At five months old, Memunatu developed a lump on her neck. In Sierra Leone her mother, Aminata, was told it was a cold. The mass kept growing. By ten months it was nearly the size of the baby’s face, pressing the airway, making swallowing, crying and sleep dangerous. Local hospitals said she was too young and too fragile for surgery. A CT scan later showed the left jaw joint beginning to dislocate. The tumour was benign. Left alone, it would have suffocated her.

Aminata kept looking. At a children’s hospital in Freetown she met Anne-Marie van Tonder, a South African Mercy Ships volunteer delivering food. Van Tonder referred them to the Global Mercy, the charity’s hospital ship in port. Preoperative manager Krystal Franke pushed the case onto a full schedule because of the infant’s age and the scans. Consultant maxillofacial surgeon Leo Cheng of the Royal London Hospital, a long-time Mercy Ships volunteer, took the case. Intubation was the first crisis: the airway was already compromised. Under anaesthesia for about five hours, Cheng spent nearly four hours dissecting the mass off the carotid vessels and recurrent laryngeal nerves, millimetre by millimetre, to avoid bleeding and nerve injury. The team reported no neurological deficit. Swelling fell. Memunatu could breathe and feed in her mother’s arms. They went home to Port Loko. Aminata said that without the ship the child would have died.

The photographs — a baby whose neck once hid her face, then the same child lifted laughing — are Mercy Ships’ usual argument in one frame: safe surgery is scarce in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and a benign mass can kill as surely as a malignant one if no one will operate on a ten-month-old. Cheng’s line after the case was the same he uses after two decades of volunteer lists: access is not a luxury.

Sources
Mercy Ships, “Meet Memunatu” and South Africa field story
Keep The Faith / Royal London Hospital profile of Leo Cheng’s Global Mercy case (November 2025)
Sierra Loaded and allAfrica reprints of the Mercy Ships press release
APO Group statement quoting Cheng on millimetre dissection and airway risk