Morie Abibu, a 56-year-old father of three, lies on a hospital bed in the humid Sierra Leonean heat. He is paralyzed from the neck down. After months of immobility, his soft muscles sag and pool on the bed, barely hanging onto bone. A mass is growing at the base of his skull, pressing against his spinal cord. And as it grows, it obstructs the nerves that control his breathing. He is slowly suffocating to death.
Abibu needs neurosurgery to remove the deadly pressure.
“Without it, he will have a devastating end of life,” says Dr. Marco Lee, past president of the Western Neurosurgical Society. “When your breathing starts to go, it’s like this constant feeling of drowning.”
That would have been Abibu’s fate before this year, but today, he is at Connaught Hospital under the care of Dr. Alieu Kamara, the first and only neurosurgeon in Sierra Leone. After starting his practice at the beginning of January 2025, Kamara carries the neurosurgical disease burden — traumatic injuries, spinal paralyses, seizures, brain tumors — of an entire country of eight million people.
“Before Dr. Kamara, there was no hope,” said Dr. Kehinde Oluwadiya, acting chief medical director of the University of Sierra Leone Teaching Hospital Complex. “If you are lucky and rich, you will go to another country and be treated. But if you are not, it’s either you die or you live with a lot of disability.”
Five months after Kamara’s practice began, April Sabangan, CEO of Mission Brain — a California-based nonprofit advancing global neurosurgical care — along with two surgeons from Stanford, Dr. Seunggu Han and Dr. Silvia Vaca, visited to support the fledgling service.
Connaught Hospital’s surgical ward consists of two operating rooms shared by all surgical specialties, three rotating anesthesiologists and a team of nursing staff. Kamara is the only doctor in the new neurosurgical department.
There, they met Morie Abibu.
An incision is made, the power goes out
Before Abibu’s surgery, the operating room must be set up. Bolsters to support him are improvised using rolled-up surgical gowns wrapped in masking tape. Someone climbs a ten-foot ladder to replace the burned-out ceiling bulbs. Another nurse swipes at the flies that had snuck in before the surgery using an electric-powered swatter — to prevent any from landing on the sterile field.