Center Offers a Haven by the Harbor

Even longshoremen can get lost amid the forest of dockside cranes and heavy machinery on the Long Beach waterfront--and they work there every day.

For the thousands of foreign sailors who haul into port each day, emerging from weeks of isolation at sea to find themselves at the edge of America’s busiest harbor and the urban whirlwind beyond, it’s even more confusing.

To such harried sailors, who often come from Third World countries and would barely be old enough to vote here, the International Seafarers Center offers at least a sliver of sanity and hope for navigating the neighboring metropolis.

“They are very unsophisticated people forced into a very sophisticated world,” said Barry Baldwin, a member of the center’s board of directors and vice president of Foss Maritime.

As strangers in a strange land, they are often dependent on the center, a one-story building near the docks of the Port of Long Beach, for help with even basic urban survival, from wiring cash to shopping at department stores.

“All these little things mean a lot to them,” said Robert Muchnikoff, a retired restaurateur who has volunteered at the center since it opened in 1983. “These guys are regular guys. They’re homesick.”

And so it is that volunteers like Muchnikoff make sure the letter to one seaman’s wife has the proper postage, or that another sailor has a ride to the mall to pick up souvenirs for his children. But perhaps the center’s most popular service is provided in a small room with eight phone stations where seamen can call home at discount rates.

With the proliferation of prepaid phone cards, which allow sailors to call from any public phone booth around the harbor, the center has seen more than a 30% decline over the last two years in the number of visitors, said manager Gerry Graham.

So with fewer sailors coming to the center, Graham said the staff has taken its services to them. Each afternoon, a volunteer or staff member makes the rounds of the vessels that have come into port, handing out business cards and offering transportation to the center. It had contact with 13,000 seafarers last year, Graham estimated.

On a recent evening, volunteer Virginia Sharma, a former director of the center, walked up the rickety gangplank of the KN Trader, a coal vessel that had docked that afternoon after a two-week trip from Yokohama, Japan. As soon as she stepped into the mess hall, where five sailors were finishing their dinners, one approached Sharma and asked to be taken to JC Penney. Another said he was desperate to talk to his family.

“I miss them,” sighed Antolio Navatos, a radio operator who said he had been away from his wife and four children for a year and 16 days. “It’s the seaman’s life.”

Most U.S. ports have some form of seaman’s center, typically affiliated with a local church. The International Seafarers Center labels itself nondenominational, and offers a chapel with services every Sunday, with shelves of Bibles and religious tracts in languages from Estonian to Zulu.

It operates on a $145,000 budget cobbled together from donations from the Long Beach and Los Angeles ports, proceeds from its own annual fund-raiser and a $35-per-ship fee that steamship lines pay on a voluntary basis.

Inside, there are also closets full of donated books--from Henry Kissinger biographies to obscure science fiction--and stacks of National Geographic magazines from as far back as 1948. (“The sailors really don’t care what year they are,” Graham said. “They just look at the pictures.”)

Another section of the building offers drugstore fare where sailors buy Baby Ruths and Butterfingers by the carton. For seamen with enough shore time, the center provides transport to Disneyland or a shopping mall.

And in an industry of whirlwind voyages, where profits come from delivering cargo on time with or without all of the crew, it has become a shelter for unlucky sailors who literally miss the boat.

Last month, a group of five seafarers took a routine flight from Manila to Los Angeles en route to meet their vessel off the coast of Mexico. But when they missed their connection, they found themselves stranded in the nation’s second-largest city with $70 among them. They spent the night wandering the airport, then caught a morning flight to Bogota, Colombia, and embarked for the next 10 days on a mad search for their ship or their business agent--a ragged rush that sent them scrambling through Cartagena, Colombia, to a handful of other cities across Central and South America.

On Dec. 16, they found themselves back at LAX, where they stumbled into another seafarer, who gave them a phone number. Using change they found on the floor, they called the number, which happened to be for the center in Long Beach.

When volunteers from the center found them, the five men had a loaf of bread, a box of crackers and 20 cents. Disheveled, exhausted and desperate, they were brought to the center, which converted sofas to give them a place to sleep.

“This is no Holiday Inn,” Graham told them, “but you’re among friends.”