Update February 2008

So hey guys,

As you may have guessed already from the last email, I am now in Africa with the Africa Mercy. And yes it’s very very different from when I was on the Africa Mercy in Newcastle, England.

For one, we definitely need the air conditioning here! I generally have to change my t-shirts 3 times in one day, sometimes due to working in construction and getting dirty, but mostly because I get very hot here (I won’t go into the details, you can understand the rest).

The people here are so friendly, so many people we meet address us with “Welcome back, we are so glad you are here again”, as the Mercy Ships were here for 9 months last year, and have come back to Monrovia, Liberia for another 10 months.

What have I been doing? It has been mainly preparation for the next 10 months. As many of you know I am on the Community Development Team (CDS) that goes into the villages and aids them to improve their facilities and trains in Agriculture and Hygiene. We have been asked to help resurrect an existing Clinic and Ward that is 40 minutes away from the centre of town, in an area called Tenegar, after it was ruined, burned and shot-up during the civil war they had here in Liberia that only ended recently.

We will also be working with a group of villages called Royesville that haven’t had much help from the charities that have visited Liberia in the past. We will be spending the next 3 weeks visiting these villages and speaking with the people to find out what they need help with and helping them to provide for themselves, rather than run in and say “Hey you need a well, we can build you a well” – as so many Charities unfortunately do, and the village doesn’t end up using the well as they didn’t see the need for one.

Between visiting villages we have also been working on the road leading to our port. We share our road with a UN base (which is very useful for security reasons) and the rest of the port, but the road has some huge potholes in it, which we are getting round to filling in. This is much appreciated by our transport department, so we are not damaging our Landrovers so much – if only all the other roads in Monrovia were as good as ours now!

That’s enough writing for this update, as I have given you the basics of what I have been and will be doing.