Just a reminder - where we have come from!

It was at Easter 1986, thirty years ago, that Graham and Sandra Hinds and Ian and Margaret Trueblood from the East Midlands Christian Fellowships first visited Sierra Leone. Initial links had been made through SOON, a charity that publishes Christian testimonies in simple English to be read in less developed countries.
Pen friendships were formed and this is how I first contacted Alpha Kargbo, who became our Programme Director for the present work. I met him on my first visit to Freetown in 1989.

Alpha Kargbo today after a friendship of thirty years.

From these beginnings People in Partnership was formed in 2000 to work with a local registered NGO called the New Era Evangelism and Development Organisation (NEEDEP) based in a Loko Baptist Church,.  Since these early days, we have helped to establish a Christian School in a Muslim area in a very deprived part of the capital, Freetown. This has expanded to a Primary and Junior Secondary School with just over 700 pupils. 

The school just before it opened in 2004. 

Sierra Leone was the first West African country to be evangelised (1785), yet over 200 years later only 13% of the country claims to be Christian.  The Loko, a tribe whose main base is in the North of the country, are classified as an unreached people group. The Joshua Project defines this as a people group among which there is no indigenous community of believing Christians with adequate numbers and resources to evangelize this people group without outside assistance.  

Working with the charity, Links International, in 2010 and 2011 we have taken two teams to pioneer work in Primary  Health Care and Micro-enterprise, which gives loans to the poorest of the poor to start small businesses.

We continue to work with the school, paying the wages of most of the teachers until the Government takes them on, which it has promised to do. We are also funding new building work to accommodate the increased number of pupils.

During our partnership we have had to contend with the aftermath of the civil war and recently with the Ebola crisis which killed 47 people in our local community, including parents of school pupils but only one pupil, a girl, died.

Mother and child being sprayed with disinfectant during the Ebola crisis.

We sent  £2350 during the Ebola emergency, which bought food for orphans and the starving and also basic medical and disinfecting supplies.