Recently, HHI staff Laura Peterson and Sujatha Balaje traveled to Uganda to work with MTI staff, key community stakeholders and village mothers to learn more about the community interest and needs in regards to early childhood development (ECD). This was a beginning step in Medical Teams’ four-year Child Survival Project that HHI is supporting with expertise and training for improving early childhood development and thus child health.

We received a very warm welcome from MTI’s team, as well as all the Village Health Teams and the mothers that we spent time with, gathering information and local insight.

We specifically spent our time in the northern region of Uganda, with communities that are just returning to their homes and land after spending years surviving in refugee camps to escape their country’s civil war. Having been in camps for years kept people alive, but led to other traumas and disrupted the lives and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people, most of whom are now returning to their abandoned homes. This population is now trying to reconstruct their lives, their families, their tiny plots of farm land that have overgrown, and their small businesses, all in a landscape that has almost no infrastructure for water, health care, communications or travel, let alone the luxury of child care centers of nursery schools. Although there was so much these mothers lacked, what was apparent to us was how much they gave to their children. They were gentle, kind and committed to giving their children the best they could and they were eager for more information about how they could support their children.

We are excited to return in July to work with MTI to integrate HHI’s trainings into these communities via the Child Survival Project.