Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the touristic identities of volunteers who work onboard a hospital ship bringing surgical care and a Christian message to West Africa. Their travels are framed by a sense of heightened accountability as they document their lived experiences during outreach to sponsors back home.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the touristic motivations and identities of volunteers who travel to work onboard a hospital ship that aims to bring surgical medical care and a Christian message to primarily West African nations. Crew members onboard come from over forty nations for as short as two weeks and as long as eighteen years, and inhabit a culture that is carried along on their journey in a more obvious manner than that of other travellers, in the form of a ship that holds not only a ward and three operating rooms to enable the carrying out of its mission, but also a school, church, air conditioning and 350 like-minded individuals.

This paper considers the phenomenon of volunteers who come onboard the ship as a form of pilgrimage and rite of passage in their relationship as a Christian to God. These individuals create a relationship with their host community defined through service to God, and in turn radiate an account of their mission to the home community they have left behind in the form of blogs, newsletters and, upon return, talks and presentations detailing their time on the ship in Africa. This recounting of their travels is important as it provides an arena to garner further sponsorship and relay a picture of, generally, a joyful and suffering Africa. Thus their travels, instead of a time of experimentation and freedom at abandon, are instead framed by heightened accountability as they engage in a continuous recounting of their Christian selves to their hosts in the outreach location, and of their outreach location to their community back home - in addition to their personal accountability to God. This form of tourism is of the type where the goal is not simply one of self-discovery and to "see the world" but also to change it, and I explore how one's faith privileges oneself in terms of the choices one makes as a missionary tourist, straddling two cultures at the same time, between ship and land. This discussion is based on ethnographic fieldwork observing crew members' daily life practices and relationships formed with the host community on land while the ship was docked in Sierra Leone, Benin and Ghana in order explore the identities they recreate in their touristic selves while travelling for God, and how they are perceived by those they intend to serve.

E-paper: this Paper will not be presented, but read in advance and discussed