Elana Dallas is in Sierra Leone as part of an Amnesty International team researching maternal mortality
Monday 2 February: We’re in Kabala, in the north, a place of rocky hills and outcrops… and cows.
Our itinerary for today has been organized by CARE, who run a number of community projects in the district.
We visit a maternity waiting house in Mannah, where women go from their villages when they’re nine months’ pregnant and wait until the birth. They don’t have to do the journey (often many miles with no transport), there’s a community health worker on hand, and they get a (rare) few days of rest.
Next it’s a village where six young men form a “standby force” to carry people in a hammock to the health centre in the next village, about a mile away. It’s not just women in labour, but also victims of snake bites, or falls from trees. We ask if they’re paid, and one says “we volunteer to save lives”.
In Dogalogo, about 25 women and men are sat on benches in the shade of a tree around a wooden box. This is the village savings and loan scheme. One by one the participants call their names and put a coin or note in a bucket.
The white-robed Secretary takes notes, reads the names and amounts back, and all agree his record is correct. Then two young women – the keyholders – unlock two padlocks, the box is opened, the money in it counted, and this week’s added.
One of the women in the group was loaned 600,000 Leone (US$200) to go to hospital when she had complications during labour, and is paying it back week by week. She and her baby are well – and without the loan that would probably not be true.
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