Mercy Trucks West Africa Project

To truck medical aid and equipment 4,600 miles from the UK down through Europe, North Africa and across desert down to Guinea Bissau to set up Mercy Trucks West Africa.

Mercy Trucks is embarking on more projects to bring hope and healing to some of the needy parts of the world. Mercy Trucks is a volunteer relief organization who work to link resources to needs by using trucks, shipping containers and other forms of logistics to undertake relief initiatives with speed and efficiency.

Mercy Trucks is running community development projects in Sri Lanka, which began in 2005 when we responded to needs after the disaster of the South Asian tsunami. Mercy Trucks also runs a mobile dental unit in the Ukraine.

The founders of Mercy Trucks, Roy and Catherine Dixon recently returned to the UK to set up another exciting project to help bring free health care and community development to some of the people of Guinea Bissau, one of the poorest countries in West Africa.

Guinea Bissau, located between Senegal and Guinea, has seen its share of trouble and pain. The BBC recently said, “Once hailed as a potential model for African development, Guinea Bissau is now one of the poorest countries in the world…Compounding this, the country experienced a bitter civil war in the late 1990’s in which thousands were killed, wounded, and displaced.” (www.bbc.co.uk) The average healthy Guinea Bissaun expects to live 40 years and for its’ population of 1.6 million, there are 0.9 dentists, 122 nurses/midwives and 16.6 physicians for every 100,000 people. (www.who.int)

This is the third year of our West African project, and the second time that Roy will have driven a lorry from the U.K. to Guinea-Bissau. We are setting up a project to convert second hand shipping containers into mobile medical clinics. Roy has made a ramp and winch system to load/unload the containers from the side of the trailer. This is an efficient method of logistics allowing mobile medical clinics to be taken to the poor and needy in isolated communities throughout Guinea Bissau and hopefully later, other parts of Africa. However while setting up this, our third project this year, the Pakistan earthquake disaster struck. We now have a tight schedule to finish collecting, sorting and packing blankets and medical aid for the volunteers to give out in Pakistan, then to take the truck and tailor full of medical equipment down to West Africa and set this new project going.

The Mercy Truck vision is to help link resources with needs while encouraging and making it easier for volunteer teams to be able to undertake outreach projects in remote locations.
If you would like more information about the Guinea Bissau project and/or Mercy Trucks other projects, please email info-uk@mercytrucks.org or phone 0870 126 9120.

Please consider partnering with us in this exciting project by sponsorship. A total of £1.00 per mile is needed to cover the costs for the 4,600 mile journey. If more funds are raised, this will help towards setting up the medical logistics project in West Africa.

Donations can be made in a number of ways:

• In the UK, At any branch of Lloyds TSB quoting the Mercy Trucks account number, 00875982 / Sort code 30-94-19
• Sending a Cheque made out to "Mercy Trucks" to: Mercy Trucks PO Box 73, Hexham, NE47 0YT
• Via Credit or Debit card, by clicking on the "DONATE NOW" button on the side of this page
• Via Bank transfer Mercy Trucks account details are:
  Mercy Trucks - Sort code 30-94-19 - Account number 00875982, Lloyds TSB Bank, Priestpopple, Hexham, NE461PA, England
• International Bank transfer Via IBAN IBAN number GB 33 LOYD 3094 1900 8759 82
• International Bank transfer Via BIG SWIFT SWIFT code number LOYD GB 21554

The Truck leaves the UK on January 9th 2008 and will take aproximately 14 days to reach Guinea Bissau. Please see below for Roy's accounts of his journey and the latest updates on his progress.

>Most recent news

>Roy's travelogue

>Mileage Chart from UK Guinea Bissau