The number of children who have lost their parents to the virus is rapidly growing and they badly need our support

Before Ebola, I was the field director of Street Child’s rural education programme – offering schooling to more than 150 villages all over the country.



Since August though, we’ve had to turn the entire operation around to make the biggest difference we could in two unique areas of the fight against Ebola: education and looking after orphans. I became director of both these projects for the north of the country at a time when the disease was really beginning to take hold in this area.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Delivering aid to remote communities by canoe in Koinadugu. This was one of the hardest journeys I have ever made, but Ebola has affected even the far-flung areas of Sierra Leone. Photograph: John Momodu Kargbo/Street Child

I’ve been a social worker for many years. And have seen much pain. But working with Ebola orphans is very different. The tragedy is raw and fresh in their minds and it’s very challenging in terms of providing the emotional support they might need.

These children have lost the adult they depended on at the hands of a virus that they don’t understand. They have a strong feeling of hopelessness and you can’t help but empathise with that. At the same time we’re doing our best to restore their hopes.

I recently visited a home in the New London area of Makeni where a teenager is now head of the household. Osman, aged around 18, is an Ebola survivor who lost 22 family members within three weeks. He’s left with no parents, no elder brother, no adult relatives. Now he has to take care of three younger brothers and a grandmother.

At another house on Susan Street, Teresa, 15, and her younger brother, just six years old, were the only survivors from a family of nine. Teresa told me of her utter despair during quarantine. Through her tears she said that, if not for her helpless younger brother, she would rather have died of the disease. It is tough to hear such words, very tough.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Street Child stockpiles aid packages ready for distribution. We provide access to food and other vital supplies but the scale of the problem is so large that more help is needed. Photograph: John Momodu Kargbo/Street Child

In both cases, we were able to offer some relief through counselling or by providing access to food and other vital supplies. And for Teresa, we were able to locate a relative and persuade her to help care for the children. But even for someone used to very sad stories, cases like these have been something else. I find myself moved to tears. It does feel good to be able to provide some help though, even if the children are still too sad to really appreciate it.

The scale of the orphan issue is huge and remains completely under-reported, which is very frustrating and upsetting. How is enough aid going to come for these children if the authorities will not admit the real scale of the issue for children? Just last week I visited the Pait-Bana area outside Makeni, where 100 people had died in just a month. When we arrived at the entrance to the village, the officers manning the quarantine checkpoint told us to bring more workers as Ebola orphans were in greater number than we could have imagined.

At the first house we visited, the village chief spoke of 24 dead in that house alone with around 15 orphans left behind, two who had survived the disease. In less than 20 minutes we had verified more than 60 orphans, some as young as eight months. We returned the next morning with some basic supplies and held counselling sessions with as many as we could. But the extent of the tragedy was hard for us all.

When we started out, it felt quite risky, dangerous even: going to visit families who appear to have the virus in their midst. But if we hadn’t reached out to these desperate people in this critical moment, who would have? So we do our best, working under the restrictions and limitations that make our working environment a very difficult one.

Just travelling from place to place is restricted, which is a challenge. Even those delivering aid need an official pass just to access victims in quarantined areas. We have an official pass but if your pass is just a day out of date it is sometimes impossible to even reach those we’re trying to help. There have been cases when the district health medical team has advised us to keep away from high-risk homes. But for the sake of the orphans in need of supplies and support, we felt we had to keep visiting them.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Providing Ebola education in Makeni. Street Child teams across the country are educating communities about how best to stop the spread of this deadly virus. Education is the silver bullet in this crisis. Photograph: John Momodu Kargbo/Street Child

These issues with restricted movement make it hardest in rural areas where we also have the biggest presence in the district. I recently visited Nieni chiefdom, in Koinadugu in the far north-east of the country. The journey was one of the hardest I’ve made, which is saying something for an experienced, specialist rural aid worker. Driving through rocky and rugged mountain routes, it was almost a day’s trip to cover a relatively small distance.

We arrived at night and were met by astonishment that we’d even attempted the trip to what is one of the most remote and least developed areas of the country – this is where blood samples are flown out for testing by helicopter. Yet Ebola finds its way even there, seemingly with ease.

In Kumala we verified more than 80 orphans from 34 families and it was clear that they were badly in need of our support. We provided food, toiletries, mattresses for those whose bedding had been burned as a way of disinfecting their homes after Ebola breaks in.

But the number of orphans we found was far more than we could cater for. Still the chief spoke of others in an even worse situation beyond his village – one even harder to get to than theirs. That’s a tough thought. Our organisation has already helped 7,000 orphans in Sierra Leone but we know there are more – in hard to reach places like this. Hopefully we’ll find a way of getting there too.



• John Momodu Kargbo (known as JMK), from Makeni in northern Sierra Leone, works for Street Child