Projects

It’s Friday afternoon, half past four. All over the ship, you can find bigger groups of people, working more or less concentrated on completely different projects. You can hear the sweet tunes of music coming out of the library, the rattle of the sewing machine from the mess hall, or discussions about photos for our yearbook on deck. All these things create a unique atmosphere of creativity.
Whilst on our big journey half across the globe, we were divided into different projects. They meet every Friday afternoon for two hours and work in those projects on different topics. Between the different projects, there are quite some obvious differences such as the realization or how seriously people take their tasks.

First, there is the music project. If you hear someone sing on this ship, especially in the library, you can be ninety percent sure it is somebody from Marie’s group trying out the newest version of their newly written song, singing a shanty or playing their instruments. In my opinion, the music project is one of the more relaxing projects because the biggest part of their job is practicing different songs for bigger events on the ship like birthdays or our weekly “Besan-Schot-An” where we celebrate the week on the aft deck.

Then there is the project in charge of our public-relations. Their job is to communicate and represent KUS in front of media and our partners. Whilst on the longer legs, their main job is to create the yearbook because of a lack of other tasks. To do so, they must collect funny insiders, write down things that happened during the legs and think of important things to put in it.

Next, we have the photo project, or as we call them: our ship’s internal paparazzis. Their duty is to take pictures of everybody whilst cooking, sailing, singing, eating, … etc. It sounds fun but think about sorting thousands of photos every week and then having to choose the best of them to upload on our website! Yet all members mostly enjoy their work and do it voluntarily in their free time.

Our film project has set itself the task to create different short film clips and documentaries about our journey for our website and Instagram. So it might happen that while you are on duty with your watch, someone of the film team suddenly crashes your task and asks you to film some scenes about the daily life on board.

Last but not least, there is, in my opinion, the best project of all which I am part of: rigging! It does not only have the coolest name, but it is also kind of the most relaxing project of all. Our project lead is Christoph and our typical task is to create birthday presents and make bigger things to improve our life on board, such as a flag-bag. Our latest project was, for example, the Advent calendar for which we wrote some notes and colored them for half an hour last Friday while telling funny stories that had happened that day.

In general, you could say our projects are a way of expressing ourselves in fixed groups and to create a more creative daily life on board. In addition, we get to represent KUS on different levels of creativity.