Sierra Leone by all accounts should be the Saudi Arabia of Africa with its vast natural resource wealth. The West African nation is one of the most diamondiferous regions on the planet and yet they rank last in livability by UNICEF and the United Nations and boasts one of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates on the planet.  According to the 2008 Sierra Leone Demographic and Health report, nearly 1 in 10 infants and 1 in 8 mothers die during childbirth in the impoverished West African nation. One in five children, or 20 percent, dies before the age of 5.  The life expectancy hovers around the age of 48 years with some of the leading causes of death attributed to preventable diseases such as malaria,  streptococcus and pneumonia. So why does a country with so much wealth leave it’s people in such desperate circumstances and what can we do to help?

Steps are being taken by the government to address these issues. Yet, ten years after the end of the bloody civil war that killed and maimed thousands of people there is no visible change. Hospitals are forced to perform delicate procedures in the equivalent of field hospitals with little funding and resources. One group has made a difference though.

The WellBody Alliance under the direction of Sierra Leonean native, Dr. Bailor Berry and American Dr. Dan Kelly are leading the way and introducing several outreach programs and services to rural areas.  The clinic has served more than 10,000 patients in the past year up by almost 5,000 from the year before. Unfortunately, there is long road ahead for the people of Sierra Leone. Unemployment has settled around 70 percent, considered an optimistic number by some with little hope in the process for the future.

This photo story explores some of the aspects of healthcare in Sierra Leone.

I encourage everyone to read the piece by Greg Campbell about the rise of child labor labor and the mining industry in Sierra Leone. Click on the link below to read Campbell’s piece.

Something you can do to help Sierra Leone

BorBor Pain translates to “suffering child” in krio. It is no coincidence that Foday Mansaray named his charity school Suffering Child.  Mansaray’s  goal is to free all children from hard labor and offer a new hope to the future of Sierra Leone through free education. This photo essay depicts a small part of Mansaray’s struggle and the conditions from which he is trying to free children. Mansaray himself was a child laborer working in rock mines similar to the ones in Lumlee, Sierra Leone. His childhood was full of relocating fleeing violence and civil war until 2002. He was able to pay for his own schooling and graduated from college  with a degree. Rather than leaving his country or looking for high paid job with some security he returned to the shanty villages that are home to some of the world’s poorest people. Mansaray’s drive is as he says, directed by god.  “It is important because the children are the future of Sierra Leone. What kind of future do we have if we  have no education?”

Those interested can send money via Western Union to: the Borbor Pain Charity School Of Hope or Foday Mansaray at 40 Main Peninsular Road, Adonkia/Angola, Freetown, Sierra Leone, West Africa. Mansaray’s cell phone number is :00 232 76 69 89 79. Email wire details and test question to Mansaray at borborpaincharity@yahoo.com.

(Borbor Pain Charity School of Hope can also be found on Facebook.)

March is one of those months when there isn’t much going on. With the exception of the errant spring snow storm and few spot news calls, March is a month when you really have to look hard and drive far to find pictures fit for the newspaper. So after 2,211 miles driven in a coverage area that rivals the size of the state of Rhode Island, this is the best I have to offer for the month.

So March was a good opportunity to grab the portable light-kit and try some portrait work. Not my strong suit. Enjoy.

Junot Diaz, whose 2008 book "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, spoke Thursday night, March 3, 2011, to a packed audience at Colby Colleges Lorimer Chapel.

Local resident, Dick Sewell, is realizing a lifetime dream by directing a play April 7 at Colby, “The Cuchulain Cycle,” about Irish literary giant William Butler Yeats and the mythical Celtic folk figure Cuchulain. Sewell poses for a portrait March 18, 2011.

Robert Alan Marden is illuminated by a flash from an event photographer Wednesday night at the Elks Lodge in Waterville March 16, 2011. Marden was recognized by the Mid-Maine Chamber of Commerce for the Life Time Achievement Award for his tireless efforts as a community leader and volunteer.

Pastor Rick LeClair, clutches a painting he was able to salvage from his mothers second home at 256 Anson Valley Rd. in New Vinyard on Friday, March 11, 2011, that was nearly destroyed by fire earlier this week.

Valerie Pinkham cares for Camden Cotnoir, 4, who is feeling the onset of the flu during preschool activities at Maines Childrens Home for Little Wanderers in Waterville Friday, March 4, 2011. The school is being recognized by the Chamber for Community Service Project of the Year.

Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans Firefighters from Rome and Belgrade responded to a barn fire at 302 Manchester Rd. in Belgrade Wednesday afternoon.

Emergency medical technicians and firefighters from Waterville Fire Department tend to two victims involved in a multi-vehicle accident on Kennedy Memorial Drive at the Interstate 95 access ramps Friday afternoon, March 18, 2011.

Staff photo by Michael G. Seamans Taylor James Crawford, right, shoots the ball as D.J. Faulkner waits for the rebound in the warm sunshine at the basketball courts adjacent to the Alfond Youth Center in Waterville Wednesday afternoon. Temperatures came close to 50 degrees in Waterville.

Gwen Higgins, left, and her sister, Shannon, both drama students from Searsport District High School, move a piece of the stage set from the hallway to the theater in preperation of their performance, "Thunder on Sycamore Street" at Skowhegan Area High School, Saturday morning, March 12, 2011. The Maine PrincipalsÕ Association and the Maine Drama Council sponsored the 80th annual Maine Drama Festival this weekend.

Written by Leslie Bridgers

Photography by Michael G. Seamans

Scroll to bottom for link to article and photo gallery.

Not Again: A 6-year-old girl fights back after second surgery for spinal tumors

NOT AGAIN: A 6-year-old girl fights back after second surgeryfor spinal tumors

BY LESLIE BRIDGERS Staff Writer

BOSTON — It wasn’t what they wanted to hear.

Just minutes before 5-year-old Jaidyn Logan-Oakes went into surgery, her grandparents got the worst news since they found out another tumor had grown around her spinal cord.

In the pre-operative holding area on the third floor of Children’s Hospital Boston, pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Scott laid out the risks of taking out the tumor, called a low-grade astrocytoma — a type of brain tumor that’s found in about eight Maine children every year and recurs in some patients. Jaidyn had the same type of tumor removed about four years earlier.

Scott’s biggest concern was nerve damage, he told the grandparents. She could lose permanent control of her hands or feet.

And then there was the possibility of total paralysis.

The little girl, who was running on the deck of the hotel swimming pool the night before, might never walk again, they learned.

At 7:30 a.m. on Oct. 25 last year, Jaidyn rolled away on a hospital bed, and her grandparents, Dan and Melissa Logan of Oakland, started waiting.

“It’s scary. Is she going to be able to walk? Is she going to be normal?” Dan Logan said after his granddaughter was taken into the operating room. He looked to the other parents scattered among the couches and chairs in the waiting area. Some slept; others read magazines.

“As sad as it is, there are people in here that have it three times worse,” Logan said. “Then you wonder, is there really a God?”

‘THEY’VE BEEN THROUGH HELL’

Jaidyn and her grandparents had driven from Oakland the day before. They left around noon, after saying good-bye to her two younger brothers, Jusiah and Caylub, who were 4- and 2-years old at the time. Everyone was crying, Logan said.

“(Jusiah) said, ‘If Jaidyn dies, will she still have cancer?’ I said, ‘Jaidyn’s not going to die,’” said Logan.

On their way down, they stopped in Saco for a break. When they got to Kittery, Jaidyn told her grandfather to turn around.

“She said, ‘Grampy, I don’t want to go to surgery,’” he said. “She knows what she’s facing.”

Logan kept driving, though, and they checked into the Hampton Inn on Massachusetts Avenue in Boston around 3 p.m.

After dinner at LongHorn Steakhouse — macaroni and cheese and a hot dog for Jaidyn — she insisted on going for a swim in the hotel pool.

The dimpled blond, in underwear and a SpongeBob SquarePants T-shirt, splashed around the shallow end and swung from the railing on the stairs.

“Once in a while she’ll say she’s scared,” said Logan. But mostly, he said, she doesn’t talk about the surgery.

It was hardly the first hardship Jaidyn had faced in her five years. After having a cancerous tumor removed when she was 18 months old, she underwent chemotherapy treatments every Tuesday for more than a year at Maine Medical Center’s Children’s Cancer Program in Scarborough. She felt weak and tired all the time, her grandmother said.

But even when Jaidyn’s health improved, her home life remained unstable.

Not long after the first surgery, Dan Logan said, her mother, who struggled with substance abuse, lost custody of the children. He said the children have had more than a half-dozen different guardians since then.

“They’ve been dragged around so much,” Melissa Logan said. “They’ve been through hell.”

In July, the children moved in with Dan Logan, their maternal grandfather, and his wife Melissa — Grampy and Mama Grammy to Jaidyn. The couple officially became the children’s foster parents a few weeks before Jaidyn’s second surgery.

“People think they got it hard,” Logan said as he sat on the deck of the hotel pool. He shook his head, talking about the relatively minor problems that seem to upset people.

“They ain’t got it hard, no way,” he said.

GETTING READY

It was still dark out the next morning when they walked from the patients’ parking garage to the entrance of the hospital, where a row of pastel-colored pillars stood like giant crayons.

They had been at Children’s Hospital last April, a few months after an MRI showed that Jaidyn had a new tumor. At an appointment with Dr. Scott, he determined the tumor wasn’t big enough to remove yet. But another MRI last July showed that it had grown, and the surgery couldn’t wait much longer.

On the morning of the operation, the Logans checked into the hospital and sat down among other parents and children. Jaidyn, with two tiny black clips in her hair and miniature bags under her eyes, walked in circles around a fish tank in the middle of the waiting room. Dragging her fingertips along the glass, she did laps around the tank until her name was called.

A nurse brought her into an examination room, where she checked the girl’s blood pressure and took her temperature. The routine was something Jaidyn was used to, her grandfather said.

After she was cleared for surgery, Jaidyn and her grandparents walked into the hallway and waited to go to the pre-operative area. While Jaidyn hopped from tile to tile in the corridor, Melissa Logan sat by a windowsill and started to cry.

“It’s OK, Mama Grammy,” Jaidyn told her.

Soon, the nurse came into the hallway and held out her hand toward Jaidyn.

“Are we ready?” she asked the girl.

THE OPERATION

One in every 1,000 children is diagnosed with cancer, which translates to about 12,000 children in the country per year, said Dr. Stanley Chaleff, a pediatric oncologist at Maine Medical Center in Portland.

Of those children, about 4,000 have brain tumors and just less than half of those are astrocytomas. The Maine Children’s Cancer Program treats about 50 children with cancer every year and seven or eight usually have low-grade astrocytomas, like Jaidyn, said Chaleff, who specializes in neuro-oncology.

The placement of Jaidyn’s tumor — on the spinal cord rather than the brain — is particularly rare and difficult to operate on without causing nerve damage, Chaleff said.

After learning just how risky the surgery would be, her grandparents were more scared than ever before.

“I just want to run away,” Melissa Logan said.

Still, they found comfort in knowing who was performing the operation. Scott, the chief neurosurgeon at Children’s Hospital, is also a Harvard Medical School professor. Dan Logan had checked out his credentials online.

“They say he’s the best,” Logan said.

Scott told them that the surgery would likely last into the evening. So, once Jaidyn left for the operating room, they set up in a circle of cushy chairs at the end of a long, narrow waiting area lined with windows looking out onto a city street. Logan plugged in his laptop and logged onto Facebook to update friends and family about what they’d heard.

“After seeing her as healthy and happy as she is, to see her in a wheelchair just wouldn’t be right,” Logan said.

Every couple of hours, a family liaison from the hospital came out into the waiting area with news of how the surgery was progressing — they’re making the incision now; she’s doing fine.

Then something happened around 3 p.m., and the surgeons had to stop.

Jaidyn was still on the operating table when Scott came out to the waiting area to talk to her grandparents. Dressed in scrubs, he knelt on one knee next to their chairs. There was good news, he said; the tumor was essentially benign. But during the operation, Jaidyn lost feeling in her right leg. He didn’t know if she’d be able to move it when she woke up.

“In 48 to 72 hours, we’ll get a better idea,” Scott told them. “We’ll have to cross one bridge at a time.”

It wasn’t until 5 p.m. that the Logans got to see their granddaughter. Lying in the intensive care unit, she told her grandfather that her leg felt like it was stuck to the bed.

But, as Dan Logan was kissing his granddaughter’s face — her cheeks as red as a Raggedy Ann doll’s from lying face-down on the operating table — he saw her wiggle her toes. Then she moved her right foot. A few minutes later, she went to roll over and picked up her entire leg.

“It was joy,” Logan said. “She’s a fighter and that just proves it.”

HOMECOMING

A siren sounded from an Oakland police cruiser waiting in a parking lot with dozens of other cars, as Jaidyn and her grandparents drove off the Sidney exit. Four days after her surgery, they were almost home.

The parade of some 40 cars followed them for the last few miles — from Sidney, through the center of Oakland, to her home on Bonnie Avenue. They parked on the lawn and filed through the house to shake Jaidyn’s hand as she sat on a recliner in the living room.

For about a week after that, her right leg would give out every once in a while, Logan said, or she’d complain that she couldn’t feel her foot. But those symptoms soon went away, and she returned to Atwood Primary School, where she’d started kindergarten a few months earlier.

Since then, Jaidyn celebrated her sixth birthday in December. For Christmas, she got a child-sized snowmobile and was out riding it right away, Dan Logan said. In April, the entire family is going to Disney World.

“If you looked at her today and watched, she’s like a normal kid. You’d never know anything was wrong,” he said.

But Jaidyn’s battle isn’t over. There’s a real chance the tumor will grow back. She could have to undergo the same surgery every three years for the rest of her life, Logan said. Sometimes the tumor could just need to be removed; other times it could require chemotherapy, the doctors told him. Regardless, he said, it’s scary.

“Every time they go in to do something there’s always a chance something could happen,” Logan said.

Chaleff said astrocytomas recur in 30-40 percent of patients, but the chance of a tumor coming back decreases with age. Repeating surgeries in the same area, however, poses its own problems.

It’s more difficult to operate through scar tissue, he said, making nerve damage more likely.

Jaidyn’s next MRI is scheduled for August. If nothing has changed, her grandmother said, she won’t have to go back to Boston for another year.

For a patient like Jaidyn, all doctors can do is continue to watch her closely, Chaleff said, and “let her be a kid.”

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there were 11 new posts, not bad for the first year! There were 326 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 269mb. That’s about 6 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was April 21st with 694 views. The most popular post that day was 4/20 Marijuana Smoke-Out: Ten Thousand take flight in Boulder with out leaving the ground..

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, chadbutrick.com, mail.live.com, digg.com, and michaelgseamans.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for chad jukes, chad butrick, christa brelsford, michael g seamans, and heidi brelsford.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

4/20 Marijuana Smoke-Out: Ten Thousand take flight in Boulder with out leaving the ground. April 2010
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Third Annual Gimps on Ice 2010-More Fun Than Shooting at Cars. March 2010
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Two Climbers, Two Feet and Two Mountains: The Beginning March 2010
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Two Climbers, Two Feet and Two Mountains: Guest Blog by Climber Chad Butrick March 2010
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Two Climbers, Two Feet and Two Mountains: In Chad Jukes Words April 2010
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