Partners and Volunteers Make a Difference in East Africa

Throughout the month of June, our teams in East Africa welcomed several visitors. We are honoured to work alongside so many gracious partners and dedicated professionals who offer their expertise to advance the mission and help more vulnerable people. Read to see how each of them came alongside our local teams and communities.

CRADLE Training

Dr. Raphaelle (delivery agent for King’s College, London) and Josephine (new midwife at our new clinic) partnered together to deliver CRADLE training in Kajo Keji, South Sudan. They spent time with the Kajo Keji government hospital, as well as several clinics. Josephine will continue her work with ongoing support and training to the midwives that attended, and then reach out to the clinics who could not be present. At 3 different locations in 3 days, the team has trained 30 midwives from 12 of the functional clinics (including the Kajo Keji hospital).

The CRADLE device is a life-saving semi-automated blood pressure/heart rate device, designed to World Health Organization standards for such settings. It has a unique traffic light system which can inform even a non-medical user if a pregnant woman is at risk or not. If the device light flashes red, this clearly indicates that the lady needs urgent treatment. By providing training and devices to hospitals and clinics in the refugee settlements, we’re ensuring women with high-risk pregnancies are identified and referred for care quickly and effectively.    

Gait Training and Assessments

We were blessed to have Brooke Barisich, long-term HHA volunteer and physiotherapist in Haiti, return to East Africa once again to provide ongoing gait training education for the physiotherapy team at New Hope Disability Centre. Additionally, she helped assess and treat patients during our mobile clinic in Kajo Keji, South Sudan.

Gait training is a type of physical therapy (PT) that seeks to improve an individual’s strength, balance, mobility, and coordination. The training focused on how to assess walking, identify specific problems for amputees walking with prosthetics, how to fix them either with PT or by adjusting the prosthetic, and an outcome measure test for walking speed.

Leadership Training and Team Building

Christian Jackson, Brooke’s fiancé, is an experienced nonprofit leader, and we’re so glad it worked for him to join Brooke on this trip. He spent time with our staff at New Hope Disability Centre, as well as with the staff and students at Amazing Grace Primary School. All of the training sessions provided encouragement and renewed vision for this important work.

The core of an effective team is trust and clear communication. Christian helped facilitate several team building activities that exemplified and helped grow these values within our teams. At Amazing Grace, he demonstrated some activities that teachers can facilitate with students that bring a lot of joy and excitement for school. The smiles and laughter throughout proved the training effective!

Wheelchair Follow Up

HHA and Walkabout Foundation have been in partnership since 2021. Since then, as a direct result of this partnership, thousands of wheelchairs have been distributed to those in need throughout Haiti and East Africa!

A few members of their team recently visited our team in Uganda! Together we visited some of our past beneficiaries to see how they're doing and check if their chairs need any adjustments or maintenance. As part of Walkabout's Repairs Project, the teams also went out to the field to carry out some much needed chair repairs.