A campaign to feed courageous African amputees started by veteran volunteer Doctor Keith Thomson has now raised more than £3,700.

Doctor Thomson, 72, a former anaesthetist at Slough's Wexham Park Hospital who lives at Winkfield Road, North Ascot, met the struggling amputees while walking on the beach in Sierra Leone earlier this year.

He is a veteran volunteer of the 'mercy ships' that used to tour Africa giving medical treatment to people in need.

He was in Africa this year to attend the wedding of a woman whose life he had saved when he paid for her mother to have an emergency Caesarian operation that saved both their lives.

Seeing the members of the Freetown Amputee Football Club on the beach playing their favourite game despite their disabilities made him want to help. They are mainly young men and women in their 20s who lost limbs when still small children during the brutal rebel invasion of 1999.

Many live a hand to mouth existence made worse by the current lockdown.

Doctor Thomson has started a fund raising website publicised in the Slough Observer to help them and it is going well.

Donating £27, the cost of a 25 kg bag of rice, will feed a footballer and a few dependents for a month.

Doctor Thomson is home now - but receives pictures from the Freetown Amputee Football Club coach Albert Mustapha showing the food being given out.

Doctor Thomson said: "The Freetown Amputee footballer feeding program is going well. The team coach Mr Albert Mustapha has now distributed 240 bags of rice to 80 footballers and their amputee supporters. This has cost £3,300 out of a total of just over £3,700 which has been raised so far.

"During this difficult time of intermittent lockdown in Sierra Leone, the footballers would like to express their gratitude to members of the Slough and Windsor Observer readership who have considered helping others who are in an even more difficult situation than themselves."

You can contribute by visiting https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/SomeoneSpecial/Food4footballers

PICTURES BY ALBERT MUSTAPHA