Norbert Mokros and the Early Days of the Twin Ports Ministry to Seafarers

by

Thousands of miles away from home, a Honduran seaman grows increasingly worried about his ailing mother in a hillside village that's a day's journey from the capital city of Tegucigalpa. As his saltie docks in the Superior harbor to take on a shipment of sunflower seeds, the young seafarer becomes more anxious. His next port of call is Rotterdam, 25 days and 5,000 miles away.

Enter the Twin Ports Ministry to Seafarers, an agency which exists to help crewmen in trouble, crewmen with family emergencies back in their native countries, and crewmen in need of just a friendly person to whom they can talk. Operating from a homey former parish house in Duluth's West End, the Ministry "provides for these strangers in our community a point of identification," says Reverend Norbert Mokros, the Ministry's executive director.

"The Center's a place where they can feel safe, where they can trust that the information they receive is reliable, and where they will not be solicited," Mokros explains. "Although we're a religious organization in terms of support, it's not our intention to be a proselytizing agency. The Ministry is not selling Americanism, capitalism or even Christianity."

It's also a spot where American, Canadian, European and Third World seamen can meet friends, forget about the job and make a phone call home. Duluth and Superior are truly international ports. In 1984, nearly 1,300 vessels called, including 249 oceangoing ships flying the flags of 29 countries.

From quiet beginnings in 1969, the Ministry has grown to serve some 1,500 to 1,800 seafarers each month in its April through December season. Its small staff consists of Mokros, two ship visitors, a part-time secretary and a cadre of 200 community volunteers. Mokros or a ship visitor meets lakers and ocean vessels as they dock in the Duluth and Superior harbors, and a shuttle bus makes daily runs transporting crew members to and from the Seafarers Center. When there's a need, the Ministry reaches up the North Shore to the docks in Silver Bay, Two Harbors and Taconite Harbor.

"Whatever happens here in the house is a result of good ship visiting," says Mokros, "because on board you can relate to people where they live and work." He greets seafarers – both men and women – who are at sea from seven to ten months each year.

At the Center, crewmen find a comfortable three-story home complete with a post office, gift shop and telephones ready for trans-Atlantic or trans-Pacific calls. They can relax in a living room stocked with books, foreign language newspapers, fresh flowers – almost never seen on board ship – and a piano.

Twenty-seven nationalities registered in the Center's guest book last year. They were welcomed by a home away from home. Ping pong and billiard tables, a laundry room, kitchen and small chapel are available, and crewmen have a chance to watch TV or see a full-length movie. All the Center's services are free, except for the gift shop, post office, and, of course, those phone calls.

For someone whose co-workers may total only 16 on an ocean vessel or 30 on a Great Lakes thousand-footer, there's the opportunity to mix with the local community. The Center's volunteer staff falls into three groups, and although many are members of local churches, that's not necessarily the the reason they're volunteering, says Mokros. They're mainly interested individuals.

The auxiliary staff serves as hosts and hostesses, helping keep the Center open seven days a week from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. They assist with phone calls, know the Center's programs and services, and operate the small gift shop and post office.

A second group of volunteers helps with maintenance of the house, including cleaning and various household jobs.

Special projects involve the third volunteer group. Some projects are ongoing, such as providing reading material free of charge that crew members can take with them. The Ministry solicits paperbacks and magazines in and outside of the local area, and these have to be gathered, sorted and packaged. It also subscribes to magazines and newspapers in various languages, including a Korean and a German language newspaper, the airmail edition of the Norwegian News, and Reader's Digest in 15 languages.

Other projects are fairly specific: each year, Christmas boxes are placed on ships leaving the port just before the holiday, an especially busy time with the late season grain push to foreign ports. The Center receives handmade items from a wide geographic area throughout the year; most years it counts 3,500 knitted pieces alone. The gifts are sorted, and last December volunteers placed 1,000 gift boxes on 34 departing ships.

Some volunteers visit hospitalized seafarers, and another group invite seamen into their homes. Some sea lines allow families to accompany officers on a voyage. When mom and the kids have not talked to another mother or child in six months, a visit to a home in the Twin Ports is a welcome respite, Mokros says.

Visiting sailors also contribute to the upkeep of the Center. They sometimes wash windows, do carpentry work, or even make financial donations. A number of the home's unique decorations are gifts of guests.

Mokros tells the story of the motor vessel Anna's captain, who several years ago was hauling a load of bauxite, the rawest form of aluminum, from Brazil to Baltimore. As he cleaned down the hull he found a sample rock and thought, "I'll bet they've never seen this at the Seafarers Center." He brought it along, and the gift has found a permanent home on the Center's mantle, with the gift giver's name, ship and date noted on back.

Who are these seafarers, strangers docking at the rockbound fourth coast of America's heartland to take on cargoes of grain, sunflower seeds and taconite? On board, they may be engineers, nautical advisers, cargo loaders, cooks or deck people. They hail from American cities, European countries with a tradition of seafaring, or emerging Third World nations.

Many speak English. "It's part of their survival mode to be linguists, and most of them are quite capable linguists," Mokros says, adding that most sailors speak two to three languages in addition to their own.

Most have been at sea for long periods. Confronted with isolation, boredom and separation, they need to store up their batteries away from the industrial ghetto of the port.

"We ask, 'what are your needs?'" says Mokros, describing the Ministry's flexible, unwritten program. "It's never our intention to say 'we think your needs are... .'"

American and Canadian crewmen often miss contact with community and families. "We used to call the seamen on the American lakers 'homesteaders,'" says Mokros. "They'd come in spring with their duffel bags and TVs, and leave again in late fall or winter." The strain of maintaining two different lifestyles – one at sea and one on shore – can take its toll, he explains, especially when retirement age approaches.

European sailors, on the other hand, usually come from a family background of seafaring, with a social support system to back them up.

"It wouldn't be unusual if I would sense that there is a problem with a northern European seafarer, that is, if he's expressing some concern about his family," Mokros says, "for me to call his town and ask the telephone operator for the name of a local church or the seafarers club and then to say 'I would like to talk to somebody in the women's auxiliary,' because in each one of those communities the women who are wives of seafarers have formed an auxiliary as a support group.

"It wouldn't be anything unusual for me to say, 'Could you give some special attention to Mrs. Hansen? Apparently she and her husband are having some real difficulty.' And this would be done in absolute confidence; they would understand it, and there would be all the charity and concern.''

Aiding a seafarer from a Third World nation, however, is more difficult. And in recent years, a changeover in the crews of oceangoing vessels from mainly European to mainly Third World sailors has made a dramatic change in the Ministry's guests.

Davis Helberg, director of the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth, says he began noticing the change in crew makeup in the mid-sixties and remembers a Norwegian ship officer telling him, "This is the wave of the future."

The switch has been fairly gradual over the last 20 years, Helberg says, and now he sees Third World sailors from "top to bottom, right up through the officers. But there are a lot of areas where the traditional system doesn't deal with the needs of these seamen."

Crewmen from Sri Lanka, Africa, Korea or Honduras have no social system back home to give their families support while they're at sea. These sailors, usually in their twenties and early thirties, are seafaring men because it's a chance to have a job, any job. No occupation in their country pays as well, Mokros says, even if Americans consider the shipboard wages hopelessly substandard.

Lacking seafaring traditions, they also lack unions and fair systems for seeking employment. The conditions sometimes have led the Twin Ports Ministry into an entirely new role in recent years - that of legal advocate. With wage and contract disputes and crisis at home, the needs of Third World seamen are more often economical rather than social, Mokros says.

Third World guests have also meant a change in activities offered at the Seafarers Center. Sightseeing trips, canoeing and soccer games, all popular with European crewmen, have been replaced with full-length feature movies (from the public library) shown every evening, volleyball games and events at the house. Since many Third World seafarers don't make much money – Indian seafarers often make $125 to $150 per month – the Center aims for recreation at an affordable price.

There were attempts before those of Mokros to to establish a seafarers center in the Twin Ports, Helberg says. "But they were the same failed efforts that go along in ports all over the world. The reason they usually go haywire is that there's so much proselytizing involved." Mokros' approach is pragmatic and practical, dealing with human need, Helberg says.

In the early days, the Center made its home in a 64 x 14-foot trailer house on the waterfront and Mokros drove a 12-passenger van paid for with 750,000 Betty Crocker coupon points clipped from cereal boxes and flour bags by church groups all over the state. ("We've always been very inventive," he says.) The present Center was purchased from the Roman Catholic diocese of Duluth and moved into during 1975.

Today, the Ministry operates on an annual budget of about $80,000. Twelve church denominations in seven states – Minnesota, Upper Michigan, Wisconsin, North Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota – provide half of its budget needs. The rest is raised from the general public.

Other seafarers centers operate throughout the world. Ninety percent are maintained by Christian churches, Mokros says, with the state and church working together in European countries. In Russia and China, centers are sponsored by the government.

But the Twin Ports Ministry to Seafarers has a unique position among Great Lakes ports. Although Mokros says some interested groups exist in Cleveland, Chicago and Milwaukee, the Twin Ports Ministry is the only center between Duluth-Superior and Montreal with a staff, a building open at regular hours and an established program.

The Seafarers' Friend Norbert Mokros

Norbert Mokros arrived in Duluth in the midst of the 1964 grain millers' strike. Grain elevators were closed, and anchored ships stood idle along the terminals. A former worker on the Holland-America line, the ordained Lutheran clergyman identified with the plight of the hundreds of stranded seamen during the six-week shutdown.

But it wasn't until four years later that Mokros began to promote his seafarers ministry in earnest. In the intervening years, he had served as a local pastor and traveled in Europe.

When he returned to the Twin Ports in 1968, Mokros capitalized on the ecumenical spirit of the late sixties. "We raised enough interest and funding in a year to incorporate the ministry and open in the summer of 1969," he says.

Now 46, Mokros is intensely aware of the difference between his type of ministry and a traditional church setting. "My congregation is coming and going every time the Aerial Bridge opens," he says. While a pastor usually deals with the same people in an ongoing program, Mokros sees his mission as "involving people of the community in the lives of strangers who are in our midst – a catalyst."

Multi-lingual, he doesn't worry about communicating with sailors in Urdu or Hindi, languages he has not yet mastered. Says Mokros, "It's not a verbal exactness, but a technique of communicating."

Mokros' off-season time passes quickly. Out-of-town speaking engagements, fund raising, building maintenance and vacation time take up his winter months. Or he may attend a workshop on the rights of Third World seafarers, a problem unique to his type of chaplaincy.

He's also active in Twin Ports' civic circles. From 1976 to 1982 he served as a commissioner on the Seaway Port Authority of Duluth. In spite of occasional economic crisis, he sees the port as the actual source of a global transportation route. With its vast shipments of grain, "we're feeding the world," Mokros says.