Liza
I am going to interview Liza and James; they work on the same vessel as George and Rafal. There is a good atmosphere in the Seamen’s Club, where about 20 seamen, mostly Filipino, are celebrating a birthday.
Liza F. says she is around 40, but with a smile she admits that she looks younger.
She is from the Philippines and lives in Manila.
She is the single parent of a three-and-a-half-year-old boy who lives with his grandmother, helped by a nanny, when Liza is on board the ship.
At first, she worked in Dubai for six years in the customer service department of an IT company. She stopped working for two years after the birth of her baby.
Later, a Filipino colleague led her to her current job. She joined the crew in 2015.
She works for 12 weeks, seven days a week, for 12 consecutive hours a day. Then she goes back home for six weeks. During a working day she has a 30-minute breakfast break, one hour off at lunch, 30 minutes in the afternoon and one hour for dinner.
She organises the travel arrangements for staff rotation, checks diplomas, vocational training certificates and medical certificates, and manages the allocation of cabins. This involves 364 people from 28 different nationalities when the ship is on a mission.
The complexity of her tasks and the absence from her family were at first a challenge, but she now feels more and more at ease. She appreciates the quality of the human relationships on board. She is respected as the only woman in the crew, although other women are present during other staff rotations. She enjoys having a cabin of her own. To respect the seafarers’ rest, access to the cabin area is forbidden during working hours.
She has many good memories of her job, though not one in particular. However, she speaks with emotion about her internet conversations with her little boy. Sometimes he plies her with questions about her tasks on board and the date of her return home, but on other days, engrossed in his current activities, he is unwilling to talk.
The trickiest part of her job seems to be the need to make decisions that are compatible with the sometimes differing points of view of her superiors, whom she says are attentive and kind. She recognises that the length of her working periods can be difficult to cope with.
Under no circumstances does she see herself working for her whole career in the merchant navy. She plans to keep her job for another two or three years and hopes to move into catering with her sister afterwards.
