Presentation by Rev. Frank Skofteland with Frode Hove at the ICMA Northern Europe Regional Meeting, Helsinki, Finland, 23–25 September 2026.
Listen to audio here.
Thank you. We have a church in Dubai. We had the big staff there when the war started. But it was evacuation, so they went home. And then we, in the Seamen’s Church in Norway, mobile service, they would send us down there because it was very important to have the church open, and then we weren’t there.
At the same time, I was renovating the old church there. So it was important to have the assignment there at the end of March. Stayed for three weeks, and then I went back to Europe, and then I came back for four more weeks.
First, before we went out, it was a ship outside Oman. so they went to see put the staff on board. And a colleage from Singapore, he went to visit in Sri Lanka. So that was a good thing.
All the information from ICMA in this situation that we got, and even from Jason, it was useful.
So my job there, we also had to open the church. We had alarms every night. We worked together with the Norwegian embassy and the consulate, and they had … on the church.
The plan was to visit ships. It was 3,000 ships in the Gulf, and 30 of them were Norwegian. But all of them, they were in the Gulf, so it was not easy to visit.
We started with this helpline. Because we did that in ’92, to have a helpline for people who were in that war. So we started this again. It was a service that they could call 24/7.
But it also is the problem to come out to visit. We have contact with them, email, call them. We worked together with the police attaché in Dubai. So the embassy wants to tell people, you know, if we could go out to visit.
We were also renovating the church, so we were not living there. Because of security, we would stay in the hotel, first floor. Every night we had three or four alarms. We didn’t sleep well in the first period. We had daily contact with the ships and the companies in Norway, because they wanted us to visit. I think it was a lot of information on what happened in the area.
It was around 1,000 Norwegians living in Dubai, because after the evacuation, and it was some social problems around there. So we had some cases we were with.
Another thing about the helpline, the phone line: we established it upon a request from the shipowners in Norway. And it turned out that there were not a lot of seafarers that contacted us, even though it was informed on board to everybody.
And that is how I experience it. They seldom call us even though they have the contact information. But if we call them, then we have a conversation. So we also tell the shipping companies to give the phone numbers to us so we can call them. And they have started to do that.
But the one thing that happened when we went out on the internet with that phone line is that the seafarers that sailed there in the ’80s, in the Gulf War, between 1980 and ’87, …. Because they had had no help or been offered help in that time.
Especially one lady, she called me seven times. She was a representative for that time, and she was in contact with a lot of seafarers. And just to know today that we had done that, they appreciated that so much. Sometimes I had met on board ships people who told me about the experience they had from that time. It was awful. And I think it is the same thing happening this time.
Of course, they could say that, “I don’t want to go,” but they would blacklist them if they said no. And also, sometimes they were not told how big the risk was to go into the area.
Some people were forced to go in there, and some of the Norwegians died because the ship was torpedoed or hit by a rocket, caught fire, whatever. It was really awful.
They were sailing. One of them told me that one of the rockets didn’t explode. It went into the living compartment and it didn’t explode. So they were hit with a rocket and passed the ships that were on fire. And it took some hours from the terminal to the safe area.
This was an old captain. And just to look at him when he was telling the story was giving me the chills, because he was so affected when he told me about the experience.
He tried to be like this tough guy, but you could see it. It was really something. Terrible experience.
And then, like this time, when they stayed there for seven months, maybe seven months before they came into …, and then detained, like cannot move for one, two, three, four months. They don’t know what is happening tomorrow. And that develops PTSD.
I had one during the COVID time. There was a ship outside Nigeria. It was …. from Nigeria, having the Norwegian boat, with a Norwegian captain.
He was supposed to go home in April, and everything was shut down at the end of [unclear]. Every day he waited for the message: “There’s a …, the captain coming to replace you.”
He was waiting every morning because he knew that morning he got the message, “Fourteen days, I can go home.” But none came. Every day. April, May.
So by the midst of June, they were actually ready to pick him up by helicopter because his mental state was so bad. They were afraid he was turning mad.
So that, I mean, not knowing, not knowing, every day not knowing, taking pictures in the head.
And you were not able to go to the ship, or more in person? Denied access, right? So that was the problem.