HEALTH & WELLBEING
SIERRA LEONE: A Personal View Village children looking healthy, young and happy. Pictured with Squadron Leader Steve Puckering (01 December 2014)
Thanks to Squadron Leader Steve Puckering who took time out to share with Envoy readers just what it’s like out in Sierra Leone at the moment. A country our Service personnel are being deployed to, in order to make a real difference.
I
arrived in Sierra Leone in May 2014 to begin a one-year assignment as an aviation security advisor with the
International Security Advisory Team (ISAT) based in Freetown, Sierra Leone. My first few months, little was I to know, were to be changed significantly due to the outbreak of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in West Africa. This hidden enemy – Ebola – is further saddening in a country which saw such brutality during the civil war period in the late 1990s. Through this adversity, though, the local people and international community have displayed admirable determination to defeat this deadly virus, and I have encountered some positive images and amazing people along the way during this difficult journey.
The assignment was initially fairly routine – yet still challenging – until July 2014. Accommodated up in the hills of Freetown within the ISAT compound, weekends were the perfect opportunity to explore a fascinating country. A chimpanzee sanctuary
32 Envoy Spring 2015
with eco huts lay one mile north of our compound, while two tropical beaches lay South and West – not to mention Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown, on our doorstep. Exploring involved direct contact with the local culture, with vibrant seafood restaurants and bars – albeit with the limitations of impoverishment. Extreme poverty was never far away. Submerged within this most basic way of life were constant examples of young people’s desperate struggles to find work and enrich their lives by earning the smallest amounts of money – pennies to a Westerner. It was evident that within Sierra Leone you were either rich or poor; there appeared to be no middle ground. Years of endemic corruption had seen to that.
By July 2014, things started to change considerably within our own field of operations and we started to see an escalation of cases of EVD. Reports from our team (six UK military security advisors, including two civilian police advisors) and our contacts confirmed the national increase in cases of EVD. We engaged with the British High Commission and together our team started to work, focusing
more closely. Further cases were identified in Freetown. Ebola had arrived in the country, well and truly, and in force.
The international community – and in particular, the UK Government – soon directed its attention and humanitarian support towards Sierra Leone. We found ourselves working all over the country, setting up command and control centres, managing burial teams, surveillance teams and ambulance dispatch teams. After the President of Sierra Leone declared a national public emergency, we started to support the local Government with their policies and intelligence gathering in order to support law and order within the community. Curfews were imposed and some villages were soon quarantined in a bid to control the virus. I then found myself primarily designing and implementing an airport’s action plan for enhanced security and health screening measures in order to assure continued international military and civilian flight operations. In order to keep the supply route open for humanitarian and medical aid, Sierra Leone’s only international civilian airport had become a critical asset to protect and secure.
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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