Hello! Welcome to our blog. We are the sickle cell diagnostics team and our goal is to develop a low-cost, point of care, screening device for sickle cell anemia (SCA). Although we are currently in the early stages of designing the device, we are going to be in Sierra Leone for the next 3 weeks to learn more about the prevalence of sickle cell anemia, the treatment and diagnostic programs currently available in Sierra Leone, and to receive feedback on our device.
As for today, day 1, we spent a majority of the morning meeting the staff of World Hope International and taking a tour of the facility. We emailed a number of people associated with different sickle cell programs, including the Sickle Cell Society of Sierra Leone and the Coulson Sickle Cell Foundation of Sierra Leone (both located in Freetown). We also got conformation that we will be going to visit Dr. Jaja at one of his clinics in Kono (approximately 2 hours away) to test a few of our test strips and receive feedback on the device. We are also very excited to learn more about Dr. Jaja’s background and his future hopes for SCA.
The World Hope staff is incredibly friendly and very willing and excited to help. We met Musa, who we are sharing an office with. Musa is the point person for the social ventures World Hope starts/supports. He taught us a lot about how social ventures allow for sustainability and how people should start thinking more “business”. He was talking specifically about his experience working with World Hope and how working with a nonprofit causes people to assume everything is free. To combat this assumption, he has been working hard to help people start their own businesses and then to maintain them themselves.
Momo, the tech lead for World Hope, gave us a very warm welcome. He taught us a few words in Themnea, the local language of Makeni and taught us a little bit about how Crio is different than English.
Some examples of words in Themne:
(words are spelled phonetically in English in order to help with pronunciation)
- Seke – hello
- Tupeah – how are you
- Tun to kru – thank God
- Ofino – fine
- Momo – thank you
