I don’t have the words to express the joy I felt returning to Kagbankona Village yesterday. I first met the people of Kagbankona and the 27 surrounding villages (collectively known as Thuan Mathinki) in 2001 when they were at Ross Road camp for internally displaced people. At that time I was living and working as a finance professional in the UK but I was also Chairperson of the Sierra Leone War Trust for Children (SLWT), a not for profit organisation that I co-founded in April 1999 with 6 other UK-based Sierra Leoneans to help children and youth affected by the civil war.
In the 5 year period between 2002 and 2007, we constructed the 6 classroom Kagbankona primary school, paid for the training of 5 full-time qualified teachers, built the Kagbankona health centre, dug 12 wells and provided agricultural training, seedlings and tools for 230 farm families in Kagbankona and the surrounding villages.
Lives have been transformed and continue to be transformed through the introduction of education and health facilities in this deprived community. Yesterday I met with several former pupils who shared moving testimonies about their personal journies; Ibrahim who went on to do a civil engineering diploma; Karim who is now at IPAM; Yeanor who is a Community Healthcare Worker; and Michael has served as the acting Section Chief and is also a teacher at the school. It was really lovely to see the familiar faces of women like the former Mammy Queen Yeanor, current Mammy Queen Adama, Saio and many others who remembered me from my numerous visits to the community. Section Chief Sorie Bah the Third and Town Chief Sasspo have passed away but I was warmly received by the new Regent Chief and other town chiefs who spoke about the impact of our interventions in their community.
At the time that SLWT did these transformative interventions in Kagbankona, I was not Mayor of Freetown, nor was I seeking political office. A desire to improve the lives of others was the driving force for myself and the 6 other SLWT trustees. Seeing first hand how our work continues to impact people living in this remote community in Biriwa Chiefdom (Kagbankona is about a 2 hour drive from Makeni, and 7 miles inland from Kamasiki village) is hugely rewarding.
Returning to Kagbankona Village yesterday, I was accompanied by four FCC Councillors, the Deputy Chairman and a Councillor from Bombali District Council, the APC Bombali District Chairman and Deputy Chairman and the APC Constituency Organising Secretary for that chiefdom. The APC Bombali District Chairman and the Bombali District Councillor committed to providing scholarships to the best performing students from JSS 1 to 3 and Classes 5 & 6 respectively. The Deputy Chairman Bombali District Council committed to ensuring that the Kagbankona primary school is finally approved by the Ministry of Education! The APC Women’s Leader in Const 128 (Chairlady Isatu Conteh) was also with me as coincidently she is from Kagbankona Village and subsequent to SLWT’e interventions, she started a junior secondary school and built a church in Kagbankona. It was truly an amazing, inspiring visit.
En route to Kagbankona, we stopped in Kamabai to pay a courtesy call to the Biriwa Chiefdom Paramount Chief Salifu Manna the Third who expressed his sincere thanks for the work that we had done and also testified about the enduring positive impacts of the work on the people of Kagbankona and Thuan Mathinki.
My sincere and heartfelt thanks go to my fellow SLWT trustees (Renee Horton-Spring, Trudy Morgan, Felna Fox, Dennis Greene, Othame Kabia and Winston Hunter), to the SLWT coordinator the late Simeon Sesay and to the many supporters of SLWT over the years for making this and other ongoing interventions in Sierra Leone possible.
Yesterday we celebrated the power of patriotism, love and action.