Help the kids of Kroo Bay

NG Kids and Save The Children need your help to make a difference to the lives of young people living in Kroo Bay, Sierra Leone, in West Africa
 

 


Kroo Bay is an extremely poor area in Freetown, the capital city of Sierra Leone, West Africa. It's built on the banks of the filthy Crocodile River. People throw their rubbish into the river and it all ends up in Kroo Bay, making it literally – a dump. Children bathe and play in the river, which is also an open sewer. Each year the river bursts its banks, spewing the filthy water into people's homes. There is a health clinic but it looks after 18,000 people in the area! Everyone who lives in Kroo Bay has had enough and they want our help to transform it into a better, safer place to live.  

Meet the Kroo Bay kids

Madlyn loves to hear jokes, play music and watch films and Bilan and Chris are football mad. In these ways they are very similar to you, but their lives are also very different. Madlyn, Chris and Bilan live in Kroo Bay where there's no electricity, no running water and only two toilets between 6,000 people.


Bilan, 12 (above)
Bilan says: "My friends and I go to the river to search for plastic to recycle and sell. Sometimes we find toys too. We collect stuff throughout the year. But in the rainy season the water can get very cold. I often get sick. I always have diarrhoea. When I'm ill, my mother calls the Blue Flag Volunteers [nurses that have been trained by Save The Children]. Before, my mother had to buy medicine from the drug peddlers [people selling medicine] or from the pharmacy. She goes to the Blue Flag Volunteer now because the treatment is free."

Madlyn, 7, and her brother Chris, 13 (above)
Madlyn says: "If I could talk about Kroo Bay to children in the UK, I'd tell them the things we have and the things we don't have. We have a clinic, we have some public toilets, taps and a football pitch. We don't have good houses, some houses are broken and made from zinc. We only have one school. Some girls my age have to go and collect scrap metal, or they have to beg in the street. They do it because their parents don't have enough money. They bring the money home and then their mother can cook some food. But me and my brothers don't have to do that."

Chris says: "Football is very popular in Kroo Bay, everyone likes to play! I've played for more than five years and have been with my team for two years. For my team, Young Stars Of Kroo Bay, I play number 9. I am an attacker. I like attackers because of [Chelsea's] Didier Drogba, and I have number 9 just like him. We play in an under 14 competition every year and just won a final recently. At Christmas, we play the east side of the bay against west side of the bay."

But now you can help by leaning more about their lives through Save The Children's new website www.savethechildren.org.uk where you can watch videos, find out how to help and even write emails to Madlyn, Chris and Bilan


Five things you can do to help Kroo Bay

  1. Get your class together to organise a fundraising event. You could wash cars, have a cake sale or a sponsored run. Don't forget to send us the pictures though!
  2. Go to www.savethechildren.org.uk where you can donate money directly to Kroo Bay. You can also email Madlyn, Chris and Bilan telling them what you are doing to help.
  3. Write a letter to your MP telling them you want them to do more to help Kroo Bay.
  4. Join the Save the Children petition to tell our government that they need to keep their promises about saving children's lives around the world.
  5. Don't forget about Kroo Bay – it will take time to make it a great place to live and that means they will need your continued support.

Keep your eyes peeled in NG Kids magazine ngkids.co.uk as we will be keeping you updated with how you have made a difference to Kroo Bay.