A little bit of seasonal cheer was brought into Kingsville, Liberia, last week when the first consignment of aid paid for by The Sunday Times appeal was delivered to the village just in time for Christmas Day.

Kaytor Kowo, midwife at the local clinic, was overcome with emotion when she saw the sacks of mother-and-baby kits arriving. The clinic, supported by the British charity Save the Children, is the only medical facility for miles and is short of even basic equipment.

So the arrival of the nappies, blankets and soap for babies and the scissors, aprons and forceps for trainee midwives was a cause for celebration.

“I feel very happy and excited,” said Kowo. “Many mothers here have had nothing to wrap their baby in but today it is a different story.”

Liberia’s child and maternal mortality rates are simply horrifying. One in nine children does not make it to his or her fifth birthday and many die within a few days of being born. Children in Kingsville routinely fall ill or die from measles or tetanus, diseases that have been all but eradicated in the West. Others are felled by stomach upsets and diarrhoea.

One in 12 women dies in childbirth, leaving behind many motherless children.

The causes are simple: some women do not stop bleeding after birth or die of infections that could be treated easily by a course of antibiotics.

The Sunday Times Christmas appeal aims to change that and to improve the life of every person who lives in Kingsville in the coming year. Aid is often thinly distributed and, as a result, has little impact. We want to focus on one community and create tangible change that makes it a decent place in which to live.

“We’re talking the basics here: saving babies’ lives, making a decent education available and bringing clean water into the village,” said Susan Grant, Save the Children’s director in Liberia. “It can all be done, but we need help.”

In a tough financial year we are grateful for any donation, however small. If every person who bought The Sunday Times were to give just £1, we could transform not only Kingsville, but also a number of villages in the surrounding area.

So far the appeal has raised more than £65,000, enough to put the first part of our plan into action — but to make it all happen we need more help.

Even small amounts of money can make a vital difference: £1 buys a vaccination that will save a child’s life; £5 buys a high-quality mosquito net that a family can sleep under and be protected from malaria, another killer in west Africa.

The prospects of newborn babies who can be kept clean and warm using the baby kits delivered last week — at a cost of £25 each — will be dramatically improved. We would also like to boost the clinic’s life-saving, but faltering, vaccination programme by providing a refrigerator to keep vaccines cool and effective.

Until now the clinic has been the only really safe place to give birth in Kingsville, a community so spread out that some women would have to walk for up to two hours to reach it, impossible in the final stages of labour.

The “midwife kits” that accompanied the supplies for mothers and babies last week will be distributed to the “traditional” local midwives who are being trained to spot danger signs and to deliver babies cleanly.

As the kits were arriving at the clinic, engineers were testing sites for a water pump that will ensure the people of Kingsville have clean water to drink.

Many have had stomach upsets after drinking from the decrepit old pump in the village — which has a cracked, concrete base infested with cockroaches — and Agnes Chea’s two-year-old daughter Pianlo died last summer after drinking water there.

You can “meet” Chea and hear her tell her story on our specially created Kingsville website, which allows you to look around the village and the school with Davina McCall, the television presenter, as your guide.

Education was made compulsory and free by Liberia’s government — led by Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, Africa’s first woman president, who has brought peace and stability after years of civil war — but there is not enough money to make a decent education a reality.

Save the Children has agreed to support the school over the coming year. Its primary class has one teacher for 113 children and the classrooms are bare, with dirt floors and walls. There are no pens, pencils, paints or books. “I dream of a library full of books,” said Charles Dennis, the headmaster. “One for every child.”

Over the next year we want to make his dream a reality. Please, please help.

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