There was much excitement on board the Global Mercy™ recently as a young woman named Hawa climbed up the gangway. Hawa, an aspiring nurse from Sierra Leone, had never set foot on this brand-new hospital ship. But she has walked this swaying path over the water...
As a young boy, Dr. Abraham Camara was puzzled when relatives, friends, and neighbours came to seek medical help from his father, a high school teacher. “He was the only person who had gone to university, and he worked for the government,” explained Dr. Camara. Thus,...
Dr Sandra Lako’s childhood was anything but normal. Growing up on board the floating hospitals of Mercy Ships, she was just a teenager when she first sailed into Sierra Leone. Little did she know this was a country that would define the course of her life. There,...
There’s a moment from her daughter’s birth in Sierra Leone that still plays over and over in Catherine Conteh’s mind, 30 years later. She had been in labour for four days straight. Catherine was writhing with untreated pain and crying out to God. The doctors said that...
Forty-five years ago, Don and Deyon Stephens had a dream. They wanted to convert a ship into a floating hospital, to bring safe, free surgical care to those who needed it most. They left their home in the United States, setting out into unfamiliar waters. There were...
The patient’s blood was A+, and she was going to need a lot more of it. Mercy Ships volunteer anaesthesiologist Dr. Brian Barki and his team knew this for certain. As they gathered for a morning huddle on board the Global Mercy®, docked in Dakar, Senegal, they began...