In August Doug Ingram (our COO), Daniel Magagnin (Regional Relationship Manager) and Ella Marshall (Regional Relationship Officer) travelled to Freetown, Sierra Leone to visit the Anglican Church within the diocese and to assess the progress of the construction of the Mount Zion Training Centre.

The visit followed the team’s time in the Diocese of Guinea, and as a result started not at the newly opened Lungi International Airport, but at the border crossing point at Kambia in the north of the country.  Thomas Wilson, the Bishop of Freetown hosted the team throughout their visit, which started with him picking them up at the border with breakfast! 

The first stage of the visit was to travel to the parishes in the north of the diocese.  There are two dioceses in Sierra Leone – Freetown and the North, and Bo and the South.  The northern region is very different to Freetown insofar is it is very rural and has few large towns.  Visiting the parishes allowed the team to start to understand the challenges that are faced by the parishes, as well as understand the bishop’s aspirations for the region in the coming years.  Despite the poverty and challenges faced by the church, it was wonderful to see the rural parishes and the team also met with some young men in their early 20’s who were planting a church in Kambia, an area that to date has no Anglican church.  A unfortunate part of the visit was getting the Bishop’s new vehicle stuck on a road visiting one of the parishes; but fortunately the team was saved by some ingenious and very amused villagers.