💙🇸🇱 SIERRA LEONE, DIABETES TEAM… AND WHY WE KEEP GOING BACK

Some places get under your skin. Sierra Leone has completely stolen our hearts ❤️.

The warmth. The humour. The resilience. The enormous smiles and laughter — often in circumstances where, quite frankly, we’re not sure we’d manage a smile at all.

And then there are the people we’ve met through diabetes — patients and colleagues who very quickly became friends and part of our Sierra Leone family. 🥰

Sadly, some of those lovely friends are no longer here. And that really, really hurts. 😢💔

Not because diabetes can’t be treated, but because in Sierra Leone something as ordinary to us as medication, a dressing, the right advice — or simply getting to a clinic — can be completely out of reach.

And this is where even a small donation can make an enormous difference:

💙 £2 can pay for someone to travel to clinic

💙 £4.50 can fund a month of diabetes medication

💙 £5 can get someone registered at the clinic, tested and started on treatment

💙 £16 can screen 100 people for diabetes

💙 £40 can feed a family for a month

💙 £60 can pay a diabetes nurse’s salary for a month

That’s what your donation can actually *do*. ❤️

In 2024 and 2025, our slightly bonkers but very determined UK team of diabetes specialist healthcare professionals and communications experts joined the brilliant Dr Veronica Sawicki 😇 and Help Madina https://helpmadina.org.uk/, working shoulder-to-shoulder with Sierra Leone’s extraordinary diabetes and healthcare teams.

And that bit really matters. ✅

We don’t go there to tell these incredible people how to do their jobs. Far from it. We work alongside them, learn from them and support them, with enormous respect for their expertise and everything they achieve with unbelievably limited resources.

Their passion, ingenuity and determination continually humble us. Our job is simply to help give them more of the tools and resources they deserve.💪

Thanks to your amazing generosity, over the last two years we’ve raised a whopping £6,000+. 💙

That money has helped fund an additional diabetes nurse, education and training, essential resources and specialist limb-saving footwear. We’ve also taken medications, dressings and supplies and worked alongside our Sierra Leonean colleagues to educate communities and challenge the myths and stigma surrounding diabetes. 📣

There have been tears. There has been frustration. There has also been an awful lot of love and laughter 🤭.

But there is so much more to do.

For many families, diabetes still means impossible choices: food or medication? Education or transport to clinic?

Some people travel for days, at enormous personal cost and in some very dodgy, rickety transport, simply to access basic care. Others turn to potentially dangerous traditional remedies because they have nowhere else to turn.

That’s why Help Madina and the brilliant local teams it works alongside are so important.

Your donations provide medicines, support healthcare teams, educate communities and fund the Help Madina Hardships Fund, helping people who simply cannot afford food or the journey to their clinic.

And this is a small charity where your money really does reach the people who need it. No enormous machine. No endless layers. Just passionate people, working together on the ground and getting on with the job.

So, if you can spare the price of a coffee, a bottle of wine, or that thing you definitely didn’t need from Amazon… 😉 please consider sending it Sierra Leone’s way instead.

Because behind every donation is a real person.

A healthcare professional doing extraordinary things with limited resources.

A family trying to keep someone they love alive.

A friend we don’t want to lose. ❤️

To our wonderful friends and colleagues in Sierra Leone: we admire you, we learn from you, we love working alongside you — and we haven’t finished yet!! 💙🇸🇱

Please donate if you can, share if you can’t — and help Help Madina and its Sierra Leonean partners continue saving lives.

Every pound matters. Every person matters.

With huge love and thanks,

Elaine Allerton, Helen Towers, Alex Prins-Mills, Evey Verdegaal & Lisa Kelly

💙 Help Madina 🇸🇱