Location: india

Images of India

See the slideshow of all the amazing pictures from my recent trip to visit Hands to Hearts in India.

Orissa Shines!

Our Orissa partners, Viswa Yuva Kendra (VYK), have been working with HHI for almost 2 years and they have not only been enthusiastic in leading HHI‘s training throughout their state, but they have been busy! Since July of 2007, they have led 46 trainings, for ICDS workers (similar to the US’s Head Start teachers), creche center workers, village mothers and orphanage caregivers. In total, they have trained 582 women!

And, they are only gaining momentum, having just trained in a new HHI Trai ner, Bharati, who comes to HHI with years of experience in leading public health trainings in the community.


This group clearly is enjoying Bharati and the fun of learning about how children learn.

My gratitude goes out to Manoj Mohapatra for his leadership and advocacy, Tapaswini Panda for her excellence in training and to Bharati, our newest team member.

HHI’s Village Mommies

Since last June, Sujatha, HHI’s Master Trainer in South India, has been leading HHI trainings for village mothers. In only 9 months, she has now served 32 villages, training mothers and grandmothers and in some places fathers and grandfathers who are welcomed to participate. The results are now rippling through this rural area of South India, where most families live off of agriculture or micro-businesses, but remain in the grips of poverty.

I have been sharing beautiful stories and pictures from these trainings since they began, but it wasn’t until a week ago that I was able to visit this area myself. It is a whole different experience first hand, much deeper, richer, and more multi-faceted. My first visit was to a tribal group, who had only just moved out of living in a small set of caves a few years ago. I described some of that experience in the blog entry before this one.

Then I was able to visit an amazing program called Reaching the Unreached, where HHI has provided training to foster mothers who parent orphaned children, many that are HIV+, but living healthy and full lives due to the love of their new families. When I entered the preschool classrooms at RTU, my heart beat in my throat when all of the children jumped to their feet at the sight of Sujatha and immediately began singing and dancing to one of the songs she taught them last summer. See the joy:

I also was able to visit 4 rural villages where I met dozens of mommies, their babies and children, all of whom had attended an HHI training. They gathered together to talk to me, to share their stories about the impact of what they learned from HHI and the difference it has made for their children and in their communities. Again and again, I heard reports that the women had changed their hygiene practices; boiling feeding bottles, covering food from flies, bathing the children more often and using soap, and that they kept themselves cleaner, especially in preparation for breastfeeding and before they prepared food.


They told of feeding their children a wider variety of foods to provide more nutrients. Women were also practicing baby massage, on their babies and by request for their older children. Many of the mommies also reported that they spent more time interacting with their children, talking and singing to them more often. They noted that their infants were learning language faster than their older children had. Best of all, in 3 of the 4 villages, the women reported that they were so happy with the lessons they learned from HHI, that they were teaching their friends and family members so they could better provide for their children. One of the HHI trainees was an Assisting Nursing Midwife. She works with pregnant mothers around the district and she eagerly told me that she now teaches her expectant and new mothers about the importance of hygiene, nutrition and early childhood brain development.

The seeds of knowledge that HHI has planted are taking root in the fertile soil of capable women who may have been deprived of a formal education, but are intelligent and want to provide the best life possible for their children. Knowledge is a gift that keeps on giving, creating a ripple effect that is now showing up in the health, weight, and language development of the youngest generations of 32 villages (just in the last 9 months in Tamil Nadu alone). HHI will continue to promote health, emphasizing the daily actions any parent can take to pave the way for a better tomorrow.

Tribal Village ~ Time Travel

I have spent the last week visiting HHI training sites in the state of Tamil Nadu. It has been an almost indescribable experience, India at times gives you the feeling of traveling through time. The first site I visited here with Sujatha, HHI’s local trainer, was a tribal village of 20 families. This group was living in a cave on the side of the mountain until about 3 years ago, when the government built them a modest, and semi-modern village at the base of the mountain. The motivation from the government was that at the top of this mountain is a sacred temple and is therefore a significant and increasingly trafficked pilgrimage site. They now have cement homes, a nearby school (which some of their youngest are now attending as the first generation to receive a formal education), they also have running water, and satellite dishes for TV.

So, 20 families lived in here… likely hundreds of years.The space is as small as it appears, though there was a small upper chamber that I didn’t wish to venture into barefoot (my shoes were held at the bottom of the mountain, as I was considered to be on sacred ground).


The mommies here are as young as 13-years-old and they are married most often to much older men and polygamy is the norm, with each man having 3-4 wives. They are very eager to grow their tribe and each woman has 2-5 children. This group was a fascinating glimpse into a completely unknown world to me. I was very curious about what they learned from HHI’s training and what of that did they choose to apply. With the help of Sujatha translating, I was able to learn that they had understood some of HHI’s core lessons, mostly in regards to hygiene. Previously the babies were not so much toilet trained, as left alone to soil the floors of the cave and now more recently the houses. The mommies reported that they now understood the health and sanitation issues that this caused and they were more attentive, taking the young ones outside and encouraging toileting there, as well as cleaning them after.

Other answers were about the women keeping themselves and their children cleaner, particularly for the hygiene of breastfeeding, but again ensuring improved hygiene for all the children with more regular bathing, which was demonstrated behind me by an older brother while I was speaking with the mothers.


The whole concept of attending a training was a very new idea to this group, as none had even attended any formal schooling, nor any type of training before. They were a lively group, preferring movement to sitting and activities to lecture – luckily HHI is designed with these ideals firming in place and they had a very positive first experience.


My compliments to Sujatha for her work with these mommies and also, my compliments to these mommies for being willing to learn and try new things in effort to provide their children with better health.

Visiting in Kerala

This week I have been visiting HHI’s training center in Kerala, India. For the last few days, ten pre-school teachers participated in HHI’s education about the importance of early childhood development and they learned how they can best support children’s healthy growth and development during their most critical developmental time. These women work for the government’s ICDS program, which are early childhood development centers that focus heavily on improving nutrition for the villages with the most disadvantaged and high risk children.

And, of course, they enjoyed singing, dancing and playing with the children! They shared their favorite songs and dances with me, then asked me to return the favor. I put on an impressive Hokey Pokey dance, but I allowed no photographic evidence of this, you will just have to trust me!


Some of these women have been working in their jobs for 26 years! But, they were eager for the information from HHI. They appreciated the small and interactive classes, where they were asked to be creative, to talk, to share and to come up with solutions that they face daily with children. They were excited to learn lessons about child development and came to recognize that some of the children in their centers are delayed, but now they knew how to better support them. The women were also enthusiastic to take their lessons learned back to share in their monthly Mother’s Meetings in the villages, where they are the main community resource person for all parents. They left the training with a greater grasp of child development, new tools and information to lead children and their families to success and with a new sense of pride in the importance of their work.



Now, I am off to Tamil Nadu to meet the village mommies taking HHI trainings.