Fashpack Liberia Marathon Trials: Young, bright hopes

The first thing that strikes you watching these guys and girls race is their age – the oldest person there was 21. Sierra Leone is a young nation. The second is their tenacity – the desire to compete, win and represent Sierra Leone. Not even that, everyone you talk to wants to race at the Olympics. The third is that these guys aren’t just runners, every single one of these trialists I talked to was still studying, at school or at college – young people like this are the bright future of the nation.

Anyway enough of this, you want to know the results.

We have our prequalified athletes

Men – Idrissa Kargbo, Challey, Victor, Tejan Jalloh

Women – Aminata Kargbo, Fatmata

As we lined up on the start of the Street Child Makeni marathon, Aminata’s mother, with a tear in her eye kissed her daughter goodbye. She seemed so proud but at the same time a little terrified at the prospect of this pint-sized 16 year-old running 26.2 miles – she stormed it and won.

The qualified athletes

Male

Mohammed Bah basking in 

Mohammed Bah Kamara – this 19 year old, awaiting the results of his West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE), dominated the field to win by almost a minute

Sheku Momoh – word on the street is that this 21 year old Nursing student had gas in the tank as he happily took 2^nd place

Mustapha Kamara – the oldest in the field, our 21 year old IT wizkid shares the same dream as Sheku – a place in the Olympics

Women

Fatmata Lome – all of our girls racing for qualification were less than 18 years old, with the youngest a 13 year old from Waterloo. Fatmata stole the show today, coming home just a minute behind the pack of male athletes

Georgina Sesay – coming in just 30 seconds behind Fatmata, this 15 year old has only been racing for a year and is certainly a hope for the future

Salma Sesay – this determined 17 year old is bidding her time to enter the army – I look forward to the time when she puts the male cadets through their paces on a run!

Salma, Georgina and Fatmata best of friends off the track

Masters

Phillip Phombro – a technician and electrician at Connaught, Phillip has been running all his life. He won the >50 year old category in the trials coming in 5 minutes behind the top man. If there is this category in Liberia, he’d be a good bet to win!

There we have it – the team. Thank you for all your donations so far and we will keep you updated on their progress over the next couple of weeks. Don't forget to donate, click here. To find out more, check out the website, video or follow us on Twitter @globalfashpack

Panning for Gold in Sierra Leone

From the vantage point of my Royal Air Maroc flight, the sun rises over the Sahara to the right, which slowly melds into the Atlas mountains, both landscapes ironically minituare from the air. Maybe it is the sleep deprivation that is the Royal Air Maroc Freetown – Casablanca experience, or maybe it’s genuinely a moment of reflection of the end of the first quarter in Freetown. It’s been a long while since my last blog, for a variety of reasons, and so much has happened, which makes it even more of a challenge to encapsulate everything of the last 5 months or so; apologies for the cheesy title but I think it does fit.

The Kings Sierra Leone Partnership has changed quite a bit over the time I’ve been here, no more so than in the couple of months. Many familiar faces who saw through the tough times of Ebola with such remarkable bravery and skill have moved on and the team is reinvigorated by fresh faced and energized recruits. Those that have stayed carry on principles of a true partnership, a characteristic exemplified by the KSLP starters and is, I think, so unique to our work.

And Ebola is really the place to start; hopefully, thankfully, possibly we are coming towards the end. Lots has been said, lots is still to come. The personal losses are horrific, the effects far reaching but, once all is said and done, fingers are and will continue to be pointed and heads may roll. But was it such a surprise that such a tragedy happened in West Africa? Is it a new thing that a humanitarian health disaster has struck a developing country with such devastation?

HIV, TB, Hepatitis B – all relatively easily identified, preventable and treatable but are uncontrolled in developing countries. For HIV and Hepatitis the parallels are clearer, a previously unknown pathogen that was identified too late and the effect of which were vastly under-estimated. The ingredients that allow these communicable pathogens to spread can be easily seen in any short trip around our Connaught wards and Freetown city, they range from public understanding of disease, to public sanitation, to ward practices. One of my favourite graphs in medicine shows the number of deaths from TB since the 1800’s in the UK, it shows the dramatic effect of poverty reduction, completely dwarfing the effect of the invention antibiotics in controlling TB. As our departed Country Director, Oliver Johnson says – the Ebola epidemic has exposed the “fatal flaws” in the health system of Sierra Leone. These flaws are globally driven, they demolish the concept of health in isolation and do not recognise borders. We can and should solve the crisis for Sierra Leone’s health system, but that won’t stop the next health humanitarian crisis in another country.

At Connaught in Internal medicine we largely deal with only the tip of that iceberg, managing the sick that walk through the door. And we have really focused on just that – providing the best possible quality of care alongside our Sierra Leonean colleagues. And, at the end of this first quarter, I feel proud. We have had our highs and lows, but on the day I left I went down to the admissions ward at 5:00 pm to review the new cases and was met by the 2 house officers. “Dr Paddy, we’ve clerked all of the admissions, shall we review them?” We spent 2 hours going over the cases, discussing, weighing things in the balance and at the end I, and the team in its broadest sense – drs, nurses, patient and relatives –were left with a feeling of pride, value and satisfaction that we had done a good job, I’d go as far as saying a great job in the circumstances. And with that feeling the sad times tend to fade, maybe that’s the coping mechanism, but it is important to remind myself and to remind you, the reader, that the inequities in access to the most basic basic of health needs is the greatest tragedy, even beyond all eye-catching headlines of ebola. And we, as humanity, should not accept that. There are stories to illustrate this – they happen every day – but maybe they are best left for another day. In an echo of Andrew Harding final blog in post as BBC Africa correspondent – I am a glass half full type of person, but we should not forget the hardships of the majority.

I hope this blog can start to illustrate how very closely we, at KSLP, work with our Sierra Leonean colleagues at Connaught with the priority of treating the patient in front of us. And how, when we work, Connaught’s problems are our problems and its ups and downs are our ups and downs. Given the lack of doctors and barriers to care providing the best we can is a time consuming task and, at times, gives less opportunity to step back and work on systemic issues. Striking this is a daily balancing act but more often than not I feel the balance falls in favour of the individual patient. And I think it falls that way because of days like yesterday, when the system and the team works - the doctors apply their skills and step up to a role of patient champion, working with the nursing staff to provide good care and the patient and their family feeling satisfied and valued. Those moments of functionality and positive experience are golden. It’s a team and a process that’s been grown organically and teethed over several months but on those golden days gives the whole team the gratification of this. Our task now is to use some of this slight momentum to start solving these systemic issues as a team but, as we say in Salone “small small” – one step at a time…