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.

Alris - now fully qualified as a doctor.

One of the most touching moments of the trip was the meeting between Ruth McArthur and Alris. Ruth has spent many years supporting Alris through secondary school and then university, as he pursued his ambition to be a doctor. They had never met. Awaiting his final results he made the journey from his work in 91 Mile to Freetown to see her and arrived just as the groups were starting to present their plans. I felt heaven was coming to earth.

Alris and Ruth

Ruth received an e-mail from him today, 25 March, to say he had passed all his exams. and is now fully qualified.

The Community Healthcare Initiative

This is the road up to the Looking Town School where we were to have our first meeting with the leaders and influencers from local schools, churches and mosques, the community elders and healthcare professionals. Note the rubbish at the side of the road, a continual problem.

At the school we were welcomed by the children on our first day, Monday afternoon.

A Greeting from the children

The rest of the week the whole school was practicing at the Field where the Sports Day would be held on the Friday. The teaching and discussions on health lasted for three days after the first session.

After a brief introduction from Linden, charts were put up listing the various concerns of those present. They can be seen around the corner of the room in the photograph.

Linden addressing the delegates.

Participants were asked to put a dot in the section they wished to see discussed. Healthcare came top with 30 voting for it. In my group we started to discuss malaria, high blood pressure and anaemia. It was interesting to find that in a number of groups eating too many oranges was seen as a cause of malaria. Someone had presumeably caught malaria just after eating a lot of oranges, put 2 and 2 together and made 29. The word had spread.

High blood pressure was often seen as a result of stress, and poverty and the aftermath of the civil war had given many opportunities for stress to take over. Explaining to the imam of a local mosque how to overcome problems in his congregation using Christian principles was an unusual experience, and showed that in this area the two religions are able to work well together.

Anne-Marie Gunter handing out name labels in the group she lead with physcologist Richard Lansdall-Welfare and Ted Swindale

                              Dr. Margaret Lansdall-Welfare (R) and Grace Swindale lead a group

L to R, Susie Marshall, Ruth McArthur and Samuel Warwick with their group and below is a group photo.

This group, Action for Health, came up with a plan.

They all received a certificate for completing the course, and here their spokesman, Nabieu Sesay, is receiving his reward from Ted Swindale. He had made an excellent Presentation, and we look forward to seeing how the plan has progressed on our next visit.

The first presentation was by Alfred Fogbawa, who gave a confident report of the plans for the future that were decided by the group with Sarah Frost.

What really happened, "Cry Freetown"

I have hesitated a long time before publishing this item.  On our recent visit, one of our party who has visited many African countries, believed that Sierra Leone was different. She felt there was a spirit of anger just below the surface. This was confirmed by a man who runs a security company in the country. In seeking to minister to people, we couldn't escape the immense traumas they have gone through during the civil war, relatives killed or gone missing, homes and businesses destroyed. There is a film which tells of the days of the rebel attack on Freetown, called "Cry Freetown" by Sorious Samura. It is graphic. Maybe you should not watch it.

Sorious Samura was born in 1964 and is a Sierra Leonean journalist. He attended the Methodist Boys High School where we held the Sports Day, and self-funded the film "Cry Freetown", which depicts the most brutal period of the civil war in Sierra Leone when the RUF rebels captured much of the capital city on 6th January 1999. The film has won both Bafta and Emmy awards, and is credited with bringing the brutal nature of the war to world attention.

It was first shown on Channel 4 on 13th January 2000, a year after the events took place, under the title "Out of Africa", and showed graphic evidence of the atrocities being committed in Sierra Leone by both the rebels and  the Nigerian troops who, with the support of the West, were nominally acting as "peacekeepers". It was made before the decisive British intervention which brought the war to an end.

TV executives were concerned that the pictures - including executions of civilians, and soldiers beating a young boy - were "too shocking".

Ron McCullagh, who directed Samura's documentary, believes that television news treads a fine line between showing what is really going on and exposing its audience to unnecessary horrors. "It's reasonable to want to protect the audience but it can take us in a direction we don't want to go," he says, "Slowly, involuntarily, we'll end up with a sanitised version of history."

When it comes to Sierra Leone he argues that the barbarity there was "so extraordinary that people needed to see it to know what has been happening".

Martin Bell, who was a year ahead of me at the Leys School in Cambridge, had been a TV war reporter himself and  MP for Tatton when he wrote to Mr. McCullagh a fortnight after the film was shown.  "I wish to congratulate you on your film 'Out of Africa' and for your achievement in raising the important issue of truth in TV."

So watch it, if you think you should. Not comfortable, but it can help us to understand the trauma that so many still bear.

Part 1

 
Part 2


Part 3

Sports Day - the Marathon

Sports Day is one of the highlights of the school year, and was moved three weeks earlier than scheduled so that we could be present.

The marathon for us was to sit for six hours in the boiling sun. Overall though a great experience, much mingling with a crowd of parents, pupils and many local youths in the grounds of the Methodist Boys High School in Kissy.

Grace and I were supporting Swindale House (Red), and were joined in this by Sarah Frost and Andy Meek. Swindale House came third out of four in the overall results. Alpha House (Yellow) came last. No fixing of the result by the establishment on this occasion!

Lined up to sing the Sierra Leone National Anthem. A stirring tune, listen here:

The opening march past was very impressive and several people on the team commented that it was amazing that one Derby Church was contributing to the education of so many youngsters. Actually we were not, but we did not know this at the time!

Swindale House (Red), motto "We lead others follow" is leading the procession, followed by Valcacell

(Blue) "Victory is our aim" and Alpha House (Yellow) "With God all things are possible". Bringing up the rear, but out of the photo is Miezal House (Green) "In God we trust". They were the winners on the day!

Sarah Frost talking to some competitors.

We started off with seats in the shade, but later moved to the other end of the field to watch the ceremony of the African Queens. Each house was judged on how well they presented an 'African Queen' and her attendants in traditional dress.

If you favoured a particular 'Queen' you could put money in her bowl!

At the end of the day came the presentation of prizes. As the distinguished guest who had consented to distribute the trophies, Councilor Abdul Salam Kanu, was unable to be present - a substitute had to be found.

Fond memories of Swindale House. Hope you all do better next year!