One of the areas Save the Children is working in is Kroo Bay a slum area of Sierra Leone's capital Freetown. Clare Kendall reports:
Sierra
Leone is officially one of the poorest countries in the world with 70
per cent unemployment, two-thirds of the population living below the
poverty line and a life expectancy of 37.
The
country was devastated by the civil war which wracked the country from
1991-2002. Tens of thousands of people died in the conflict and more
than one-third of the 6m population was displaced.
The
war was marked by extreme cruelty by rebel groups which left an
estimated 6,000 people mutilated through amputations of hands and arms.
As
the G8 meets the Freetown slum will be in the middle of its rainy
season where drains will block and allow putrid waters to rise, filling
homes and alleyways and bringing rats, cockroaches, cholera, dysentery
and malaria. People will sleep in beds inches from the surface of the
infected slurry. And in an average month here 3,800 people will suffer
from malaria and diarrhoea.
More than 5,000 people are crammed together in flimsy tin-roofed hovels in extreme poverty.
Pigs
wander knee-high in stagnant pools of water - human excrement floating
on the surface - while women and children wash clothes and bathe a few
yards away.
Kroo
Bay is built on mounds of rubbish and the area is regularly flooded
bringing in deadly diseases. Most people can't afford to pay for
medicine at the area's rundown clinic and one in four children die
before their fifth birthday.
Between December 2007 and May of this year the price of a 50k bag of rice in Freetown, rose by more than 50 per cent.
Save
the Children has built a walkway to stop people having to wade through
the septic river and helped the community bank the filthy Crocodile
River. They have also trained 240 volunteers to identify and treat
cases of diarrhoea.
The
charity aims to renovate the rundown clinic, train more community
health volunteers and provide the supplies and equipment they need. It
is also supporting the government to make healthcare free and to stem
the endless flow of rubbish into Kroo Bay.
On a
beach beside Kroo Bay an abandoned fishing boat, The Mont Loura, has
become home to a community of orphaned or abandoned street children.
It's rusting hull provides somewhere to sleep and some respite from the
merciless midday sun.
As
they hang from it's portals and masts they look like children playing
on a fantasy pirate ship except they are surrounded by almost
unimaginable squalor and suffering.
These are truly the ''lost boys" of Kroo Bay.
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