Lesley Hunt is a consultant colorectal and general surgeon in Sheffield, UK. Since 2013, she has been working for the surgical training program and other organisations, in Sierra Leone. She has undertaken 30 missions to the country, teaching basic skills, abdominal surgery and proctology. Her focus from 2017 to 2021 was developing local trainers to deliver courses. During the pandemic she produced a distance learning program for Sierra Leone. She led work to establish comprehensive syllabuses for general surgery courses in West African. She supervised a Masters project in surgical education finding differences in surgical learning between trainees in Sierra Leone and the UK. In Sierra Leone emergency surgeons are trained in two years, necessitating a pragmatic and rather didactic approach. When Lesley introduced teaching methods developed for Africa, to the early year’s simulation training she provides for Yorkshire and Humber trainees, she found this immensely popular with UK trainees.