding out calloused, grease-stained hands.

His crew mate, Stavros Valeris, was chief steward overseeing the preparation of meals aboard the freighter.

For both men the hardest part of going to sea is being away from their families, but every three weeks Valeris manages to call his.

The heart of the Seafarers’ Center, indeed, is a series of soundproof booths where the men sit hunched over telephones, intently listening to news of home. Because of the sheer volume of calls around the world--about 1,000 monthly--the center can charge relatively modest rates.

“And sometimes you have to really look up on the map to find out where they’re calling,” said Erna Kramer, 82, a volunteer called “Mom” by the visiting seamen.

Over the phone the men receive good news such as word that they have become fathers. Other times they learn of sickness and death in the family.

A year ago, Sharma had to comfort a Russian officer who was told that his wife had been murdered. Vladimir Leonenko received the shocking news that his 5-year-old son had witnessed the murder during a robbery at the family’s apartment in Vladivostok.

Sharma spent hours with the young officer. “Within three days we were praying, studying the Bible, laughing and crying together as if we had been friends all of our lives,” she said.

The San Pedro resident discovered this kind of pastoral work while a student at the Lutheran Bible Institute in Anaheim. “I do this because I think God has called me to this ministry,” she said. “You can come down here and be with people and share with them. I’d do this for nothing.”

Part of Sharma’s work is advocating for the seafarer. She said those who call at U.S. ports are fairly well treated because ship captains know that if there is any abuse it can be reported to the Coast Guard.

However, seamen have told her of non-payment of wages or overwork and physical abuse. Then she gives them the option of reporting infractions to the Coast Guard or the maritime union, and helps them get legal representation.

Other crew members have asked her about jumping ship in the port. “Don’t do it,” she says. “How would you like to be stuck in a foreign country not knowing the language and having to survive somehow?”

Sharma has a unique understanding of these people’s lives because she is married to a ship’s officer she met five years ago at the center. “I don’t date seamen,” she replied when he first asked her out. Finally, she relented.

Vinay Sharma is chief engineer on a small container ship that sails between Singapore and Manila. Home six months and away six months, he is now on his annual tour of duty. The center director racks up a $1,000 monthly telephone bill keeping in touch with him.

Vinay Sharma’s job can be very dangerous, she said, remembering the time he called to tell her his ship had been rammed in fog off South Korea and had sunk. He escaped without injury. However, she was not thinking of such dangers as she contemplated her first visit to the Orient to be with her husband. Sharma recently spent two weeks on board his freighter, her first ocean voyage.

“I think it was the isolation (of seagoing life) that impressed me the most,” she said. “The crew members are so cut off from the outside world.”