After a long flight, we finally arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone on August 6th at around 6 pm. Fortunately, all of our luggage was waiting for us when we arrived at the international airport in Freetown. After a short time spent gathering our belongings and finding Khanjan and Kelley outside, we piled onto the bus and made a 3 hour drive to a restaurant in town for dinner. When we finally got to the hotel in Makeni, it was well past 10 pm local time. We had a short debriefing meeting, and then everyone piled into their respective rooms.
The next morning, we hit the ground running at the World Hope International office in Makeni, making plans for the upcoming days. After a small breakfast of eggs, sausage, bread, and pancakes at the hotel, we drove to the office in small groups and got acquainted with the area. We reached out to contacts that we spoke to previously back in the US in order to let them know that we had landed. We also connected with a few other vital contacts in order to gain access to even more healthcare facilities while we were here. Much of the morning was spent planning when we’d meet with our partners in Freetown, as many of them had already given us ranges of dates and times they would prefer to meet with us.
Around 11:30 am, we were all given about $100 in Leones, which we had exchanged previously back at the hotel. Khanjan gave a brief overview of the different note values and then we settled down and got to work. Jake had been in contact with Suleiman, the team’s translator, prior to us leaving the US, and asked him to come down to the World Hope Office to translate our video series and documents for us.
Although this meeting was not originally planned for today, we were excited when Joseph Sesay, previously thought to be the Vice Chancellor of the University of Makeni, surprised us at the World Hope HQ. Joseph is a mathematics and statistics professor at the University of Makeni, but he was incredibly invested in our project and he was insistent upon helping us develop connections with health workers, doctors, and nurses. He even arranged a time for us to meet with the real vice chancellor at the University of Makeni, where we will have the opportunity to showcase some of our material and get professors on board with our content. Furthermore, he mentioned he would bring some public health students to view our material as well.
Joseph is also connected with Dr. ABD and some of his community health workers, so he is trying to set up a meeting with them for us as soon as possible. There, we want to learn from some hospital staff about what was originally taught regarding SCD in med school so that we will be better prepared to meet the Vice Chancellor of the University of Makeni.
Then we met with Suleiman, our dedicated translator with whom we have been working closely with for quite some time. We discussed our course that we are using to help spread important information about sickle cell disease in the Sierra Leone community. We then explained that we would need the course to also be translated to Krio to help reach as many people as we can. For the rest of the afternoon and evening, he helped us translate the articles and quiz questions for our course. Later on, we plan on having him record and translate the videos soon as well.