Local doctor makes difference in Sierra Leone
By NADIA MARIA SMITH
CS&T Staff Writer
VALLEY FORGE — Dan Kelly arrived to Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone in West Africa, on a Global Health Fellowship sponsored by Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, where he was in his third year of medical school in 2006. Though he originally worked in one of the nation’s hospitals, Kelly’s attention was quickly drawn to the displaced victims at a nearby amputee camp where he started working on the weekends.
He also forged a friendship with a local doctor, Mohamed Barrie, through a mutual friend and the two set out to figure out a way to provide long-term care for the forgotten amputees — victims of a decade-long civil war, in which more than 50,000 civilians were killed, thousands mutilated and half the population displaced.
They founded the National Organization for Wellbody, a Sierra Leone-based, nonprofit organization which fosters health and economic development for amputated civilians while serving the medical needs of the greater community. It partnered with Global Action Foundation in Valley Forge, a non-governmental organization that Kelly founded with his mother, Kathy Kelly, and friend, Yachtz Radcliff, which is committed to supporting sustainable community-led growth in the poorest regions of the world.
A graduate of Malvern Preparatory School for Boys who was raised in St. Katherine of Siena Parish in Wayne, Kelly, 27, said that when he went to Sierra Leone, he found amputee victims, who “were amazingly passionate and wanted the opportunity to become self-reliant.”
In Kono, the diamond mining capital of Sierra Leone where the highest concentration of amputee war victims live, he heard stories like that of Sabindi, a war victim who recounted how he lost his arms: “The rebels discovered [us] and told us, ‘Don’t move! We will throw one stone. Whoever it hits will have his or her arm amputated. The rest will be killed.’ [The] government never helped us, and six months after the war ended, relief organizations stopped assisting us. Since then, we have struggled to live.”
Kono was seized in 1991 by the Revolutionary United Front (R.U.F.) a rebel group that is reported to have used murder and tactics including torture and mutilation to control the diamond mines in order to fund their rebellion.
Sabindi opened his home to a mobile clinic run by Kelly and Barrie before the permanent clinic was established in January of this year. In the six months the permanent clinic has been operating, nearly 2,000 patients and more than 700 amputee victims have been treated.
Barrie runs the clinic with the help of seven full-time staff members, including three nurses and medical student volunteers from different parts of the world, while Kelly is in his first year of residency at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas.
He works 90 hours per week, but he still finds time for GAF and pursuing ways to sustain the clinic long-term. GAF’s health initiative is linked with amputee-run micro-agricultural projects such as palm kernel farms, where profits will provide long-term sustainability for the health programs. Kelly hopes to also add health services for children under 5 that would provide immunizations and malnutrition and growth monitoring next year, and to initiate a clinical research project critical to preventing pharmaceutical resistance in Sierra Leone by 2013.
GAF also runs a malnutrition eradication program, in partnership with UNICEF, in the Portoloko district which has the nation’s highest rate of malnutrition in children under 5. More than 11,000 children are estimated to be severely malnourished in that district alone.
The program has trained 460 village health promoters to survey households about child health and nutrition and has educated thousands of families. Through the program, nearly 2,000 malnourished children have been rehabilitated to date.
Seeing children die because of malnutrition has served to “motivate me to work harder,” Kelly said.
And seeing the hope and deep faith of the people he has served in Sierra Leona has deepened his own Catholic faith and his resolve to make a difference in that part of the world.
For more information visit www.go-act.org or contact Kathy Kelly at kkelly@go-act.org or (610) 933-5261.
CS&T staff writer Nadia Maria Smith may be reached at npozo@adphila.org or (215) 965-4614.