PHOTOS: Healthcare in Sierra Leone

A power outage doesn’t stop doctors from performing emergency procedures at the Freetown hospital.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

A woman is prepped for a C-section at Princess Christian Maternity, where the power had come back on just minutes earlier.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

An expectant mother waits on a gurney before surgery. Sierra Leone, a country of 6 million, has four obstetricians.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Marion Kagbo, 17, reaches toward the bassinet where her baby should be. She does not yet know it was stillborn.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Marama Kamara, 17, holds her baby at Princess Christian Maternity. Considered one of Sierra Leone’s best hospitals, it nevertheless suffers from a lack of running water and medications.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

The hospital’s maternity ward. World health officials fear that West African countries such as Sierra Leone are unequipped to identify and cope with new diseases that could spread globally.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Dr. Ibrahim Thorlie, chief of medicine at Princess Christian Maternity, has grown increasingly frustrated with the power outages, shortage of drugs and low pay for his staff. Many of his colleagues left for more lucrative jobs in the U.S. and Britain, but he chose to remain. “If I didn’t stay,” he said, “who would?”  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Nurses Ajaratu Davis, right, and Kadiatu Jalloh complain to a Health Ministry official about the low pay for those in the medical profession. Doctors say they often pay nurses out of their own pockets to ensure they’ll show up for work.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Lamin Bangura, 27, is a former child soldier who now operates a motorcycle taxi in Freetown. Large numbers of those former rebels are unemployed, and their anger, combined with their military training, poses a threat to Sierra Leone’s political stability.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Twenty people live in this makeshift house. Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war in the 1990s drove people from the countryside into Freetown, the capital, and today a city built for 250,000 is home to 10 times that number. Tens of thousands camp out in shacks on a lush mountainside with views of the Atlantic but no clean water or electricity.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Work is underway on a market in Freetown, a city mostly devoid of signs of economic life.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Men converse on a bench in Freetown. A lack of infrastructure has hindered economic development in the capital, where vehicles inch along narrow roads jammed with pedestrians. There are no traffic lights.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

Jonathan Harding, 63, gets by on tips from motorists outside Freetown, where he works on his own to shore up a road with rocks dug up from the countryside. He says he once worked on a highway maintenance crew but was fired for accusing his boss of corruption.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

A mother of three breaks stones to sell to people building homes and structures.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)

The village of Grafton outside Freetown. More than $1 trillion in foreign aid — a major chunk of it from the United States — has been pumped into Africa over the last half-century. But on most of the continent, people are poorer and less healthy than before.  (Liz O. Baylen / Los Angeles Times)