Salisbury City Football Club has shown its support for the charity ‘Operation Hernia’ by donating several football shirts to the mission in Ghana.

Operation Hernia is a charity created to assist in the treatment of hernias in low and middle income countries. Hernias are a big problem in these places, not just because of the sheer amount of hard manual labour the people there face every day, but because of the lack of readily available medical facilities.
Cases that would be a routine day surgery in the U.K. are often left untreated for years.

Whites fan, Sarah Hasted, is a volunteer for the charity. Every year she travels to Northern Ghana to assist a small team of U.K. surgeons and nurses in performing as many operations as they can. The village Sarah travels to is a 10-hour bus journey north from the capital of Accra, where a very rudimentary hospital has been set up in a converted building at a local Christian Mission.

For this year’s trip, Sarah went to the mission with Salisbury City shirts for the local people who give up their time for the charity. “We are assisted in this task by a wonderful group of people who work at the mission, and who take time from their normal jobs to work with us as hospital porters, translators, or assist with laundry, cooking and lots of other jobs that help the project to be so successful.”

“It was to our group of translators/porters that I gave the shirts. They worked with us every day from early morning to late at night, looking after the patients before and after their surgery and we couldn’t do it without them. I cannot speak highly enough of them.”

Pictured in their new shirts, Sarah was hopeful she’d converted a few new fans! “I know they would probably have preferred Michael Essien Chelsea shirts, but I like to think Salisbury FC will have a special place in their hearts now – not least because I was glued to my mobile phone every Tuesday and Saturday – desperate to find out the Salisbury score!”

(From left to right: George, Matthew, Sarah, Richard, Emmanuel and Nelson)

Salisbury City Chief Executive Paul Fredericks was glad to see the shirts go to a good home. “It’s a very worthwhile cause and fantastic to see one of our own supporters dedicating themselves to something like this. Supporting charities is very important to us at this Football Club and we were only too happy to offer Sarah the shirts. It’s great to hear we’ve made some new fans!”

The Mission was a fantastic success this year. 160 people were operated on in 206 surgical procedures (some patients had two or even three hernias) over the two weeks.