Latest news with #SierraLeoneans
Hindustan Times
5 days ago
- Hindustan Times
Villagers step up to halt Sierra Leone deforestation
Deep inside a Sierra Leone national park, a mother of seven was about to set dozens of tree trunks ablaze to make charcoal. Producing the cheap fuel in this way is illegal in the protected rainforest near the capital of a country highly vulnerable to the ravages of climate change. But Aminata Sankoh, a widow who said she had no other choice for making a living, defiantly shrugged off a stern warning from a group of villagers who monitor the forests as part of a groundbreaking grassroots initiative. "You are saying you are not affected by this deforestation, that there will be tree planting but it will affect your own great grandchildren!" chided group leader Caesar Senesie. The extent of the deforestation in the humid tropical forest and what remains of the primary forest is clear as far as the eye can see. Some has been taken over for marijuana plantations Sierra Leone is battling drug problems and land grabbing is also rife to satisfy demographic pressures. Nearly a third, or 5,600 hectares of the forest within the Western Area Peninsula National Park has been lost or severely degraded since 2012. Last year alone "intensive deforestation" led to the loss of 715 hectares, or the equivalent of 1,330 football pitches, according to the World Food Programme. UNESCO says the area is home to between 80 and 90 percent of Sierra Leone's biodiversity. But charcoal is the only way for many Sierra Leoneans to cook in the face of power cuts and soaring energy prices. Finding the illicit charcoal producing sites requires venturing deep into the forest by road and on foot, but an AFP team managed to visit the area. Groups of men fended off exhaustion as they carried out backbreaking work in stifling 35-degree Celsius heat, stacking up tree trunks covered with stones. Near Sankoh, the widowed mother, a mound several metres wide began to smoke. The worn-out 45-year-old said her husband died four years ago and to feed her children and pay for their schooling, she took a job breaking stones on construction sites. But two years ago, she made a decision. "I used to break stone... but I am not doing it any longer because I was struggling a lot. So I decided to come to the forest and do charcoal burning," she told AFP. Faced with the failures in protecting the forest as well as land seizures, units comprising 40 villagers have been set up. "Even at night, when we have a fire break out, I call my guys, we move straight away," Senesie, the group leader, said. "We, the community, are the solution to protect the forest," he added. Funded by the Global Environment Facility, the initiative was launched by the Environmental Foundation for Africa NGO, with support from the government and the United Nations Development Programme. People carry out illegal activities in the national park "because they can and believe that they will get away with it every time", Tommy Garnett, EFA founder and executive director, said. He blamed poverty, ignorance and greed for driving the deforestation. "This situation is destroying our natural heritage at an alarming rate," warned Garnett, who for 30 years has been involved in conservation projects in Sierra Leone and other west African countries. Sierra Leone is the 11th most vulnerable nation to the impact of climate change out of 191 countries ranked by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative. Faced with the inefficiency and the alleged corruption of some forest rangers who, under-equipped and underpaid, sometimes turn a blind eye campaigners are banking on involving the worst hit local communities. Garnett said that paying villagers an incentive of $60 a month to make daily patrols and collect evidence had shed more light on what was happening in the forest than a decade of official patrols. EFA has replanted 103,000 trees in the past year, with the goal of an additional 500,000 by 2028. A few kilometres away, another unit of villagers from the "Mile 13" settlement were doing their bit under Sulaiman Barrie, who angrily complained of recent forest fires in the vicinity. "This was never the Sierra Leone we knew... This was never the Mile 13 I knew when I was just a boy," an emotional and exhausted Barrie said, smoke from the fires still rising above the mountains behind him. "We are standing now in a protected area... where we have all sorts of animals," he said. The community must "step up and protect the forest", he insisted. The government has also taken steps, Tamba Dauda, director of surveys and land within the lands, housing and country planning ministry, said. "We are quite aware of the massive deforestation that is ongoing," he said, highlighting the establishment of a land and environmental crime unit within the police to pursue perpetrators. Despite such efforts, Joseph Rahall, founder of the NGO Green Scenery, warned that the forest's very survival was at stake. "We are beyond the emergency level," he said. "If we don't manage the Western Area Peninsula very well, in 10 to 15 years there will be no forest." lp/sjd/cw/kjm
Yahoo
19-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Opinion - The US needed a Peace Corps in the '60s — it still needs one today
We're just three months into President Trump's second term, and already the Peace Corps is on the chopping block. While he touts solutions of tariffs and 'government efficiency,' he shatters our alliances and our hard-won moral authority abroad. By contrast, less than a month before winning his election in 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his vision for a 'Peace Corps' at the University of Michigan. In the six and a half decades since, nearly 240,000 American volunteers have responded to Kennedy's inspiring call, 'Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.' The Peace Corps experience is now more relevant to the United States than ever. In 1984, the Peace Corps sent me to a place I could hardly find on a map. I was assigned to Sierra Leone to teach farmers how to improve their rice yields in swamps. I lived in a peaceful rainforest village with 40 rice-farming families in mud-brick homes on the edge of the country's diamond fields. During my early days there, the farmers taught me how to gather the necessities for living: food, water, medicine and mail. I developed habits and routines that firmly anchored me in the community and found meaningful and enduring connections in a society that generously welcomed me. Until this immersive experience, I was naively oblivious to the bitter history that Sierra Leoneans themselves had shared their agricultural expertise with their enslavers, thus enabling them to cultivate rice in the swampy lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia. The U.S., with its growing disparities in health, education and wealth, and a government that is discounting many of its citizens' needs, increasingly resembles some of the countries where Peace Corps volunteers serve. Americans, like so many abroad, are struggling with broken systems and are unable to respond to dislocated workers, children's educational needs and inadequate healthcare. Peace Corps volunteers have lived in places where injustices such as these, sustained by corruption and disenfranchisement, have exploded into brutal and prolonged civil conflict. Four years after my departure, this happened in Sierra Leone. We cannot let it happen in the United States. The Peace Corps is often portrayed as a rugged experience for privileged college graduates or as a community of change agents willing to endure hardships for a benevolent outcome. Yet, the enduring success of the Peace Corps consistently counters these stereotypes and offers a vision for America now. Volunteers have demonstrated that building and supporting collective agencies for good is the essential work of social cohesion in any nation. The Peace Corps expands this definition of volunteerism to create partnership-oriented cultural systems that foster mutual respect, one person and one community at a time, which bridges people and nations in a fraught and trembling world. Energized Americans are once again answering President John F. Kennedy's call: What can I do for my country? With Democratic traditions and government supports formerly taken for granted and under siege today, we are all the Peace Corps now. According to the National Peace Corps Association, funding the Peace Corps costs each American a mere $1.26 annually — a bargain that extends hope and acknowledges our interdependence. By fostering a global culture of mutuality, we enhance the well-being of everyone. We create a safer and more harmonious world that addresses humanity's shared concerns. We can ill afford to imperil this under-appreciated agency within the U.S. Department of State. Betsy Small is the former executive director of Creating Friendships for Peace and is the author of the new book, 'Before Before: A Story of Discovery and Loss in Sierra Leone.' Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
19-04-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
The US needed a Peace Corps in the '60s — it still needs one today
We're just three months into President Trump's second term, and already the Peace Corps is on the chopping block. While he touts solutions of tariffs and 'government efficiency,' he shatters our alliances and our hard-won moral authority abroad. By contrast, less than a month before winning his election in 1960, John F. Kennedy announced his vision for a 'Peace Corps' at the University of Michigan. In the six and a half decades since, nearly 240,000 American volunteers have responded to Kennedy's inspiring call, 'Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.' The Peace Corps experience is now more relevant to the United States than ever. In 1984, the Peace Corps sent me to a place I could hardly find on a map. I was assigned to Sierra Leone to teach farmers how to improve their rice yields in swamps. I lived in a peaceful rainforest village with 40 rice-farming families in mud-brick homes on the edge of the country's diamond fields. During my early days there, the farmers taught me how to gather the necessities for living: food, water, medicine and mail. I developed habits and routines that firmly anchored me in the community and found meaningful and enduring connections in a society that generously welcomed me. Until this immersive experience, I was naively oblivious to the bitter history that Sierra Leoneans themselves had shared their agricultural expertise with their enslavers, thus enabling them to cultivate rice in the swampy lowlands of the Carolinas and Georgia. The U.S., with its growing disparities in health, education and wealth, and a government that is discounting many of its citizens' needs, increasingly resembles some of the countries where Peace Corps volunteers serve. Americans, like so many abroad, are struggling with broken systems and are unable to respond to dislocated workers, children's educational needs and inadequate healthcare. Peace Corps volunteers have lived in places where injustices such as these, sustained by corruption and disenfranchisement, have exploded into brutal and prolonged civil conflict. Four years after my departure, this happened in Sierra Leone. We cannot let it happen in the United States. The Peace Corps is often portrayed as a rugged experience for privileged college graduates or as a community of change agents willing to endure hardships for a benevolent outcome. Yet, the enduring success of the Peace Corps consistently counters these stereotypes and offers a vision for America now. Volunteers have demonstrated that building and supporting collective agencies for good is the essential work of social cohesion in any nation. The Peace Corps expands this definition of volunteerism to create partnership-oriented cultural systems that foster mutual respect, one person and one community at a time, which bridges people and nations in a fraught and trembling world. Energized Americans are once again answering President John F. Kennedy's call: What can I do for my country? With Democratic traditions and government supports formerly taken for granted and under siege today, we are all the Peace Corps now. According to the National Peace Corps Association, funding the Peace Corps costs each American a mere $1.26 annually — a bargain that extends hope and acknowledges our interdependence. By fostering a global culture of mutuality, we enhance the well-being of everyone. We create a safer and more harmonious world that addresses humanity's shared concerns. We can ill afford to imperil this under-appreciated agency within the U.S. Department of State.
Yahoo
30-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Author John Green meets a young tuberculosis patient
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Author John Green has been obsessed with tuberculosis (TB) since 2019, when he first visited Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone and met a young TB patient named Henry Reider. In his latest book Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection (Crash Course Books, 2025), Green explores the history of the bacterial disease, highlighting its impact in different eras of history. And he calls attention to the present reality of TB, a curable disease that nonetheless kills over a million people each year due to stark health care inequities around the globe. In this day and age, Green argues that injustice is the root cause of TB cases and deaths, and that we can collectively choose to correct that injustice and finally snuff out the deadly disease. Related: 'We have to fight for a better end': Author John Green on how threats to USAID derail the worldwide effort to end tuberculosis At the time, I knew almost nothing about TB. To me, it was a disease of history — something that killed depressive 19th-century poets, not present-tense humans. But as a friend once told me, "Nothing is so privileged as thinking history belongs to the past." When we arrived at Lakka, we were immediately greeted by a child who introduced himself as Henry. "That's my son's name," I told him, and he smiled. Most Sierra Leoneans are multilingual, but Henry spoke particularly good English, especially for a kid his age, which made it possible for us to have a conversation that could go beyond my few halting phrases of Krio. I asked him how he was doing, and he said, "I am happy, sir. I am encouraged." He loved that word. Who wouldn't? Encouraged, like courage is something we rouse ourselves and others into. My son Henry was 9 then, and this Henry looked about the same age — a small boy with spindly legs and a big, goofy smile. He wore shorts and an oversized rugby shirt that reached nearly to his knees. Henry took hold of my T-shirt and began walking me around the hospital. He showed me the lab where a technician was looking through a microscope. Henry looked into the microscope and then asked me to, as the lab tech, a young woman from Freetown, explained that this sample contained tuberculosis even though the patient had been treated for several months with standard therapy. The lab tech began to tell me about this "standard therapy," but Henry was pulling on my shirt again. He walked me through the wards, a complex of poorly ventilated buildings that contained hospital rooms with barred windows, thin mattresses, and no toilets. There was no electricity in the wards, and no consistent running water. To me, the rooms resembled prison cells. Before it was a TB hospital, Lakka was a leprosy isolation facility — and it felt like one. Inside each room, one or two patients lay on cots, generally on their side or back. A few sat on the edges of their beds, leaning forward. All these men (the women were in a separate ward) were thin. Some were so emaciated that their skin seemed wrapped tightly around bone. As we walked down a hallway between buildings, Henry and I watched a young man drink water from a plastic bottle, and then promptly vomit a mix of bile and blood. I instinctively turned away, but Henry continued to stare at the man. I figured Henry was someone's kid — a doctor, maybe, or a nurse, or one of the cooking or cleaning staff. Everyone seemed to know him, and everyone stopped their work to say hello and rub his head or squeeze his hand. I was immediately charmed by Henry — he had some of the mannerisms of my son, the same paradoxical mixture of shyness and enthusiastic desire for connection. Henry eventually brought me back to the group of doctors and nurses who were meeting in a small room near the entrance of the hospital, and then one of the nurses lovingly and laughingly shooed him away. "Who is that kid?" I asked. "Henry?" answered a nurse. "The sweetest boy." "He's one of the patients we're worried about," said a physician who went by Dr. Micheal. "He's a patient?" I asked. "Yes." "He's such a cute little kid," I said. "I hope he's going to be okay." Dr. Micheal told me that Henry wasn't a little boy. He was seventeen. He was only so small because he'd grown up malnourished, and then the TB had further emaciated his body. "He seems to be doing okay," I said. "Lots of energy. He walked me all around the hospital." "This is because the antibiotics are working," Dr. Micheal explained. "But we know they are not working well enough. We are almost certain they will fail, and that is a big problem." He shrugged, tight-lipped. There was a lot I didn't understand. After I first met Henry, I asked one of the nurses if he would be okay. "Oh, we love our Henry!" she said. She told me he had already gone through so much in his young life. Thank God, she said, that Henry was so loved by his mother, Isatu, who visited him regularly and brought him extra food whenever she could. Most of the patients at Lakka had no visitors. Many had been abandoned by their families; a tuberculosis case in the family was a tremendous mark of shame. But Henry had Isatu. I realized none of this was an answer to whether he would be okay. RELATED STORIES —10 of the deadliest superbugs that scientists are worried about —'It is a dangerous strategy, and one for which we all may pay dearly': Dismantling USAID leaves the US more exposed to pandemics than ever —Massive tuberculosis outbreak sickens dozens in Kansas He is such a happy child, she told me. He cheers everyone up. When he'd been able to go to school, the other kids called him pastor, because he was always offering them prayers and assistance. Still, this was not an answer. "We will fight for him," she told me at last. Editor's note: This excerpt, from Chapter 1 of "Everything is Tuberculosis," has been shortened for the purpose of this reprinting. Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection In "Everything Is Tuberculosis," John Green tells the story of Henry Reider, a tuberculosis patient he met at Lakka Government Hospital in Sierra Leone. Throughout the book, he interweaves Henry's story with scientific and social histories of how tuberculosis has shaped our world — and how our choices will shape the future of Deal
Yahoo
24-02-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Zuri Sky Announces Website Launch Ahead of Non-stop Flights from London to Freetown
LONDON, Feb. 24, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Zuri Sky Ltd, a UK-based company, is proud to announce the launch of its official website, marking the initial step in its mission to reconnect Sierra Leone with the UK and beyond. This proposed new route strives to enhance connectivity, provide greater travel opportunities for Sierra Leoneans, UK and international travellers and help boost tourism and business to Sierra Leone's stunning shores. In preparation for its inaugural flight to provide a direct flight service from London to Freetown, Zuri Sky invites travellers to subscribe to its website for exclusive updates and an introductory 10% discount on their first ticket when bookings go live. "Having operated this route successfully before, I am delighted to once again be part of a credible organisation to operate this flight." said Robert Blick, Chairman of Zuri Sky. "We will be fully transparent and provide regular updates to our subscribers." The Zuri Sky website is a user-friendly portal for travellers seeking seamless travel options between the UK and Sierra Leone. By subscribing now, travellers will benefit from early access to news, updates and promotional offers, including the exclusive 10% discount for first-time bookings. The London-based CEO of Zuri Sky highlighted the airline's raison d'etre: "This is about much more than flights; it's about building a bridge: we are the People's Airline." Mina Nozari, Director of Zuri Sky, expressed her enthusiasm for Sierra Leone's potential as a global tourism destination: "We see Sierra Leone as the Caribbean of West Africa, with its pristine beaches and vibrant culture. We aim to showcase Sierra Leone's natural beauty to the world and bring traveller's closer to this hidden gem." About Zuri Sky Zuri Sky Ltd is a new UK-based Company headquartered in London, dedicated to organising, managing and operating, direct, hassle-free connections between London Gatwick and Lungi International Airport in Freetown, Sierra Leone. With a team of passionate, seasoned professionals, Zuri Sky is committed to building a reliable, enjoyable, efficient and sustainable air bridge that meets the needs of Sierra Leoneans, UK and international travellers. For more information and to subscribe for updates, visit View original content:
