View our latest mission trips to Sierra Leone here.
TEBBS Second Chances will offer a helping hand to people and communities who are less fortunate. Supporting ordinary people who are trying to achieve the extraordinary; people who are committed to building their community and educating their children using the limited resources they have. We focus our efforts on the schools which have been identified by TEBBS as needing extra support.
One of these schools is SAIO elementary school, located in regent village where the mudslide took place in 2017.
SAIO Primary School was started in September 2008 by and an uneducated woman name Mrs Saio Dumbuya Sesay now a chief in the Regent Community. As she did not have the opportunity to get formal education herself, she aimed at providing quality and affordable education for the children of Regent Community, especially those who were under-privileged
Without the services SAIO provides, the communities 225 children would have a very long distance to travel to get an affordable basic education which often means many children not attending school. Due to the classroom conditions the ministry of education were in the process of shutting down the school, however with our volunteers help, renovation work has now begun to build the school back up again.
This school has classrooms of 120 pupils and desperately needs further space to alleviate class numbers and overcrowding. We have made the bricks for another classroom and will continue to build here in 2018.
KRA was meeting under a mango tree, in the open air – a school with great teachers, but no facilities. After an afternoon visit here, a Mission Direct team were so moved they immediately paid for an interim timber shelter, meaning that school could continue through the summer rains.
Now a proper school is under construction as volunteers raise the funds to build a longer-term structure. We have also recently built a bakery for this school to generate an income and become self-sufficient. This needs finishing and an additional classroom needs building.
In recent years, Mission Direct teams have assisted in building the doctors accommodation at this beautiful beach community. Our work will continue here in 2018, continuing the building work from last year to establish a clinic to provide urgently-needed healthcare and transform the community.
A remarkable disabled lady called Melrose hosts 42 disabled children in a three bedroom house with a couple of carers. Manaheim is home to children that others have effectively been “thrown away” by others. Children here suffer from epilepsy, mental health issues, encephalitis and polio – conditions widely misunderstood and feared by the communities in Sierra Leone.
We continue to support this fantastic home with aid and educational materials and many of the children have been sponsored to go to school by past volunteers.
The child soldiers of Sierra Leone’s brutal civil war have now grown up. Some became Christians and came to terms with their traumatic experiences. Four of these young men lead a home for forty street boys and a school of 400 children.
In 2012, they were awarded a UK lottery grant to provide vocational training for 150 young people who had dropped out of education, to give them a skill, whereby they can earn a living. We have helped to build a set of classrooms here as well as other amenities, enabling scores of young people – who would have faced a life on the streets without any hope of any education- to gain the skills to build themselves a proper future.
These remarkable disabled ladies built an association to ensure that they and others like them would not have to live on the streets. They fought to obtain land and work hard each day to give polio sufferers the skills to be self-sufficient.
Mission Direct has built two, 6 bedroom dormitories, bathroom facilities and numerous other pieces of building work and upkeep and through listening to and meeting the immediate needs of the association, we have been able to help them work far more effectively. Women who would otherwise have been abused – or even died – on the streets, now have a home and a safe future.
