Latest update from Sierra Leone
Christmas letter 2025
Hello All
Well Christmas is upon us and another year of amazing work by our team in
Sierra Leone. All that work totally reliant on good will from you – our equally
amazing supporters.
Can I start with some quick fire points before that chatty letter bit that you
may or may not manage to read through.
So – Firstly and straight to the point. Can anyone assist with £400 or part of to
cover the cost of parties for the children in the next few weeks?
Secondly - Justina and Aruna (two key members of our Sierra Leone team)
both hope to visit the UK in the spring. Can anyone invite them to a talk to
your local community about our work while they are here?
Thirdly – Our AGM is approaching and will be online again. It is Saturday,
January 25 th at 10am. If you would like to join us online can you please email
back to request a link invitation?
Fourth – sorry its money.
We have completed the upstairs of our offices now and looking for some funds
to furbish the new rooms. £1,300 required?
We have also committed to buying a small section of land immediately
between our boundary and a new access road that is being built behind us.
We don’t want to find a new neighbour building right on our boundary so we
have already paid part but still require £5,200 to complete over the next few
months.
Fifth point - is to say a huge thank you to Stephen who has purchased and is
donating to us in January a used Toyota Prado 4x4. It’s a huge expense that we
would have had to come looking for in the near future so we are greatly
relieved to have one donated in a single act. Stephen and some friends are
actually driving it to Sierra Leone and then flying back. It’s been upgraded to
handle really difficult conditions and should last us very well for several years
to come (and he very kindly let me choose the car myself, so it is exactly what
we wanted).
And now …………..the actual letter to see out 2024.
Well this year and in the last few years we have expanded to have about 300
children stay at St George home in any one year period (and over 2000 have
actually lived in with us over the 20 years we have existed). But we never have
300 children there at a time. So what has changed? Well, we have actually -
to match the nature of the demand, but the one thing that hasn’t changed is
that ALL the children in our care were either homeless, or had nowhere to go
when they came to us.
So who are the children? Well we still have a core of street children who do
come and stay for quite a while much as we have always done. But in addition
we do have a lot of short term children coming through and leaving again quite
quickly. These can be abandoned children and babies who are found in the
streets and brought in by the Police or social services normally – we look after
them while longer term arrangements can be made. Others may be children
who have been abused and run away or been rescued from an abusive
situation for their own safety or child rape victims. Sadly, quite a few of them
and they all need care and somewhere safe – we arrange appropriate medical
support and counselling, and when we are sure we arrange reunification with
their families - plus we do assist with prosecutions. But how we transform
these frightened children is amazing. On my last trip a teenage girl was
brought in (I don’t actually know why) and clearly looked traumatised and
tense…..the next day when I saw her again, she had fresh clothes, was relaxed
and playing with the other children as if she had been there forever.
Another category of children I never really expected are victims of slavery and
trafficking. In 2023 we actually rescued 25 children from traffickers (20 were
Sierra Leonean and the other 5 were from Liberia or Guinea). But for all these
children St George Foundation offered a safe and caring place for them to stay
until they could safely move on with their lives.
(That is still happening today and at the end of this letter I am adding two
stories of actual cases that are live right now just to give you a flavour of what
happens when we get trafficked children in).
And of course, all of this happens with the money you donate and we still
manage to take less than 1% for administration in the UK. That does come
with a catch in that all of us in the UK are volunteering our time and have
regular jobs elsewhere. St George IS our spare time and the real reason you
can go for long periods without these catch up letters.
We also continue to do ‘community’ work and have always done so. The
number of children worked with in the community tends to be bigger and it is
not normally paid for out of our own funds, but we will be working with
partners. It still happens under our name and carried out by our team and it
wouldn’t happen if St George didn’t exist. The number of children worked with
in this way has now passed 5,000. It tends to be supporting children who are
spending their days in the streets and may be working and not attending
school, but these ones do go home at night. The support mainly is in
education (sometimes in street school classes), and intervening with the
families and communities to encourage them to get their children in to school.
We would never expect these children to have to come and live with us at the
home – it is just working in the streets.
And now for the surprise. There are little St George Foundations popping up
elsewhere now – not just Sierra Leone. They are not actually us, but we have
mentored and encouraged small groups who have a passion and have seen and
experienced our work and we have encouraged them to copy our model and to
find their own funding. So a small team is now established and supporting war
victims and child combatants in Goma in Congo - just in the streets (no home
at this point). And ex-employees have just set up street projects in Liberia and
Guinea. In Guinea it is mainly child protection work, in Liberia it is that but also
having to deal with environmental issues which are causing problems within
communities.
I often think now of St George Foundation as a child protection organisation
rather than a children’s home and I am somewhat surprised to find ourselves
dealing with victims of modern day slavery.
But we do now regulalrly come across children who have been sold and
trafficked across borders to work as slaves.
I am going to tell you 2 stories of girls who have just been rescued in the last
few weeks, so these are real cases and happening right now. The two girls are
both about 12 years old. They will both live with us at St George for a while,
but eventually both will be returned to their real families once we are sure it is
safe.
The first story is about a girl who only arrived with St George Foundation last
Friday.
We do not know anything about her mother at this stage, but we do know that
her father went with people traffickers to get himself smuggled into Europe.
He is now living as an illegal immigrant in Spain. He had a girlfriend in Sierra
Leone and he left his daughter with her to be looked after. But the girlfriend
turned out to be some sort of wicked stepmother.
Last week a man turned up at their house in a van and the girl was told that
she had to get in the van and go with the man. She had never seen him
before. When she got in she discovered that she was one of 8 children in the
van. It appears they were then being trafficked into Guinea – that’s the next
door country to Sierra Leone and a much wealthier. Many Sierra Leonean
children live and work there as slaves and are seriously abused. But they don’t
run away, because they are told that if they run away and get caught – they
will be killed.
On the way to Guinee the van stopped and the children saw a chance to
escape. Three of the 8 children managed to jump out of the vehicle and run
for their lives to escape. This girl was eventually stopped by a woman who
wanted to know what was going on. When she heard, the woman took the girl
immediately to the Police and told them what had happened. The Police
brought her to St George Foundation last Friday where she is now safe and the
staff will find out where she is from and then visit her family and make sure
everything will be OK before she is returned. We will also be ready to work
with the Police to bring the people who caused this to justice.
The next story is about another girl about the same age. Her mother was
tricked into going to job in Kuwait. But the job was not true and she then got
into trouble and taken to prison in Kuwait. This is very common and wealthy
people in countries like Kuwait will use people from poor countries as servants
but not pay them and treat them very badly – it IS a form of slavery. But if
they run away they get arrested. This girl’s mother had made arrangements
for her daughter to stay with her friend in Sierra Leone while she sent money
home, but as no money came they did not wait and they headed off towards
Europe. It is actually her mother who was tricked and became a slave and it is
not clear at this stage what was happening to the girl – but it wasn’t good.
On the way the girl got seriously sick and the mother’s friend abandoned her.
She ended up in Hospital in Tunisia and is still there. The International
Organisation for Migration have contacted St George Foundation and arranged
that when she is well enough she will be sent back to Sierra Leone and handed
over to us. From there the staff will trace her family and work out how to re
unite her with here real relatives once we are sure she will be safe. At this
stage we don’t know why she was in Tunisia, but highly likely she was being
trafficked.
St George Foundation has been increasing efforts on anti-trafficking and anti-
slavery among vulnerable children. We have managed to help prosecute
suspected traffickers and actively working with the Government to tighten up
the Anti-Human Trafficking and Migrant Smuggling Act of 2022.
So why do people end up as slaves in 2024? The answer comes down to
poverty and greed.
Some families are so poor that they cannot feed themselves. They are then
tempted to send one of their children to relatives or other people they know
who promise to look after them. But actually they get used as slaves. St
George Foundation is working with the government of Sierra Leone to make it
illegal to send your children away to live with other people (who abuse them).
I have personally met with government ministers who are supporting us in this
work.
Another way children become slaves is that people sell them to traffickers or
fake adoptions. The price is typically around £60 to buy a child, but once the
child has been adopted or trafficked they are rarely seen again.
St George Foundation do not do this work on our own but as part of the Child
Welfare Committee. But we are the only ones that take care of the child
victims and give them a caring home while they are being helped.
We also work with Social services and the Police and court system to prosecute
offenders, as well as UNICEF which is very involved and oversee a lot of the
work.
I just thought it would be interesting for you to see actual example cases that
are live today. This is the sort of thing that is happening all the time and
happening because you give us such reliable support.
THANK YOU ALL SO MUCH!
And may you all have a lovely Christmas and a great 2025.
Philip
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Help these children today
St George Foundation does not receive funds from national campaigns or the UK Government to support its vital work transforming children's lives.
To support each child costs the charity £5/day, which includes the provision of food, shelter, medical care and enrolment at a local school. However, to continue our work we need your help.
97% of your donation is spent on the actual project: achieved by very low UK overheads and no paid staff in the UK
