PHILADELPHIA, PA (Feb. 16, 2026) — It was to be a typical photo shoot in the Port of Philadelphia, the kind a publisher requests of its authors for publicity images taken in a context befitting a future book.

I had written Pedro’s Delivery, an early reader book about the travails of a Filipino seafarer who escorts a cargo ship brimming with bags of cocoa beans from the Ivory Coast to Pennsylvania, where chocolatiers turn the beans into candy bars for store shelves. 

I was to visit the the Gloucester Marine Terminal at the Port of Camden across the river and the Del Monte Rose, a ship brimming with containers of bananas brought from Costa Rica and Guatemala. Soon the bananas would hit the region’s store shelves. The assignment was simple enough. My photographer, John Kahler, would take scores of photos of me. Mark with the captain, Mark with an able-bodied seaman from the Philippines—like Pedro in my book of fiction based on fact—Mark in the busy port. It was unusual because as a career photojournalist and publicist, I am the one frequently taking pictures of others—until now. But simple enough.

Then I looked at the Del Monte Rose’s crew list: Vitaliy Sopin, a Russian and Master (Captain) of the ship. The next highest-ranking officers? Yevgen Ryezanov, Viacheslav Shynkarenko and Dmytro Kravtsov: all Ukrainian.

I felt the axis of my world shifting, images of war north of the Black Sea filling my television screen daily. What is it like for these men, on opposite sides of a geopolitical conflict, to work together for months at a time? 

I learned that collaboration between Russian and Ukrainian seafarers aboard today’s cargo ships is not uncommon. 

Master Vitaliy, thirty-nine, is a third-generation seafarer from Sochi, Russia. He is Russian Orthodox, with a sense of humor that flashes amid his businesslike demeanor. Vitaly does not like being away for four months at a time from his wife, Anastasiia, and his children, Ihor, eight, and Juliya, five. But he does relish the freedom he enjoys at sea compared to life back home. Like many Russians, Vitaliy has relatives in both Russia and Ukraine, the latter of which was once part of the former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. He also enjoys seeing the world. He estimates he has tied up at thirty countries, and he's not yet forty years old.

When Russian and Ukrainian seafarers coexisted at sea as the war first began, tensions were higher than they are now, Vitaliy agrees. “Now in the ship’s daily routine, politics and religious differences are just not talked about, except perhaps during some very private conversations. Tomorrow we will leave for Costa Rica and then Guatemala to pick up bananas, and we will be back here in two weeks. That is our focus.”

Chief Officer Yevgen hails from Crimea in Ukraine. Ukrainian seafarers cannot return home when not on duty, otherwise they will face conscription. So many Ukrainian seafarers choose to live in Poland or Moldova with their families during home leave. Like his captain, Yevgen has a wife and two young children in his adopted home. 

Watching the captain and his first officer interact during my day with them in port, I notice the absence of tension between the ship’s highest-ranking officers. The camaraderie appears genuine and unforced.

Both men share the same view about the war as expressed by Master Vitaliy. “We think the fighting should stop. People should gather around a table and find a solution.” Fighting may continue back home, but aboard the five-year-old Del Monte Rose it feels like a different world. 

Many of us don’t think much about the details of the journeys undertaken—or the hardships endured—by seafarers like Yevgen and Vitaliy. But after ten years serving as a Homeland Security-certified shipboard visitor to welcome the strangers arriving on ships, I wanted children to know more about how seafarers serve us. (I volunteered for the venerable Seamen’s Church Institute of Philadelphia and South Jersey all those years.)

When Pedro’s Delivery is released in July 2026, it will be the first title from Granum Kids, the new imprint of Canadian publisher Ingenium Books. We both—publisher and author—see this story as a celebration of global partnerships and the trade relationships between nations. 

In short, we all need each other.