Saturday 24 January 2015

Swimming Libby

Just like the rest of our family, Libby is an amazing athlete. She's good at running, is trying at netball, and is a BRILLIANT swimmer. Today we went to the local Time Trials, in which she won 3 out of 4 categories in her age group, and came overall first in Butterfly, even beating kids way older than her.


Her swimming coach thinks she's got a good future ahead of her as a butterfly champion. Olly 

Friday 23 January 2015

5 months later...

It's been over 5 months since I last wrote a blog entry. Whilst Britain is in the midst of another damp winter, West Africa continues to fight Ebola. About 8,500 people have died, and maybe up to 20,000 people have been infected. The international community has, at last, responded, and Ebola treatment centers are set up all over Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia, staffed by medics from around the world including the UK, the US, and even China and Cuba. The message is finally getting through, and the number of new cases is dropping, and the treatment centers are seeing less and less new cases every day, and more and more people surviving. And as I write this, 300 experimental vaccines are arriving in Liberia, to start the long process of testing to see if the population can be vaccinated against this disease.

I'm reading a great book about the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, that an acquaintance of ours wrote:


In Harm's Way - A View from the Epicenter of Liberia's Ebola Crises, by Nancy Sheppard.

Nancy and her family are long-term missionaries to Liberia, and we were privileged to know them during our time there in 2006/2007. They have been working in Liberia, or with Liberian refuges in neighbouring countries since 1986. Awesome people. Book available on Amazon.

Olly