Girls' home given fresh lease of life by RFA Mounts Bay's crew

A home for vulnerable girls in the West Indies has been spruced up thanks to the efforts of British sailors.

Crew of support ship RFA Mounts Bay used their two-day visit to Antigua to carry out a raft of improvements and repairs to the Good Shepherd Home for Girls, which provides residential care for up to a dozen girls aged between four and 18 who are in need of supervision and protection.

More than a dozen crew from all departments of the ship, plus retired sailor Mike Rose of the Royal Naval Tot Club of Antigua and Barbuda which supports the home, picked up tools for a day's toil.

They tackled cabinets and doors, repaired windows and some electrical fittings and provided computer assistance, allowing residents to get online.

"It was a pleasant change to volunteer and assist at the care home - we left it in a better state than we found it," said 3/O Liz Nelson-Taylor, a systems engineer aboard Mounts Bay.

"I particularly enjoyed fixing the residents' computers and the highlight of the day for me was the home's resident puppy - a new addition that received a lot of attention and took great interest in the flurry of activity going on around him. We left the home in a better state than we found it."

Her ship is on a three-year deployment to the Caribbean with a varied mission: to support the international fight against drug running, visit and reassure British territories in the region, and assist - as Mounts Bay did last autumn - in the aftermath of a hurricane or other natural disaster striking the region.