Thank you to our supporters for your continuing donations and support.

With your help we have purchased the Centre and land for $35,000, and would now like to purchase the next-door site. This will ensure we do not have developments on our boundary, and will allow much easier access to our Well. The cost is a further $35,000, but we expect to be able to raise about $10,000 of this sum in Sierra Leone.

Loans or donations will be very welcome. Any loans will be repaid within 5 years.

Family Tracing and Reunification

Over the summer we are pleased to say that we have traced and reunified 20 children with their families. That’s 11 girls and 9 boys back where they should be And the parents very happy to have their children back!

Provide life skills and psychosocial first aid to children at the ICC As always we hope that a stay at St George Foundation gives skills to children that help with their ongoing lives. This is wide ranging from oral and body hygiene to cultural dance, drama and singing. Singing and dancing have always been a core part of what we do and great activities that can involve all the children and get them all joining in. Story telling is also a skill the children will learn and without modern day distractions the other children listen with real interest and enthusiasm and we hold competitions with this too.

Follow up visit on UK Sponsored Children

Over the August holiday we have been monitoring sponsored children. A total of 40 boys and 21 girls we followed up in mostly village locations. This involved not only the children but their care givers and the local schools they attend. The vast majority of children were successfully contacted and it was clear that we do need to keep supporting these children to go to school.Many were feeling the pressure of additional school charges, text books and food. Most have the children are performing well and some children have moved onto technical learning of trades which is encouraging.

Award

As you mostly know we work with another charity Toybox on certain projects and in particular street work. One of those joint projects is to work with children in the Mabella community and they appreciated our efforts so much that a group for people from Mabella came to the Scout Camp and presented us with an award. They were recognizing the work we had done in their community to get hundreds of children back to school (who were not attending and on the edge of being street children) and also establishing a savings and loan scheme for local families.

Medical Report

Over the summer months for us it’s the rainy season in Sierra Leone and a time when people are more prone to being ill. Over July and August we 8 children and 7 members of staff that needed hospital attention. Five children were suffering from fevers caused by heavy colds, two with malaria and a boy with a heart condition. The really sad news is that having joined forces with another charity Caritas they found the funding for him to travel to India for a lifesaving operation – but he died of before we could get him there.

Present number of children at the ICC.

Over the whole summer we actually reunified 28 children and took in 20 new ones. Its actually one of the lowest number of children residential that we have had for a long time with just 27 children currently living with us (12 boys and 15 girls)