Category: Street Child

My third day of visiting Street Child projects was to a village south of Makeni. I have done a seperate blog for that.

In the evening Rashinda, Alfred (both work for Street Child) and I went out for a meal with some people who work for the International Medical Corps.

A pregnant lady came to the village of Pate -Bana Marank and fell ill. The baby aborted and the woman died. The villagers were sad but in a rural area such as this it was not uncommon.

Then the women who had attended the sick lady also became sick. So their families cared for them, wiped sweat from their brow, until all these women also died. Their carers also became sick and died. Can you imagine how frightening this must be for the villagers? They had not even heard of Ebola at this stage.

I went out with Sheku, another social worker today. We started in Yelisander village where he asked the teacher at the school to send the Ebola orphans down to the community hall to meet me. I started walking down the road with about 4 children. Another joined us, then another. By the time we reached the community hall there was about 20 children in the group.

Dora is a grandmother who is believed to be 102 years old. She looks after her four grandchildren aged 5, 11, 12 and 14 because their parents died from Ebola.

She is at a time of her life when her children should be caring for her,  instead she has suffered the loss of her own child and the hardship and hard work involved with bringing up 4 small children.

Benjamin is a normal 8 year old boy who lives in Sierra Leone, Africa. What makes Benjamin special is that he is the single survivor of a family of 14.

Since Sepember 2014 Ebola has claimed his mum, his dad, his sister, aunts, uncles and cousins. It is impossible to imagine how he must feel.