By Olusegun Ogundeji

An American businessman is enlisting support from President Ernest Bai Koroma to build a power plant and new schools in Sierra Leone .

According to a reliable source, Robert Bradsby is planning to build several schools, a school lunch programme with an infirmary for which he has scheduled to meet the President on Sunday May 11, in Freetown.

"Basically, they need everything," Bradsby said. "That's the problem. It's impossible to pinpoint one thing they need most. It's hard to figure out where to begin, actually," Bradsby said as he expressed the belief that Koroma will embrace his plans for helping the people of Sierra Leone, like other high-ranking officials he's met with in the past.

"From what I understand, he really wants to help," Bradsby said about President Koroma after admitting that rebuilding Sierra Leone will not be an easy task. He also pointed out that with time and outside help, the nation could one day flourish.

Bradsby's first visit to West Africa was a business trip to Guinea over 14 years ago when he submitted a bid to purchase the nation's telephone company.

Fourteen years and 59 trips to Western Africa later, Bradsby is now preparing to meet with President Koroma.

Though his bid to buy the phone company was rejected, he was committed to helping the area after witnessing the poverty and living conditions in that part of the world.

"Hundreds of thousands of children die from malaria every year," he said. "Many women die during childbirth because they don't have proper medical care. It's terrible."

So when he returned to Southeast Texas, Bradsby sent a 40-foot container packed with health supplies to Guinea and the rest, he said, is history. He later purchased a two-storey building in Conakry , Guinea and converted it into a 14-classroom school and church.

Bradsby sees helping the people of Guinea and Sierra Leone as paying it forward. "I feel a calling to try and improve their living conditions and their nations," he said. "They inspire me to no end. They are so poor but they have a wonderful spirit."