©InfoAbout 1.5 million children under five die each year from diseases related to poor water and sanitation. To Faty Togbah, this is more than just a statistic.
Faty, 26, lives in Kornemah, which is a remote village in the Liberian jungle that can’t be reached by road.
As she feeds her six-month-old baby, she says: “I was born here and I remember when we used to drink from the creek named ‘Neamen’ which means ‘jump over it’.
Water and sanitation
“When we’re sick we have to walk almost five hours to get to Walala district clinic to seek treatment. A lot of people used to get diarrhoea and some died,” Faty says.
“Fortunately, in 2004, the Liberian Red Cross came to our aid. They started by building the hand-pump well in the middle of the village and two toilets.
“But they did not stop there. They gave us drinking buckets, pots, mosquito nets and seeds for communal farms.”
Health education
The British Red Cross has been supporting the Liberian Red Cross health programme for the past five years. Community involvement is key to the programme, which includes contributing materials and labour, such as moulding of bricks, and providing gravel and sand for building wells and latrines.
We work with the community for a minimum of three years to ensure people can begin meeting their own health and hygiene needs.
“The whole community has benefitted greatly from the Red Cross health education. Everything is alright with me, because my two children have not suffered one day from diarrhoea or cholera,” Faty says. “Also, I always make sure we sleep under the mosquito nets so we don’t get malaria.”
Watch a video about Jeneh and how she's moving on with her life after the civil war