It's 430pm and myself and Clare are waiting to board a flight which gets us going onthe first leg of our trip.
We will arrive in Freetown tonight at about 330am via Casablanca.
For a bit of background to the trip, while you'd be forgiven for thinking Ireland and a small west African nation called Sierra Leone have absolutely nothing in common, just like the inferior health system mothers and babies once experienced in Ireland - as late as 1949 more than 50 of every 1,000 babies died before the age of one - women in Sierra Leone face an uphill struggle to access any kind of healthcare.
The country, which is trying to find its feet after a brutal civil war which ended in 2002, has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
For every 100,000 live births in the west African nation, as many as 1,800 women die. And every year another half a million pregnant women die each year because they can't access healthcare.
According to a 2008 Unicef health survey, out of every 1,000 children, 140 die before they reach their fifth birthday.
Although it may be more than a half a century ago in Ireland, it is still difficult to comprehend that in 1949 one child in 16 born in that year did not live to see her or his fifth birthday. Diarrhoea and enteritis were the biggest killers of babies. Tuberculosis and other preventable and treatable diseases swept through the nation, killing older children. It was only in 1951 that the Catholic Church backed the medical profession in strongly opposing a proposal for free medical care for mothers and children.
It was only last year in Sierra Leone that something like that scheme has become possible for women and children. From April 27 2010, all treatment and medicines for pregnant women, lactating mothers and children under five in Sierra Leone are being provided free of charge in all government health facilities. Around 1.2 million mothers and children will benefit from the abolition of fees which acted as a barrier to treatment for most people and which contributed to the many maternal and child deaths in Sierra Leone.
How the scheme is being rolled out on the ground and what impact it will have remains to be seen but it seems as though the will is there. Sierra Leone is a country desperately trying to drag itself out of poverty, to rehabilitate and care for its citizens who firmly believe in its future.
The health of its woman and children are paramount to this recovery and during this trip myself and Clare hope to find out how the policy is being implemented on the ground.
So that's it folks. Tune in for more who knows when - hopefully tomorrow. We are not yet sure what kind of access we'll have to the Internet but should be pretty steady. (This turned out not to be the case so unfortunately a live blog was not possible but we have since updated the blog with more to follow).
