|
|
 Dead men tell no tales—live men tell good ones. Such was the case of a man who survived the sinking of the Madame Monique, the ship chartered by World Vision to carry emergency relief supplies to displaced Liberians. In an interview with World Vision’s Kevin Cook on Aug. 18, just hours after the ordeal, the man recounted how the 50-year-old vessel was battered in the stormy Atlantic, a few miles off the coast of Sierra Leone. When the ship began to founder, he and 18 shipmates felt sure they would die. Here are highlights of the interview:
"When the first big wave hit us, the workers began shouting, 'We're gonna die!’ One of the guys went up to the top deck to get the raft, and it just flew off the deck from the wind.”
"People were shouting prayers. The next thing you knew, we hit something big, and the boat began circling. [The captain] tried to get it out [but] there was nothing he could do anymore. There were too many waves. It was too rough.
"Getting tossed around like that, we knew there was no way we were going to get out. All the members of the crew were saying that they weren't going to see their children again. What was going to happen to them? I said to myself, 'Nobody is going back home.' So I confessed my sins to God and said goodbye to my family and to everybody. I was just waiting to go overboard—to jump down and not come back.
"Luckily for us, we hit the sandbank. If that hadn't happened we would have gone down fast. After an hour or two we realized that we weren't going to flip over. It wasn't until about 30 or 40 minutes later that we knew that we were sinking from the back. So all of us went to the top to hang on, and we kept hanging on from 11:30 at night until six in the morning
"[When it grew light], we saw we were eight or 10 kilometers from shore. We could see trees. We wanted one person to [swim to shore], but nobody [volunteered]. Then I went down, me and one other guy. We jumped into the water. We had life jackets and [buoyancy] rings. And we just swam to shore.”
The survivor told how he and his shipmate swam five miles through stormy seas before local village men pulled them to safety. Later, the villagers rescued their 17 shipmates.
Later that day, a chartered helicopter flew the survivors to the point of embarkation, Freetown, Sierra Leone.
|  |
|
