‘CHILDREN DUG WITH THEIR BARE HANDS IN CORPSE-STREWN MUD’
WELSHMAN Daniel Egan has seen some horrifying scenes this year. Daniel, 30, has turned his life over to helping chidren in one of the poorest countries in the world, Sierra Leone.
And not only has he watched countless children lose their lives to wretched diseases he has also witnessed the aftermath of a catastrophic landslide in the capital Freetown which claimed the lives of at least 1,000 people on August 14. Another 6,000 were left homeless. Daniel recalled: “Visiting the site a week later was a haunting experience that I haven’t shared until now.
“I’ve never cried and vomited simultaneously. Some toddlers sat and sobbed, while other children wailed as they continued to dig with their bare hands above the location of where their home once stood.
“Others sat emotionless. It was hard to tell whether they were still holding out hope that their parents would be dug up, or if they’d resided to the fact, like most of us, it was too late. Watching those children with a feeling of desperation and hopelessness, mixed with the stench of rotting flesh, whilst dogs dug for their next meal and flies swarmed in a frenzy, is an experience that’ll stay with me for a long time.”
Daniel, from Pontypridd, is the chief operations officer at British non-Governmental organisation Planting Promise.
He spends his time in Sierra Leone overseeing country-wide operations such as schools, partnerships and social enterprises.
Daniel said: “On some scales, Sierra Leone isn’t ‘one of the poorest’ it is ‘the poorest’. If there’s a list you don’t want to be on the bottom of, Sierra Leone will highly likely feature within the last five.
“Due to its lack of educational and healthcare infrastructure, for the very first time I’ve had to be more than simply an educationalist.”
Daniel has worked teaching abroad for several years, but he has been in Sierra Leone for 12 months.
Tragically, in his first few months on the job he lost six students at one of his schools.
They lost their lives to illnesses such as malaria and dysentery which were both exacerbated by chronic malnutrition.
Daniel found it incredibly difficult to deal with the loss.
He said: “I’m a teacher by trade – not a doctor. I’ve worked in countries with limited access to healthcare before, but this is the first time to work directly with children who were dying.
“It was my responsibility to change this, or to try at least.
“I introduced an emergency healthcare fund at the school to financially assist with getting sick students to the hospital.”
As a part of his role, Daniel also set up the Kids’ Crusade Foundation to assist children’s charities in Malawi, India and Sierra Leone.
Since its launch in 2016, the foundation has helped to build five new classrooms and also helped to put 109 children on continuous daily feeding programmes.
But even though he does a lot to try to help better the life of the country’s children, Daniel admits the problems in Sierra Leone are well-rooted.
An 11-year civil war, that didn’t end until 2002, set the tone for years to follow.
Daniel said high-level corruption among government officials ensures international investment will never be the country’s saving grace.
The Ebola epidemic that threw the country, and the wider West Africa region, into turmoil also enabled the country’s president to clutch onto power for a few more years.
“Anyone around the age of 25 and older will remember only too vividly the days of the civil war,” Daniel added.
“Women raped and murdered in front of their children, babies thrown off bridges, into rivers and against walls, men disembowelled, beheaded and mutilated on the streets of the capital, entire villages burnt to the ground, children forced in to the military as child soldiers.
“Many hope that these memories will be enough to keep violence from once again ripping their country apart on the run-up to the elections.
“However, many others insist that the factors and tensions that led to the last civil war are once again rife in Sierra Leone society and an air of discontentment and anger is also once again on the rise.”
Life won’t get much better for the people of Sierra Leone on Christmas Day – 60% of the population survive on less than £1 a day.
If a family can afford it they may have more food than usual on December 25, and the majority of Sierra Leone’s children will take a break from selling items out of buckets on their heads to dance and sing with the community.
Daniel said: “Christmas will also feature some time off school for children if they attend.
“Children seldom also get gifts which is why the Kids’ Crusade Foundation is supplying gift bags to the 191 students at Planting Promise’s rural school, and throwing an endof-term Christmas party at the city schools with snacks, hot meals and prizes for the students.”
It’s moments like this that makes Daniel’s job so rewarding.
Even though he admits to having moments of depression and sadness, he loves his job.
“I’ve come to understand that seeing children begging and fighting for survival on the streets or dying from a disease that, in Wales, would have be cured before it even affected the child, is nothing compared to the kid actually living it.
“For all the dark days in life, there are many others that make me smile from within, lift my soul and make me realise that my life’s a gift.
“If I can share that by helping others then what an amazing job.”
To support the Kids’ Crusade Foundation visit https://www. gofundme.com/the-kids-crusadefoundation-fund