New Objectives

BANGBUTT AND AFTER
As members and supporters of the Youlgrave Bangbutt Village Link will know, between 2005 and 2008, we successfully undertook many practical projects in the village of Bangbutt in the Tonkolili District of Sierra Leone. These culminated in the opening of the Primary School and completion of the adjacent building which is now used as living quarters by the head teacher. Since then we have continued to co-fund the very successful literacy and learning circles in Bangbutt and surrounding villages.

But it has become increasingly clear to us that it is time to concentrate our efforts elsewhere.
Thanks to our supporters in Youlgrave and elsewhere and to generous grants from charitable trusts we have raised and spent over £50,000 in support of Bangbutt and 9 surrounding villages. Far more has been achieved than we ever dreamt was possible. Its school attracts pupils from the surrounding villages and the goat herd we financed has been fruitful and multiplied throughout the local area. The efforts we made there and the work done in the Literacy Circles have started a degree of co-operative self-help which will, hopefully, in time enable the benefits to be more widely shared. This process is starting but it is taking more time than we expected. Indeed we feel we need to withdraw somewhat to ensure the villagers take responsibility and don’t become dependent on us for their needs. We want to avoid being regarded as a fairy godmother who will provide whatever next benefit the villagers might wish for, making Bangbutt ever more privileged than its neighbours. More information about our projects is available on other pages of the site.

Bangbutt is remote and without electricity, so keeping in touch with it is difficult. However, we hope to keep in touch especially with the progress of the school. Fortunately we still have contacts in Tonkolili. The children in Youlgrave School continue to benefit from their link with Bangbutt School. They have exchanged letters and sent out a whole school photo and a beautiful banner to celebrate the opening of the school in Bangbutt.

The committee have recently been putting a great deal of thought and research into considering our next project. We thought first about moving to another district and establishing a link for support such as we gave in Bangbutt. Lottie, the young woman who went out to Sierra Leone with Barbara for the opening of Bangbutt school, went back to do voluntary work and we asked her to research the practicability of working in one of 3 other areas. The report she made confirmed our expectation that those areas contain many places lacking basic necessities for an acceptable standard of life. But she was unable to find possible personal contacts in those areas that she could give us reason to trust. We are clear that that is an essential prerequisite of working in poor and primitive places. Otherwise we cannot be sure that the finance and other assets we send get to the right place. We have a trusted contact who is trying to set up a new network for literacy projects in the Tonkolili district but he is still in the early stages of that project.

Meanwhile the attention of the public has been drawn to the dreadful statistics of maternal and child mortality in Sierra Leone which means it has the highest death rate in the world. 1 in 8 women die in or as a consequence of childbirth and 2 out of 5 children die before their fifth birthday. The Sierra Leone government has this year announced free medical care to all pregnant and nursing mothers but how can that be sustainable in such a poor country? There is an acute shortage of staff and of drugs. We, as a committee, felt compelled to try and find some way of helping.

We have been fortunate enough to make contact with a National Government Organisation based in the UK named Health, Poverty, Action (previously known as Health Unlimited). See http://www.healthunlimited.org/Home. This group works with some of the poorest and most remote people in the world, believing them to have as much right to good health as the rest of us. They are at present piloting a scheme to give training to traditional birth attendants in one of the most remote regions of SL where access to medical facilities is very difficult because of the long distances involved. We have made contact with the country director for Health, Poverty, Action, Dr Regina Bash Taqi, as we feel it is just the kind of initiative that we would like to be involved with. As a start we have offered to finance the training of 8 such people.
This is her reply.
‘We are really pleased you are interested in partnering with Health Poverty Action. Traditional Birth Attendants are a significant force in maternal health in Sierra Leone and we have a strong conviction that our intervention is the start of a strong, meaningful engagement with a powerful grassroots ‘institution’ that can significantly improve maternal health outcomes in the country. Many thanks for your pledged contribution of £2000. We are planning to conduct the training in October/November of this year, and we will be in touch again soon.’

When we read some of the shock stories of young mothers and their babies dying in childbirth, we realise how much we take for granted the medical care we have here. We hope that all our supporters in Youlgrave and beyond will agree that this is a most worthwhile move forward and perhaps that even more villagers will feel that they would want to support this cause.

The picture shows a group of traditional birth attendants during their training with Health, Poverty, Action. The training is supported by volunteers including Zoe Vowles, who is sponsored by Vodafone and keeps a very interesting diary.
http://worldofdifference.vodafone.co.uk/international/zoe-vowles/