"When I looked at the pictures, I realized that kids in America are the same as kids in Liberia," Petock said. "They laugh, make funny faces, and want you to twirl them around until they get dizzy. You realize that your humanity is no greater than anyone else's."
For the next year, Petock will pay $525 a month to volunteer as a ward nurse for Mercy Ships. The nearly 30-year-old Christian charity provides free medical care in developing countries on ships converted into floating hospitals.
The group also helps the local communities with water, sanitation and agricultural projects; HIV/AIDS prevention; and construction of schools and clinics.
Medical staff perform about 7,000 surgeries a year, including cataracts and tumor removal, and cleft lip and palate reconstructions. The Africa Mercy ship has six operating rooms and a ward with 78 beds.
The year of service will cost Petock about $10,000. She must pay for her flight along with monthly room and board. She will live in a small cabin with at least three other volunteers near a country whose citizens have been displaced by a history of civil war.
She can't wait.
Petock has long envisioned spending her much of her career volunteering. She grew up in the church, attended her congregation's Calvary Christian Academy in Philadelphia, and spent time counseling youth and building houses in Panama. But for a while, it looked as if softball might be her calling.
Petock was an ace pitcher and threw for the Warrington Thunder travel team as a teenager. She decided to leave Calvary Christian Academy and attend Archbishop Wood High School in Warminster to play against the kind of competition that could get her noticed, and perhaps land a college scholarship.
