This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

Just on the horizon, you probably can't quite make it out in Sharjah.

This is Andy Bowerman, recording himself with his phone as he stands on a cargo ship off the coast of Sharjah, a city in the United Arab Emirates.

It's in some ways an idyllic setting. It's 40-odd degrees. Sea is calm. The sky is blue.

Andy is the regional director at an organization called Mission to Sea Fair's and part of his job is to deliver things like rice, blankets, water, and sim cards to workers who are trapped on abandoned cargo ships.

It is literally me and typically one other member of our team

on a small speedboat pulling up alongside

and climbing up a 15 foot rope ladder to get to the ship.

In some cases the people that Andy tries to help have been stuck on these abandoned vessels without enough supplies for months or even years.

And we're loading provisions yet again onto this vessel that's been here now for more than two years.

Yeah, we've all been on lockdown around different parts of the world. Just multiply that by, you know, 10 and you'll get a sense of what these guys are facing

all the time. I mean I would sometimes say it's like prison but you don't know how long

the sentence is. Right now there are about 50 of these situations on the International Transport Federation's

official database.

But a lot of these cases go on reported,

and so the real number is probably much higher.

That's producer Alex Aetac, who brought us this story from the podcast

Kearning Cultures.

Andy works mostly in the United Arab Emirates,

but there are abandonships all over the world,

particularly in the Middle East,

and the people on them do describe feeling like they're in prison, surrounded on all sides by water and unable

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