Davina McCall

I’ve visited Kingsville. I’ve met the people struggling to make a better life for their kids. This is your chance to meet them too — please visit every week and hear their stories with me.

Read extracts of Davina's diary from her trip to Liberia.

“Liberia is not like any other African country I have visited.

I learnt that not many homes have electricity so everyone hangs out at bars or by the street lights. Children even gather under street lights to do their homework.”

“Monrovia has lots of greenery, its potential is HUGE. The scenery dramatic, the people lovely. A nation ripped apart by civil war, slowly…very slowly trying to come together.”

“I met Agnes and her three year old daughter Baby Girl. She was so perfect and sweet and Agnes was so graceful.”

“We went to Kingsville to a school, a long building, not very big with 447 pupils. I spoke to the headmaster and he told me some of the problems the school was facing. They only have a few trained teachers, there was no play area for the kids at break time, no books, not enough chairs, none of the teachers were being paid, and lots of the kids couldn’t afford the school uniform. Even with all these problems I looked in each class and saw eager faces, looking at the board, listening intently because they really want to learn. Some of them walk miles to get there.”

“We left the school and went to the market — a big rural market, where suddenly all of us with our camera became the main attraction. It was the first time since I’d got here that I felt a little afraid. We did our filming and said goodbye to everyone and went to the clinic that Save the Children had built and pays for. It was basic but brilliant, a vital lifeline for the local community offering medicine and a place for women to see the midwife and also give birth. How they stored their medicine I don’t know because they didn’t have a fridge. Or any electricity for that matter!

“I watched as mothers and babies had injections and check ups, and just generally sat around chatting to mums and playing with kids. I could have stayed there for hours but we had a curfew to honour and we had to head back to Monrovia.

“It was an hour and a half back and I had time to reflect. Think about how as a mother it is in built in me to cherish and care for my children, and how horrific it would be to not be able to do that. Or to have to walk for hours to get help. Some of those children don’t have hours and doctors told me that the rate of children dying before they are a month old is very high.”