Mercy Ship for Sierra Leone in 2011

We are delighted to have Dr. Matt Walters of the Derby Royal Hospital with us at the Riverside on the evening of Tuesday 8th June when he will be talking about the role of Mercy Ships alongside our 2010 Healthcare Team, who will share their experiences in the country in March 2010. Details from tswindaleuk@yahoo.co.uk



This is an inspiring video to the song "Deliver me" from the David Crowder Band. The before and after pictures of the work of the medical teams are indeed inspiring!

Much of the following is taken from http://www.mercyships.org.uk/.
Mercy Ships has selected Sierra Leone as the site for the 2011 Field Service for the world’s largest charity hospital ship, the Africa Mercy. This will be the fourth time that Mercy Ships has delivered free world-class medical care to the impoverished West African nation.


Healthcare in Sierra Leone is unaffordable and often unavailable. The country ranks 180 out of 182 nations on the 2009 Human Development Index, and the majority of the population lives on less than £1.40 per day. Infant mortality in Sierra Leone is 160 per 1000 births as compared to the UK at 4.8 per 1000 births. (UN Population Division). 

The ten-month 2011 Field Service will once again bring hope and healing to Sierra Leone. The state-of-the-art hospital ship, the Africa Mercy, contains six operating theatres and will provide free medical care. The off-ship Eye Clinic and Dental Clinic will offer additional medical services.

Mercy Ships looks forward to their continued partnership with the West African Fistula Centre in Aberdeen founded in 2004. The clinic is now under the management of the Freedom from Fistula Foundation. The Centre offers free surgeries to women suffering from childbirth-related injury and has the capacity to serve between 500 and 600 patients per year.



The hospital ship will also serve as a platform for training African healthcare professionals and for community development teams. These programs ensure that the positive impact of Mercy Ships will continue long after the ship leaves Sierra Leone.

What some of the team thought of their visit!

A team of ten from the Derby and Nottingham area met Linden Boothby at Heathrow for a visit to Sierra Leone from 28th February to 7th March 2010.

The English Group was varied, four different denominations, ages from 18 to 70, medical and non-medical backgrounds. None had visited Sierra Leone before except team leader, Ted Swindale, who had known Alpha Kargbo in Freetown for 22 years and worked with the New Era Evangelism and Development Programme since 1999.

The Sierra Leone Group who took part were from a wide section of society - Male and Female, Christian and Muslim, Pastor and Imam, Western influenced health workers and Traditional Healers.

This made for an interesting time in Looking Town, a deprived area of Freetown in a country which is currently 180 out of 182 on the UN Human Development Index, just ahead of Afghanistan and Niger. Not a good place to be and still suffering from the effects of the civil war, which devastated this area.


After Linden had explained the aims of our time together and those taking part had identified their most pressing health problems, we split into four groups - sharing the health professionals (three doctors and two nurses) among them. Feed back from the those who went has been encouraging.

What did they most enjoy about the trip?

Two Doctors: “Being in small groups, getting to know people. Team
discussions. Watching Linden at work - very inspiring lady.”

“Meeting the Sierra Leoneans in the groups. Seeing all the children at the Sports Day”

Former Teacher “Visiting Africa for the first time. The work the team did - the stance that was taken i.e. local people to take ownership. The people I met”

Nurse “Meeting the locals. The satisfaction of seeing the action plans - they actually learnt from us.”

Psychiatrist “Meeting the people. Their local situation. Making relationships. Support of whole group.”

Business analyst: “Exposure to vastly different culture”.

Young Man 18yrs “The food was delicious. I enjoyed meeting locals and the teaching itself. Visiting the beach was very good.”

In Freetown the four groups are now meeting together and number about 40 in total. Their enthusiasm is keeping up and we look to see results on our next visit.

Since returning to the UK the group have kept in touch and further links with medical workers in Sierra Leone are being forged. Margaret Abbott, a GP and aided by her son who is doing a Graphic Design
degree, is creating a small colourful stand-alone flipchart (small enough to go in a suitcase) with basic healthcare messages.

Out of the ten who went, eight want to go back and the other two “might”. Something has started that is continuing with enthusiasm.

Thank you Linden and Links!

Water, Water but is there a drop to drink?

"Drink plenty of water" was the advice given to the team when in Sierra Leone. There are a number of pictures in which bottles of water feature. Here are some and you will notice bottles of water in many more as you look through the blog.

Break time for Andy and Margaret

Grace learning deportment at the airport

Our first morning in Sierra Leone. Bottle in hand, Linden is setting a good example as we cross on the ferry to Freetown.

However bottled water is expensive and way beyond the reach of many people who have no access to guaranteed clean water. This results in many cases of waterborne disease, sickness and diarrhoea. What are we doing about it?

While in Africa we taught a simple method of making impure water much safer to drink.

Fill a clear plastic bottle with water leaving a couple of inches of air at the top. Seal and shake the bottle to distribute oxygen through the water, then stand in full sun for a minimum of 8 hours. The ultra violet light from the sun will sterilise the oxygenated water.

A demonstration by a group member. To help with teaching this principle, they composed a song to go with the actions.

This method is getting wider acceptance. The web site http://www.worldchanging.com/  reports that in Tanzania, villagers have been placing plastic water bottles full of dirty spring water in the sun on their black tar rooftops. After eight hours (or less in very hot areas), UV rays and heat have killed off the bacteria that cause cholera, dysentery, and typhoid.

According to the site "What remains one of the greatest impediments to wider adoption of this approach is simply education and information. According to an organizer from Plan International, many villagers fear that the water bottles may not be an effective means of cleaning water, or may be vulnerable to further contamination when left sitting on the roof.

For all its potential problems, though, the method does seem to have a lot to offer - it's very inexpensive, and can be implemented by anyone, anywhere that the sun gets hot enough to kill potential contaminants. It's also spurring a new demand for the collection and distribution of plastic bottles."

Good to have our methods verified by what Time Magasine described as one of the world's top 15 environmental websites.

Since coming home we are negotiating with Links International to send some water filters for use in the school. A recent study by a leading UK University showed that use of British Berkefeld® drinking water filters in a community in Zimbabwe slashed cases of potentially fatal diarrhoea (a common problem in Africa caused by pathogenic bacteria and cysts in the water supply) to virtually zero. These water filters have been proven to work in the most demanding conditions. This is why they are used by the major aid organisations and recommended to us by Links.

A study in Zimbabwe and rural South Africa to evaluate the effectiveness of British Berkefeld®

filters found an 80% reduction in dysentery and watery diarrhoea through the use of the filters. General diarrhoea levels were also extremely low. The study concluded, “British Berkefeld water filters are an effective point-of-use intervention for reducing E-coli and diarrhoea in African households". In a Ugandan school in which clean water kits were installed, absenteeism due to sickness dropped immediately from 45% to less than 5%.

Due to a very generous donation that People in Partnership has received a supply of filter kits will be going to Freetown shortly.