Hawanatu Fofonah, age two, was happy to receive two dresses and two pairs of shorts a few days before Christmas. Hawanatu has been living with her mother, who is one of several patients being treated for abscessed jaws or oral tumors through Africa Surgery’s oral surgery program in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Eight of these patients, including Hawanatu’s mother, live a distance from Freetown and therefore are being lodged and fed at Africa Surgery’s facility until fully recovered.
The dresses and shorts are part of a consignment of girls’ and babies’ clothing made by volunteers who donated them to the Filippini Sisters at Villa Walsh Girls’ Academy in Morristown, New Jersey, who in-turn donated four boxes of the clothing to Africa Surgery’s container-supply drive last September. A few very-poor girls wore new clothes for the first time this Christmas and in the New Year.