Esther Conteh first came to us in January, 2016. She presented with the right side of her face ballooned out, her jaw being shifted to the left by a tumor. She had been previously been working as a police officer, but had to give up her job due to the appearance of the tumor. We had Esther start receiving weekly chemotherapy treatment from our oral surgeon in Freetown, but her tumor only grew larger.
In 2017 we were able to send Esther to the Kijabe Hospital in Kenya. There her tumor was successfully excised, and she returned to Sierra Leone. However, despite the surgery, the tumor had eaten away so much of her lower-and-upper-right jawbones that her face was left with a large divot, and she wore a sling to hold the right side of her mouth
closed.
I was very surprised on April 1, 2019, when Esther turned up where we were unloading supplies from our storage container. She was nicely dressed, no-longer needing the sling to hold her mouth closed. I learned that she is now living in our village just a few houses away from our storage container and that she has been reinstated as a police officer.