Amelia and Richard knew they wanted to change their lives dramatically and help other people. <\/p>\n
The couple from Stoke-on-Trent, along with their three children, are uprooting their lives to volunteer on a hospital ship off the coast of Africa.<\/p>\n
Richard has recently trained as a counsellor, which he said gave them an opportunity that “just seemed to fit really well with our calling, our life and professionally as well”.<\/p>\n
The family will be joining the charity Mercy Ships, which operates two vessels deployed to some of the poorest countries in the world to offer free healthcare.<\/p>\n
“You can think of Mercy Ships as floating hospitals,” Richard told BBC Radio Stoke. <\/p>\n
“They seek to give medical care, life-changing surgery to people of nations that wouldn’t be able to access it normally.”<\/p>\n
The family will be joining the ship for 11 months as it docks off the coast of Ghana.<\/p>\n
“It’s wonderful partnership,” Richard said. “The countries are always excited when the ships are coming.”<\/p>\n
Amelia first found out about the charity when she was a radio producer, hearing about a family who moved across the world to work on the ship outside Sierra Leone.<\/p>\n
“It opened my mind that a family like ours, who were not medical, could work for Mercy Ships,” she said.<\/p>\n
“I never thought it was possible that someone like us could support that ministry.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Amelia and Richard knew they wanted to change their lives dramatically and help other people. The couple from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":661271,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[102,2960,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-661270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-healthcare","tag-health","tag-healthcare","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=661270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/661270\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/661271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=661270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=661270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=661270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}