sometimes you have a niggly feeling
about things you're not happy about
about the way things are going if you're
frustrated and dissatisfied and so often
we choose to live with it it's a
negative that we tell ourselves we have
to endure and yet I passionately believe
that we all have the ability to turn
that negative feeling into a positive by
allowing our dissatisfaction to give
birth to change on the 6th of January
1999 I was working in London when the
news channels began to report the rebel
invasion of my hometown Freetown Sierra
Leone thousands of people lost their
lives and there are bodies littering the
streets of Freetown my husband's elderly
aunt was burnt alive and I thought of my
own two-year-old as I saw images of
little children with amputated limbs
colleague said to me how could we help I
didn't know so I began to call the
telephone numbers that came up on my
screen as international aid agencies
started to make Appeals to raise money
to address the tragedy the vagueness of
those telephone conversations
disappointed me it felt like the people
who are raising the money seems so far
removed from the crisis and
understandably so but I wasn't satisfied
and I wasn't convinced that the
interventions that would eventually
implement would actually have a level of
impact that was so clearly needed there
are butterflies in my stomach for days
as I continued to watch forest unfold on
television and I continuously asked
myself what could I be doing what should
I be doing what I wanted to do was to
help children affected by the war so
that's what we did
myself my sister and some friends
started the Syrian war trust for
children s LWT we decided to focus on
the thousands of displaced people that
fled the fighting and were now living in
really poor difficult conditions in
camps in Freetown our work started with
the Ross Road camp at the east end of
the city
working with a local health organization
we identified about a hundred and thirty
of the most vulnerable single mothers
with children under the age of five
supporting them by providing business
skills
microcredit whatever they asked us
working in those difficult conditions
just getting the basics right was no
small task but our collective sense of
dissatisfaction at an unacceptable
status quo kept us focused on getting
things done some of those women went on
to open small businesses we paid their
loans and allowed other mothers and
their children to have the same
opportunity they did and we we kept on
going in 2004 we opened an agricultural
training center for X child soldiers and
when the war was behind us we started a
scholarship program for disadvantaged
girls who would otherwise not be able to
continue in school today
Stella one of those girls is about to
qualify as a medical doctor it's amazing
what a dose of dissatisfaction can burn
ten years later in 2014
Sarah Lewin was struck by Ebola I was
working in Freetown at the time on a
hotel construction project on the 25th
of May when the first cases were
announced but I was back in London on
the 30th of July when the state of
emergency was announced the same day
that many airlines stopped their flights
to Sarah Newlin I remember crying for
hours asking God
why this why us but beyond the tears I
began to feel again that profound sense
of dissatisfaction
so when six months after those first
cases had been confirmed
the disease was still spreading rapidly
in Sierra Leone and the number of people
infected and dying continued to rise by
level of frustration and anger got so
much that I knew I could not stay than
watch the crisis from outside Sara Leone
so in mid-november I said goodbye to my
much loved and very understanding
husband and children and boarded a
rather empty plane to Freetown freetime
was now the epicenter of the outbreak
there are hundreds of new cases every
week I spoke to many medical experts
epidemiologists and ordinary people
every day everyone was really scared we
won't succeed until we're talking to
people under the mango tree so said
doctor yotie a Ugandan doctor who worked
for whu-oh and who had been involved in
pretty much every Ebola outbreak in
Africa previously he was right and yet
there was no plan to make that happen so
during a weekend in early December I
developed a plan that became known as
the western areas surge plan we needed
to talk with people not at people we
needed to work with the community
influencers so people believed our
message we needed to be talking under
the mango tree not through loudspeakers
and we needed more beds the National
Ebola response center Newark built on
and implementing that plan and by the
third week of January the number of
cases had fallen dramatically I was
asked to serve as a new director of
planning for Newark which took me right
across the country trying to stay ahead
of the outbreak but also following it to
remote villages in the provinces as well
as to
urban slum communities on one occasion I
got out of my car to call for help for a
man would collapse on the road I
accidentally stepped in liquid that was
coming down the road from where he lay I
rushed to my parents house washed my
feet in chlorine
I'll never forget waiting for that man's
test results as I constantly checked my
temperature then and throughout the
outbreak the Ebola fight was probably
the most challenging but rewarding
experience of my life and I'm really
grateful for the dissatisfaction that
opened up the space for me to serve this
satisfaction can be a constant presence
in the background or it can be sudden
triggered by events sometimes it's both
with my hometown that's the way it was
for years our city had changed and it
caused me great pain I remember
childhood growing up climbing trees
picking mangoes and plums on the
University campus and my father was a
lecturer went fishing in the streams
deep in the Botanical Gardens the
hillsides around Freetown were covered
with lush green vegetation and the
beaches were clean and pristine the
doubling of the population of Freetown
in the years that followed the civil war
and the lack of planning and building
control resulted in massive
deforestation the trees the natural
beauty were destroyed as space was made
for new communities formal and informal
and for the cutting down of firewood I
was deeply troubled and dissatisfied it
wasn't just the destruction of the trees
and the hillsides that bothered me it
was also the impact of people as
infrastructure fails to keep up with the
growth of the population no sanitation
systems to speak of
a dirty city with typhoid malaria and
dysentery I didn't know the statistics
of the time but it turned out that by
2017 only 6% of liquid waste and 21% of
solid waste was being collected the rest
was right there with us in backyards in
feels rivers
I'm deposited in the sea the steps to an
address that deep sense of anger and
frustration I felt didn't unfold
magically or clearly that's not how the
power of dissatisfaction works it works
when you know that things can be done
better and it works when you decide to
take the risks to bring about that
change and so it was that in 2017 I
ended up running for mayor because I
knew things could be better
it seemed that people agreed with me
because I won the election today today
we are implementing an ambitious plan to
transform a city well and when I say we
what gets me really excited is that I
mean the whole Freetown community
whether it's being part of competitions
like rewarding the neighborhood that
makes the most improvement in overall
cleanliness or whether it's our programs
that are leading and joining people and
waste collectors through our apps in
Freetown today it's a much cleaner City
and those trees that were so well known
for we planted 23,000 of them last rainy
season and in 2020 we plan to plant a
million trees as part of our Freetown
the tree town campaign
sometimes sometimes we have a niggly
feeling about things we're not happy
about the way things are going we feel
dissatisfied and we feel frustrated we
can change that negative into a positive
if you believe that things can be better
then you have the option to do something
rather than to do nothing the scale and
circumstances of our situations will
differ but for each of us we all have
one thing in common we can take risks to
make a difference and I will close
insane step out take a risk if we can
unite behind the power of
dissatisfaction the world will be a
better place thank you
[Music]