News & Stories

Mariama Kamara felt suddenly unwell upon coming home to her daughter and grandson one evening in August 2016. After walking the familiar dusty road home from the diamond mine where the 43-year-old worked in Sierra Leone’s Kono District, she sat down in the kitchen with a worsening headache and nausea.
We sat down with Marta Lado to discuss what drew her to Sierra Leone in 2014, her experiences working with the Ministry of Health, and patients for whom she wishes she could have done more.
Upon learning she was pregnant in early 2017, Aminata Kebbie couldn’t stop smiling as she walked around her village in rural Kono District, Sierra Leone.
Walking around her clinic in the muggy heat, Gladys, 52, attracts a lot of attention. During the morning’s whirlwind of activity, people rush up to her from every direction: uniformed midwives, women with newborn babies strapped to their backs, heavily pregnant women.
When 18-year-old Fanta Karoma found out she was pregnant, she was scared. It was her second pregnancy—her first child had been stillborn, after a complicated birth—and it was also bad timing.
In September 2014, as the largest Ebola outbreak in history was devastating West Africa, Alusine Mark Dumbuya was struggling with an additional, very personal concern in a rural region of Sierra Leone.
It was a landmark, a triumph, a watershed moment—without fanfare. On Oct. 6, two doctors stood under the awning of a yellow hospital on the western edge of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, and gave instructions to the first patients to be discharged from the first tuberculosis treatment program of its kind in the country.
The teams wound down dirt paths, high-stepped through muddy slums, and climbed stairs cemented into lush hillsides. Never mind the lack of road signs and house numbers—they knew where they were going. They lived nearby.