Turley Associate Director Marianne McCallum has this to say about her upcoming trip to do charity work in Sierra Leone.
On 23 February, I head out to Sierra Leone with 10 colleagues to do some charity work. The main focus for our 9-day trip is to do some light building work to help three local charities in the capital city, Freetown. This will be my second time in this crazy country, which is still recovering from the after effects of Ebola.
Our construction projects include building an outdoor kitchen at a school run by ex-boy soldiers (truly inspiration young men), building a clinic on a beach and refurbishing a ward at Waterloo Hospital so it can be returned to the local community following its stint as an Ebola centre. Luckily, they don’t have building regulations, so we only need to use basic DIY skills. Even that is pretty challenging in 30degree Celsius…
The first half of our trip will be spent in a slum area call Kissy, then we move to Bureh beach which is still basic but at least will have clean air! Our hotel is very basic: no running water and intermittent electricity. It’s part of the experience!
Over the last few weeks I’ve been collecting football kits, clothing and other items to share with the charities we visit. Family, friends and contacts have been so generous that I’m in danger of exceeding my 46kg luggage allowance. We are also fundraising for the building projects as the country doesn’t really manufacture anything, so it imports almost everything at extortionate cost.
If you would like to help with the fundraising or to learn a little more about what we will be up to follow this link: https://mydonate.bt.com/fundraisers/turleycharity1
If you want to see what we’re up to, the team will be tweeting about the work we are doing – assuming we have electricity and Wifi…follow @turleycharity.
