Former Port Chaplain Paddy Percival, or rather Mama Paddy or Babushka, as she was known to the many eastern European sailors she helped, has won an international maritime award for her years of service to ships’ crews in Durban’s harbour.
Afraid of heights and talking to strangers, particularly men, Percival said she heard a call from God to tend to the needs of the often abused and mistreated eastern European sailors on vessels tied up in Durban’s harbour in the late 1990s.
Former Port Chaplain Paddy Percival, or rather Mama Paddy or Babushka, as she was known to the many eastern European sailors she helped, has won an international maritime award for her years of service to ships’ crews in Durban’s harbour.
Afraid of heights and talking to strangers, particularly men, Percival said she heard a call from God to tend to the needs of the often abused and mistreated eastern European sailors on vessels tied up in Durban’s harbour in the late 1990s.
Each evening, she would first go home, say a prayer and then, together with her sister, Joyce, drive down to the harbour, look for the ships with Russian flags and clamber aboard to share the gospel. Once she retired, Percival joined the International Sailors Society and ministered to the sailors full time.
In December, Percival received the International Seafarers’ Welfare Award at the International Labour Organisation on the opening night of the Maritime Labour Convention in Geneva. She shared the award with her Hong Kong friend and colleague, the English-born Reverend Peter Ellis.
“I heard I had been nominated and that was such an honour. And then I received a phone call asking me if my travel documents were in order because I had won and would have to travel to Geneva. Well, I just couldn’t believe it,” she said. Percival said eastern European sailors, particularly after Perestroika and the collapse of the Russian shipping industry, were often badly treated.
“Some had not spoken to their families for over a year, while others needed medical attention. Also, they just didn’t get paid.”
At the age of 60, Percival took a course in Russian and she spent three months visiting Russia, Georgia, the Ukraine and Romania at the invitation of families she had helped.
With a myriad stories to tell, of praying every day at the door of a critically burnt engineer, to assisting a woman with an acute kidney infection, Percival says she is ready to write a book.
“I could think of no better way to have spent my retirement,” she said.
Her life philosophy is to learn more. “When I first started visiting the ships, I would have to lug bibles… By the time I left, I was handing out a memory stick,” she said. “I keep in contact with the sailors on Skype.”
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