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Here I am with an update from Freetown. We’ve accompanied David around the capital to visit a wealth of friends and relatives, and the above greeting has now entered our active vocabulary.

Freetown is a very interesting city, it is dense with houses that descend down green and red slopes to greet the Atlantic ocean. The streets are filled with cars and are lined by pedestrians that often carry large loads on their heads. There is a constant clamor of horns, voices, private power generators and engines. At night, most of the city goes pitch dark as the electrical grid hasn’t been working for more than three months now. Strolling through the city with David is in itself an immense learning experience, and we’ve felt nothing but welcome.

Now, as for a follow-up on my last post: We’ve held four key meetings, and they were all successful. First, we met with the Health Officer at UNICEF, and we agreed on the provision of the nets. Also, we agreed that research should be at the centre of our project. This means that the test of our project will be the results from the District Health Team’s surveys, in relation to the initial survey we will help conduct when we go to Sahn Malen.

Next day, we first met with the Representative for UNICEF in Sierra Leone, Geert Cappaelaere, (see picture below) and he fully endorsed our efforts. Later on that day, we met with the District Medical Officer of the Pujehun district, who welcomed our project warmly, but we didn’t go beyond arranging dates.

The final meeting that day was with the Chief of Sahn Malen village, who is also the chief representing in parliament all the chiefs from the Pujehun district. He also welcomed the project, and this meeting served mainly to square our understandings of the project. All of these meetings were supportive and gave a further boost to our enthusiasm for this project and confirmed it. One thing is to plan a project by making conference calls and sending e-mails, another thing is to be on the ground in a (to me) new country and meet everybody face to face.

Chief

Girl playing at David’s

The venue of the last meeting was David’s family’s house in Freetown. We’ve spent a good deal of time there, and I’ve uploaded a few pictures from the veranda, from a chilled-out afternoon. David’s father and brothers stay in Freetown, but his mother and sister live in Bo Town, where we are going on Tuesday. David’s father and eldest brother have already gone ahead to Sahn Malen via Bo Town to prepare the project and set up the survey. Before we join them, we’ll pick up Jacob Lennheden, possibly do a radio show, and hold a few meetings about possibly bringing Être: The face of human rights, a travelling exhibition, to Sierra Leone (more on that later).

As the pictures indicate, we’ve been doing other things than holding meetings in Freetown. We’ve met up with several graduates and students of United World Colleges, We’ve enjoyed the fresh fruit that is available from every street corner (even though they’re out of season) and we’ve traversed many different parts of Freetown. Additionally, we’ve been to the public Lumbley beach on a day with almost no rain, where the Atlantic Ocean was beating relentlessly upon the shore, the smell of salt was carried by a warm breeze and the soothing, luke warm water of the ocean surrounded our feet.

That was all for now from Freetown where the rain has returned and we expect it to stay along with the blackout, the clamor of noise and the amazing, tropical landscape.

“We go see”

-Mathias

We’ve arrived in Sierra Leone.

In the airport we met David, his older brother, and Ishiaka of Red Cross Nordic UWC ‘08. They took us to eat some very spicy food near the airport at a friend of the brother’s place under the shade of mango trees.

Flying in, we saw a tropical and very lush country covered in green. It is the rainy season here, with the occasional shower and the constant drizzle. The humidity is of course very high, but the temperature rests around a comfortable 25-30 degrees Celsius. There are people out and about everywhere in the streets, and the way people live here is very far from the neat, orderly arrangement of housing we know from suburban Denmark.

We took the ferry to Freetown and I got a chance to recap with David on the swingy ferry ride while the fresh, hot ocean air was blowing in our faces. Later on we met Paul, David’s father, who has taken very good care of us and has arranged a stay in a comfortable guest house for us. He works for UNICEF and has been instrumental in planning the project, and we’ve now squared our understanding of the project with him. So, the GMin Eradicate Malaria project is as follows:

The UNICEF division in Sierra Leone has most generously decided to donate approximately an extra 600 Long Lasting Insecticide-Treated bed Nets - also known as LLINs - for the Pujehun district in Sierra Leone. We are meeting with UNICEF’s representative tomorrow, the first of a series of meetings this week. Then, we will meet with the District Medical Officer (DMO) of the Pujehun District who has also agreed most generously to donate these nets to the GMin project in the Sahn Malen Village, in the Sahn Malen Chiefdom. We will work with the DMO’s health team and utilize their expertise and sustained presence in the village. It is the purpose of the project to equip everyone with a mosquito net. However, there are several steps we need to take before this becomes reality.

First, we need to square our understanding of the project with all interested parties in the course of the coming week, where we will be based in Freetown.

Next, we will travel to Sahn Malen via Bo Town which is about 8 hours of rough ride from Freetown. Once there, we will seek to make friend and partnerships with the people in the village. Although they have already expressed that they are happy about this project, we still feel that a challenging exercise awaits: We will have to engage in a dialogue that is based on their reality - and thus not a sermon on our part - and we have to uncover the problems that make people stop using bed nets even though they have been provided free of charge. Furthermore, the culture is obviously very different (for the Danes), and we will have high school students acting as our ‘buddies’ - personal guides and translators. It is a demanding task, but we are confident that we through various initiatives and activities will establish a bond with the village, and that our visit will create some lasting publicity and general awareness about the importance of using bed nets. More about how that goes later.

The final step is the work of the District Health Team. The money GMin has fundraised will act as a long-term incentive for them to make a sustainable effort in achieving a high rate of bed net usage. At best, they will write a report each year for the coming three years.

This is how the project looks now, and we will consider ourselves blessed if all goes according to plan. We will try to update as frequently as possible (which will be more frequently when in Freetown) and hope that you enjoy following our blog.

We’re all gonna blog at some point, so our posts will represent various points of views and experiences. Till next time!

-Mathias

The interest for the LifeStraws have so far been enormous. I will first join the others in Sierra Leone the coming monday, and I’m currently enjoying my time at the big rock festival known as the Roskilde Festival.

I brought a LifeStraw along for testing purposes, as well as to get an opportunity to show off with my little new gadget. Since Denmark has experienced heavy rain the last couple of days, finding a suitable waterhole at the Roskilde festival turned out to be an easy task.

I decided to use myself as a guinea pig, and stuck the lifestraw into the dirty mud-like water and sucked.

Before I got any water in my mouth I heard people yell “You can’t drink that water, you are insane” or “What is he doing!?!?”.

Having faith in my little gadget I keept sucking and when the water finally reached my mouth I was happy to realise that the water tasted like any other water you from the tab, and that it was complete transparent. (in comparison to the brownish color of the water).

I let two very skeptical drunk Norwegians try it - and both of them stood up with a big smile and said “It works, it works”.

So yeah - even though my test wasn’t very scientific in anyway, the interest for the gadget showed to be very big. Hopefully we can manage to use this little tool in other projects in the future.

If you have any interest in being part of an eventual project, perhaps involving LifeStraws, perhaps something different - feel free to contact us at info@gmin.org.

That’s all for now from the part of the the GMin team, which is still in Denmark.

-Jacob

Okay, so we’re now in Freetown the capital of Sierra Leone.

David’s dad have been introducing us to a bunch of people right from a Unicef rep to the chief of Sahn Malen. More on that in tomorrows longer post.

It’s quite exciting and in many ways different from what we thought it would be (guess that’s to be expected) while at the same time confirming some of it.

Anyways, we should have some photos ready for you tomorrow (now that we have found a place with wireless Internet).

-Morten

So I’m sitting Gatwick airport with Mathias, co-founder of GMin.

We’re excited to board our flight bound for Lungi Airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone, where we’ll meet up with David and probably a few others from Red Cross Nordic UWC. Security was pretty tight due to the bombing in Glasgow last Saturday, but luckily they didn’t scrutinize our luggage too closely.

Gatwick airport is rather crowded and noisy, but it was definitely interesting to meet the other people on our direct flight to Freetown with Astraeus airlines. The people from Kevin McPhillips Travel were very kind and we learned a bit about their influence in Sierra Leone which extends beyond air traffic.

We should have some pictures a or video up on this blog in a couple of days. I hope you will enjoy following our blog, and that I’ll be able to pass on some of the feeling of excitement and adventure that I am experiencing. Stay tuned!

-Morten

At GMin we’re always looking for new and exciting ways to fight poverty and diseases. So today we received 5 LifeStraws that we’re going to bring to Sierra Leone for testing purpose.

A LifeStraw is - as you may have guessed - a straw, but what’s cool about it, is its ability to filter water thus preventing diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery, typhoid, salmonella and cholera, among others.

More information about this little life saving gadget can be found here: www.lifestraw.com 

We will bring malaria to a minimum in the village of Sahn Malen in Sierra Leone, Africa.

During our trip we’ll be updating this blog with stories, photos and maybe even a few videos.

So stay tuned…