Empower Magazine Fall 2022 : simplebooklet.com

HelloAs I thought about my letter for this magazine you are reading, I thought I should share that it was produced by one of our recent interns. Thanks, Nyakeh! We are so blessed that God brings talented young people to us every year and season to expand the breadth and depth of the work we do. Frankly, I think the way we handle internships, the way we view these special additions to our staff is brilliant. I have to brag that it is one of the things we do very, very right.We encourage our interns to ﬁnd value in choosing this work in their vocation and avocation, and by the time they leave us, they have accomplished something they can point to as a career achievement. It may help to shape the work they choose to do in the future.For example, the Together for Global Health coalition was the continuation of two internshipprojects and became a calling for HCW Technical Advisor for Global Health and Missions Yasmine Vaughan when she joined us on permanent staff assignment upon her graduation. Program monitoring and evaluation improvements often come from internships. The Rising Tides forums, Breaking Bread Table Fellowships, social media engagements, including Optimistic Voices Podcast, even the child protection policies, these are end results of successful projects begun by interns.all my dear friends, old and new!Letter from the desk of the EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR2 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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My pitch (of course, there’s a pitch) – dear friends, share this information with your friends. If you know someone in advanced studies looking for a role that will enhance their career and learning, or an educational institution looking to offer that, tell them interns at HCW don’t just run errands, ﬁle and fetch things. Yes, they do all that, but so does every other member of our team. We learn best by teaching, and I personally learn so much every year by being open to inﬂuences of college students in advanced studies. These young people are introduced to the work with a lot of heavy reading and education for the ﬁrst week or so. But then we welcome them into our workforce and throw them right into the deepest end of the pool where we’re swimming that season. Occasionally, when opportunity arises, we send interns overseas.Whether it’s for a semester, a year, or longer, at HCW we challenge interns to tackle difﬁcult and complex projects and problem-solve barriers to success alongside the professional team. They are mentored as they engage with partners, volunteers and stakeholders across cultural divides and geographical boundaries to bring resources and best practices to empower local ownership of solutions. In the future, we would love to enhance the scholarship work of the CRC to offer internships to advanced studies students living in Africa, to enrich their careers and lives. But that’s a topic for another letter.CONTENTSEDITORIALEXECUTIVE DIRECTORMelody CurtissCONTENT & RESEARCHLaura HorvathEmmanuel M. NabieuYasmine VaughanDESIGN & LAYOUTNyakeh V. Kamara PROOFREADINGLinda ReinhardCONTRIBUTORSDavid T. MusaKatie MilazzoPHOTO CREDITSMohamed NabieuYasmine VaughanDavid T. MusaProgress in the Transition to Family-based carePG: 4-7 | 8-11A typical day for Mercy Hospital’s matronPG: 12-15Gentle but Hard: A Nursing Student’s Experience of Mercy HospitalPG: 16-173 Steps for Cultivating Sustainable Cross-Cultural Partnership in MissionPG: 18-21Join Optimistic Voices podcast in conversations about Child Welfare, Global Health, Short Term Missions and morePG: 22-23Strengthening and empowering families and communities.We operate through partnerships with people and organizations interested in ﬁnding solutions to the fundamental causes of child poverty and morbidity.Executive DirectorMelody Ctiss, J.D.3www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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Leading the charge to get kids HOMEDAVID T. MUSASenior Consultant,Transition, Coaching, and Mentoring Department Child Reintegration CentreThe CRC operated as an orphanage for up to 18 years providing shelter, food, clothing, psychosocial counseling, health care, and education. During the 18 years that the Child Rescue Centre operated as an orphanage, it was a residential care model, recognized as providing the best care for vulnerable children in Sierra Leone, and as one of the best orphanages in Sierra Leone. However, with all the opportunities created for these vulnerable children, we began to realize that the bond between children and their families and the attachment, care, and attention that is needed by every child to thrive was absent. No matter how good the CRC was, it could never replace the family for these children. When we decided to transition from a residential to a family care model, we did an assessment on our own children, and discovered that 98% of the children in the orphanage by then had a living parent or relative. We just needed to help them to be able to care for their children.After much research on the importance of children growing up with their families and after conducting an assessment of the children living in the CRC orphanage, the CRC transitioned from a residential care model to family care in 2018 and became the ﬁrst child welfare organization to successfully transition in Sierra Leone. With this new vision, the Child Rescue Centre ofﬁcially became the Child Reintegration Centre.Because of this achievement, HCW and the CRC with support from 1MILLIONHOME, created the Transition, Coaching and Mentoring (TCM) Department to teach other residential institutions how to transition to family-based care. The TCM now leads other organizations in the country and throughout the West African region in reintegration, case management, and family strengthening training to reach a wider population of children, families, and communities in these areas.Rising Tides Reunion participants explore solutions to get children home to their families. CRC’s TCM Senior Consultant David Musa leads a workshop for journalists and media personnel on why children need to grow up in families and not orphanages.4 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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Since the establishment of the TCM Department, we have been engaged in offering various training opportunities to organizations and individuals. This includes but is not limited to:• A two-day Rising Tides Family Reuniﬁcation training for major child protection agencies in Bo, Moyamba, Kenema, and Pujehun Districts 2020.• Attachment Theory train the trainer workshops, to teach social workers in other organizations how to help caregivers understand trauma and form healthy attachments with children being reintegrated with them - for major child protection agencies in Bo, Moyamba, Kenema, and Pujehun Districts 2021.• A ﬁve-day International Rising Tides Family Reuniﬁcation Workshop for over 150 participants from Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria in 2021.• Attachment Theory train the trainer workshop for 15 organizations in Freetown in February 2022.• Child Status Index Training for All for One organization Freetown in 2022• Attachment Theory train the trainer session with Red Meets Green Social Workers in Monrovia Liberia in 2022.With these trainings, the CRC has been able to reach and teach over 270 case managers/social workers and 85 organizations in Sierra Leone and beyond.The TCM department has engaged the media on major radio stations in different parts of Sierra Leone and Liberia to educate the general public in these regions on the importance of family reuniﬁcation and the need for children to grow up in safe, strong and permanent families. And these mediums had wide coverage that reached thousands of people across borders. Speciﬁcally, we have been engaged in:• Radio interview sessions from three radio stations in Monrovia and Ganta-Liberia in February 2022.• Live radio discussion programs on Family Reuniﬁcation in Bo and Kenema Districts in 2021, and 2022• TV interviews and broadcasting of TCM activities on African Young Voices (AYV) TV in Sierra Leone.We have also continued the education and advocacy work by Social workers attend a TCM training at the Child Reintegration Centre5www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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sharing the message during presentations on Family Reuniﬁcation at the 2022 United Methodist Liberia Annual Conference as a step to transition the Bishop Judith Craig Children’s Village in Monrovia.We made a similar presentation of annual report on the activities of the CRC and advocating for local sponsorship in the United Methodist Sierra Leone Annual Conference in March 2022.We are also in partnership with the regional and national Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs ofﬁces to develop programs and conduct training on family reuniﬁcation that will complement the effort of the government and other international organizations for de-institutionalization in Sierra Leone and beyond.Because of the low level of understanding people who are not engaged in child protection and most importantly those who are engaged in it but have limited ideas beyond orphanages, many organization leaders in West Africa see it as almost impossible for them to succeed in transitioning their model of care. This creates more fear and increases barriers/obstacles because they have no access to resources that can provide authentic and strong evidence of successful family reuniﬁcation programs to build their conﬁdence and help them to break those barriers.This is an important part of the TCM activities because, providing mass CRC’s TCM Reintegration Ofﬁcer, Rosamond Palmer presents to social workers and orphanage leaders on family reuniﬁcation and the importance of children growing in families.The activities of the TCM department expand the work of the CRC, allowing children all over the world to be reunited with families.6 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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education and advocacy will disseminate rich research information to heads of institutions, board members, key stakeholders, decision-makers, and the general public on child reintegration and family reuniﬁcation, updated child rights acts and the current state of child protection policies, as well as the clear evidence of the successful transition of the CRC’s orphanage to a family care model. And this is our stepping stone for the TCM’s training and coaching approach.Because of these activities by the TCM, staff in this department and the CRC as a whole are receiving tremendous rewards. The department and staff are widely known by many organizations in Sierra Leone and throughout West Africa, as leaders in transition and coaching for changing the way we care for orphans and vulnerable children and their families. The government of Sierra Leone has recognized the good reintegration work of the CRC TCM Department. We have also been recognized internationally in different parts of the world through HCW and 1MILLIONHOME as a leading organization in reintegration in this part of the globe. This work continues to build staff capacity in various courses relating to child reintegration and family reuniﬁcation.The key goal of the TCM is to assist orphanages to become successful in transitioning their model and to have more children be reuniﬁed with their families. However, there are challenges faced by the department in achieving this goal. With the fear of losing donors, funding and loss of jobs amongst other barriers, lead organizations are still dragging their feet in taking the ﬁrst step towards achieving this goal. Scheduled individual organization meetings are sometimes turned down. There is always a question of ‘where can I get support if my donor decides to turn down my new approach?’ Coaching an orphanage to shift their model is a long process, and most organizations begin very slowly. In the beginning, most organizations just want to make use of our resources and training opportunities, continue running their programs as they already are, but will decide later on the next step. We hope by building trusting relationships and continuing to educate and advocate with these organizations, they’ll continue to keep on the journey toward transition to family care.With the gradual impact the TCM is creating on organizations since 2020 to date, the vision for the TCM department is to have a ‘Sierra Leone without orphans/orphanages and for the TCM department becoming an international consultancy for the West African sub-region and beyond for family reuniﬁcation.’CRC’s TCM team and social workers from various child welfare agencies enjoy a Rising Tides Reunion in Bo, Sierra Leone. 7www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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My name is Katie Milazzo, and I am currently the Acting Director of the Child Prosperity Centre in the Wellington area of Freetown. The Centre is part of the work supported by All for One, which supports various child welfare organizations in 26 different countries. Our site was originally conceived of as a 200 bed orphanage, but after a chance meeting between Richard Wernick of Sierra Leone International Mission School, and Melody Curtiss and Emmanuel “Nabs” Nabieu from Helping Children Worldwide, the program has taken a dramatically different approach. That ﬁrst conversation launched many more, ultimately resulting in a partnership MOU between us, HCW, and the Child Reintegration Centre in Bo.Our work in Wellington now focuses on family permanency and our primary work is on reintegration of children back into their families, and reunifying those families and making them whole again. The vast majority of our cases right now, however, are about family preservation - essentially, trying to prevent children from becoming separated from their families in the ﬁrst place. These are families expressing desperation and showing signs of potentially needing to give up their children due to treatable and ﬁxable circumstances - most of these driven by extreme poverty.For any case coming into our program, we cover education costs and medical costs. We also want to strengthen and build the capacity of caregivers to provide for their children, so that they don’t become dependent on us, but can achieve independence in time. The direct caregivers of any child on our caseload can and are recommended to participate in our strengthening programs/training, which include: Literacy, Computer Skills, CV Building, Mock Interviews, Job search support, Attachment Theory (helping caregivers heal trauma and form strong attachment with their children), and access to micro-loans. Families are on case management in our program for an average of 18 months, some less and some more depending on the needs of the case, but we tell families we’ll be there with support for them for 18 months in order to build the expectation that families will need to work toward their own independence. We also provide interim care for children where we have concerns about their safety and protection, while we seek to ﬁnd and secure a safe and permanent family solution for them. Additionally, we provide daycare for single parents of children who are not of school age yet, so that caregivers can work. We’re ﬁrm believers in the power of partnership and collaboration, and we’re proud to partner and work with the CRC, HCW, World Hope International, Handicap International, the Ministry of Social Welfare, and the Ministry of Gender and Children’s Affairs.We’re just getting started, but we are proud of our success so far. We’ve reintegrated ﬁve children from our interim care back into families. We currently have 13 children in our interim care. Eleven of these are on track for reuniﬁcation in near future; one is moving toward independence and being prepared for that transition because she’s 17 years old. We are providing various types of support and family strengthening in 48 9www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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cases of families we’ve kept intact (we call these ‘family preservation’ cases) or post-reuniﬁcation cases. We’ve also been able to provide emergency response for major events and catastrophes in the area (like a recent vehicle explosion and ﬁre in our own neighborhood, and the roof collapse of a housing unit next door). This has included providing contact tracing for families separated in the wake of these emergencies, helping to ensure family permanency in disasters, and the ability to provide medical support liaising for victims.This work is not easy, and there are many challenges, the largest of which is changing the wider community’s perception of best practices - both locally in Sierra Leone, and in the United States. It’s difﬁcult to effectively The Child Prosperity Centre is located in Wellington, Freetown, Sierra Leone. Located very close to the wharf, Wellington is one of the poorest communities in the Freetown area. The Child Prosperity Centre is located about half a mile from the location of the deadly oil tanker explosion that occured in November of 2021, which killed 151 people. The CPC assisted by undertaking the task of contact tracing for the victims of the accident. 10 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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promote family-based care as the best model of care for children when orphanages have been an accepted model of care for so long. Ensuring not just that every child has a family, but also that the family has the capacity to care well for their children requires funding, and even though the research is clear that it is 8 - 10 times less expensive to support families caring for their own children than it is to care for a single child in an orphanage, it’s extraordinarily difﬁcult to get people to make that shift. Funding is always a challenge, both locally and internationally. And because this is children’s lives that we’re talking about, it’s unethical to do that ‘on the cheap.’ Ethically to do this work, we must do it as well as we can. One way that can help with this is to establish a dedicated donor base, but this takes time and relationship building. And ﬁnally, getting local police and legal structures to uphold child rights in actual practice - in the form of timely police reports, follow-up for perpetrators of crime, etc., would be helpful - which is also challenging in a place where the government infrastructure needs capacity building as well.Despite all of the challenges, we remain hopeful, largely because of the collaborative network we’ve plugged into. Our current partnership with HCW and CRC provides us with the opportunity to continue to build our own capacity through training and coaching of our staff offered by CRC. HCW has been providing international support and is assisting our AFO HQ with ideas about developing donor relationships and effective communication of a change of model of care, as well as support for policy development, and collaboration on best practices in child welfare. HCW also provides advisement on cases at AFO as part of ongoing training and capacity building, and we’ve begun to build a referral pathway between CRC and AFO for effective case management and services, covering a larger region of Sierra Leone in a much more coordinated way than has ever been possible in Sierra Leone before. I think the future looks very promising for the Child Prosperity Centre and AFO writ large, because of the strong collaboration that exists between HCW, CRC and AFO. CRC’s Transition Coaching and Mentoring Department has been able to partner with us in offering training opportunities to social workers and leaders of other child welfare organisations in Sierra Leone, enabling us to grow the national network of child welfare actors seeking to ensure that all children grow up in families, and broaden the referral pathways throughout the country. Through this partnership we are building the capacity of local leadership to be able to run this site as a centre of excellence in child care that will become a globally recognized model like the CRC is. For our site in Wellington speciﬁcally, we’re working on ways to rent portions of our enormous facility to other partners who offer varying services as a way to provide more effective, holistic care of families. We’d like to expand our portfolio of training courses to meet continued and new needs of the community we’re serving, and I’d like to see the site become a hub for training on family care programming for the entire Western region of Africa. AFO is already engaged in child welfare in 26 countries. Globally, I believe that AFO can engage in the transition of other AFO-supported orphanages throughout the world, and eventually provide site-speciﬁc family-care programming and training in each of these countries, and enter into the global conversation about best practices as a player on the world stage. The Child Prosperity Centre works to strengthen families so they don’t become separated.11www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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Tell me a little about yourself. I am Augusta Kpanabum, the Matron (head of nursing care) at Mercy Hospital. I am married with two children, a boy and a girl. My role here is to take care of the nurses, and manage medical supply inventory and I work directly under the supervision of the Chief Medical Ofﬁcer, Dr.Stevens. On average, I supervise a staff of 20 nurses. I have worked at Mercy for over 7 years. What is your background in medicine?I began with a SCCHN degree, which is State and Whole Community Health Nursing. After that, I furthered my cause to do the SRN--that is State Registered Nursing. After that, I went to do my midwifery to help with maternal and child mortality rates in this country. After that, the former Bishop awarded me a scholarship to go to Zimbabwe to do my ﬁrst degree. And when I returned back, I applied to do my Masters in Public Health,and was awarded a Ginny Wagner scholarship through HCW. So, I now have a masters degree. I also have experience in theater nursing so I can assist the Doctor-- I scrub with him, do different surgeries. I sometimes assist maternity patients with difﬁcult deliveries. I’m always rounding, to make sure the nurses work according to what they’re supposed to do and everything works well. I do direct supervision and give them support. What does a typical day look like for you? Each morning we begin with morning devotions, and then each department gives a report to me on the activities of the day. Normally after morning devotions, I make sure I go round to cross check the nurses like those that did night duty. I have to take the report book and go through the workbook to check the report they sent to me to know which patients are in critical conditions, or which ones need urgent referral or attention. Then I will discuss [those patients] with the doctor. Then after doing the top wards, I will go to maternity if they had a recent delivery. I check on the mother and see how she’s faring on together with the baby. We had a twin delivery yesterday and I understand that she has not been giving breast [milk] to the children, so I have to go around her and encourage her, so that she will try to produce small milk so and start breastfeeding to prevent hypoglycemia in the children. I check at the pharmacy to make sure they have their daily drugs., the essential ones for the day. I also cross-check at the pharmacy and drug store, to ensure everything is in order. Finally I come to my ofﬁce, sit down and try to round up with the A typical day for Mercy Hospital’s matronIn my previous two trips to Mercy Hospital, I have had the pleasure to get to know the hospital’s matron, Augusta Kpanabum. Matron is always immaculately dressed, either in her nurses’ uniform or business casual attire, a symbol of her double role in administration and patient care. She has a warm smile and an easy laugh, but do not let that fool you. When it comes to patient care, she is very serious about her work and the professionalism owed to her patients. I have seen her scold nursing students for uniform violations during morning devotions or reprimand the staff for not being prepared for the activities of the day. She can be stern, but it is clear in everything she does that she cares deeply about the work of treating the sick. She wants things to be done well, because she knows that the health and conﬁdence of her patients depends on this. She runs a tight ship and expects a lot out of her staff, but never more from them than she expects of herself. She is often the ﬁrst to arrive in the morning, and the last staff to leave in the evening before the night shift comes Matron also knows the patients at the hospital very well. During the diabetes screening and treatment clinic I attended, she operated the pharmacy, dispensing drugs for the treatment of the patients. More than once she sent a patient back to the doctor because she knew the patient had diabetes and had not told the doctor, and therefore was not getting the right prescribed medication. With the help of Melissa Herbolsheimer, a missioner on the July team, I sat down with Matron Augusta to talk about one of her passions—her work at Mercy. WRITTEN BYYASMINE VAUGHANTechnical Advisor for Global Health and Missions, Helping Children Worldwide13www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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nurse’s roster, because I also prepare the roster for the month. Then I’ll be in and out in and out to make sure everything is OK, before the day ends. I’ve been here many times and I have never seen you in this ofﬁce. Of course, of course I’m all over! I have to make sure everything works right, because we are here because of the patients. The patients are not here [in her ofﬁce] therefore I am not supposed to always be in here. When I come [to the hospital], what is expected of me to be done should be done before I leave at the end of the day. Going back to this mother who just delivered and is having trouble breastfeeding—is this common among new mothers? Yeah, yeah, it’s common, especially in cases of Cesarean section. This is her ﬁrst pregnancy, so maybe she has the fear of giving breast because of the pain she is having. So, we need to educate her on breastfeeding, which will help the womb heal. We need also to encourage her to do early ambulation, because helping her to move will begin the process for her system to work correctly. OK, can you tell me what are the most important programs that you can see here at mercy? The malaria program, the nutrition program, and the prenatal program are the most important for me. Every Monday we have our EPI, that is that vaccination of babies. Then of course Tuesdays and Thursdays we have the antenatal clinic, where new pregnancies come together with women who have been pregnant before. For those coming for the ﬁrst time they need a lot of education for them to carry a pregnancy [to term]. So, make sure we attend to them.For prenatals we also do outreach, because some people are living in deserted areas that they don’t have even the opportunity to come to the big hospitals to get services. So we thank God for the HCW team--they are really helping the community. So our nurses here will go out to the community there and they help people that are in need because some are pregnant, and some do not have transport to the big hospitals to get services. So they do go out there, treat them for minor ailments, and give their appointment dates and transportation money. If there are complications, then we advise them to come to the hospital to deliver to prevent further complications to the mother and baby.For malaria--malaria is endemic to our country. So we go out there to help to treat mothers, fathers, including the under ﬁves especially. The pregnant women and the under-ﬁves are the most vulnerable. This is the program I am most passionate about, because it has a lot to do with the infant mortality and even malnutrition, because if children fall sick with malaria, and if they are not treated early, anemia and malnutrition may result, especially if they are under 5 years old. So on outreach, nurses also go out there, check the children, check their weight and see if they meet certain criteria to be supplied with food to help them. This is the nutrition program. So all those things help them a lot, because we have to prevent malnutrition and even Matron sits outside her ofﬁce with Melissa Herbolsheimer, a missioner on the July team, to talk about her passion for healthcare.14 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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maternal and mortality and prenatal death. Where do we stand with maternal and prenatal death? Are things improving? We are trying as best as possible to reduce it. According to the last meeting, I attended we are seeing maternal mortality rate is 700 [per 100 000 livebirths] now, and we are trying as best as possible to reduce it down to 300. That’s why the government is trying as best as possible to train more midwives, because the more we get skillful midwives, the better for our mission. There are three delays to getting care. First, there is a delay when the mother has to decide to go to the hospital. Second, she may be delayed to ﬁnd transportation to go to the hospital. Third, when they come within healthcare, workers have to put one or two modalities in place to also attend to them, and they may not have the tools they need to care for her. So those are the three delays that can lead to death and that is what we want to reduce. What is the thing that you love most about your job? The thing I love most about my job is to make sure things work right. That’s the thing I admire most, because I love going around to assist [my staff] when they are in difﬁculties because, as I made mention earlier, we are here for the patients. So, when I come, my concern is that patients get what they come here for—that they get well so they can return home to their families. That is what I stand for—to make sure our patients have good health. What is the hardest part of your job? The most difﬁcult? The most challenging parts are the times when I want to do certain procedures and we have inadequate equipment or run out of drugs, or maybe so sometimes the equipment gets spoiled. For example, the July team brought us blood pressure machines, because the ones we had were all out of order. This is a major constraint—imagine a patient comes in and their pressure needs to be checked in order to give them the right drugs, and we cannot diagnose correctly. It’s very challenging. Can you talk to me a little bit about the health crisis that we’ve been experiencing with COVID through the past year? Have you seen changes here at Mercy as a result? With regards to this crisis, we want to thank God for the Sierra Leone Annual Conference, for the partners, and for the Ministry of Health and Sanitation. They provided in-service training on infection prevention and control, and provided materials such as PPE, and equipment such as the ventilator. With this support, the COVID cases were reduced. As you enter the gate to the hospital, there is a hand-washing station to reduce infection. This has reduced other communicable diseases as well. What do you hope to see Mercy do or be able to do in the future? The future we get to by God’s grace. We are moving gradually, and there is great change as a result of HCW and the Sierra Leone Annual Conference’s support. We are really very grateful to them, but we do go by His grace. Our wards should be more equipped, with bedside lockers and bed linens, and it would be nice to have a feeding program for patients and a waiting home for pregnant women. For children under 6 months whose mothers have died, we often need infant formula which is difﬁcult to access here. We have so much that is wanted, but everything comes bit by bit. Matron assists a nurse to clean the wound of a patient.During the diabetes screening and treatment clinic hostes in July, Matron worked with board member, Mary Ann Gilkeson, to run the clinic ‘s pharmacy. Mary Ann later told me how impressive it was to see Matron quickly select the right medicine and educate the patient on how to take her medicine. 15www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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Gentle but Hard A Nursing Student’s Experience of Mercy HospitalAlbeita Momoh is a nursing student who has been doing her rotations at Mercy Hospital for the past few weeks. Albeita is from Freetown, but is in her second year at Njala University in Bo. She told me that the second year of nursing school was “hard but worth it.”She has worked in the adult and pediatric wards and on the maternity ward during this time, observing the interworkings of the hospital. The day we spoke she had just left the busy male and female wards, where there were many patients to care for and fewer nurses because some of the nursing staff were out doing a medical outreach. ‘Things have been crazy today,” she told me, “but thankfully everyone is stable.”Her mother is a nurse, and seeing her dedication to nursing is what inspired Albeita’s drive. When she was younger, her mother took her along with her to help a mother give birth. Albeita was so scared at the time she tried to run away, but one of the midwives held her arm so she would stay and witness the birth. Since then, she has grown more comfortable with medical procedures (she recently sat in on bowel obstruction surgery performed by Dr. Stevens and proudly told me “I didn’t pass out!”). However, this ﬁrst experience made her decide she did not want to be a midwife. I sat with her some time as she worked with Matron to dispense drugs during a diabetes screening and treatment clinic. I asked her what it was like to train under the supervision of Matron and she nervously laughed and said, “when you are with Matron you learn A LOT.” Matron can be very strict with the nursing students, but they always come away having received an excellent education and experience. Training nurses in Sierra Leone is an important task, as there is fewer than 1 registered nurse per 1000 people in the country. Recruiting, training, and retaining health care workers like nurses is a key part of health system strengthening, and a task that Mercy Hospital sees is their duty as well. Albieta has a warm smile that she shows often to her patients, and although her training is not yet complete, she has the makings of a great nurse. When I asked her about the challenges of her job, she said the most difﬁcult part is that “a nurse must be gentle but hard– when people are sick they need someone to be gentle with them, but sometimes a nurse has to be hard on her patient to get them to do what they need to be well. Often a nurse has to be hard inside oneself to cope when people are hurting.” WRITTEN BYYASMINE VAUGHANTechnical Advisor for Global Health and MissionsHelping Children Worldwide16 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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3 Steps for Cultivating Sustainable Cross-Cultural Partnership in Mission“From whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” - Ephesians 4:16Traditionally, we are taught that the Apostle Paul was preaching to his followers from his prison cell on the right way to grow the church when he wrote those words. Paul wanted to form a congregation worthy of the divine example they had in Jesus’ life. You may have heard another saying, “What you give attention to grows.” I do not think it is a mistake that spiritual leaders talk about our work like we are cultivating a garden. We talk a lot about the work we do in our partnership, but we almost never talk about the work we do to create and maintain a healthy partnership, and how that is part of what we do to strengthen and empower others.When Melody asked me to write an article for Empower! magazine about the work I do for Helping Children Worldwide (HCW) in Mission Advancement and Partnership, I realized that over the years, I have experienced healthy partnerships between organizations in the WRITTEN BYEMMANUEL M. NABIEUDirector for Mission Advancement & Partnership, Helping Children WorldwideImage by peoplecreations on Freepik18 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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same culture. But for a long time, I used to wonder what brings about a thriving partnership, especially across cultures with huge differences in economic status, lifestyle, language, and more. With this request, I thought about those essential steps that have continued to take hold, inspire and sustain the many years of faithful partnership between HCW, a U.S.-based 501c nonproﬁt organization, and the Child Reintegration Centre and Mercy Hospital, a Sierra Leone-based child welfare and healthcare ministry. In no speciﬁc order, I have quickly highlighted three of those steps here: 1. EMBRACE RADICAL COLLABORATIONThe African proverb [on the right] provides a rationale for collaborative ministry. With radical collaboration, we can do both. We can go fast, and we can go far. At HCW, we believe that radical trust, mutual respect, and radical honesty spur quality collaboration in the right direction. Over the years, we have learned to creatively collaborate with our local partners on the ground, and this has proven to be very transformational in both the short term and as we plan into the future. Though there are many projects we start out by working together as partners, there are also those projects where we work separately on both sides of the culture at a different speed, using different resources, different means, and the unique expertise we each bring. But what remains constant is that each partner recognizes the need to work together from our different strengths to reach a shared purpose, ensure longevity, and make our impact go further. We are learning from each other every day. We believe that our partners know their culture, needs, and solutions better than we could, no matter how many times we continue to travel over there. We may have a sense of what life is like over there, but they live and breathe that life every day. And we have come to respect the fact that just having a “sense” of a situation is not the same as “living and experiencing” that situation every day. Likewise, they cannot truly understand what it is to live and work here on the partnership, even when they travel here to support that work.When we work together, we create a network of strengths. The success of cross-cultural collaboration largely depends on cultural awareness to build that trust. In Collaborating Across Cultures, Professor Roy Y. J. Chua coined the term “cultural metacognition,” to talk about an individual’s reﬂective thinking about their cultural assumptions. And this is where trust plays another vital role in quality collaboration for maintaining cross-cultural partnerships. Research distinguishes two kinds of trust as we collaborate across cultures: “Cognitive trust,” which has to do with the rational appreciation of the skills, abilities, and reliability of others; and “Affective trust,” which is the emotional belief we hold that another person has our interest at heart. As explained by Professor Chu, “Affective trust is especially critical in creative collaboration because, unlike collaboration that merely involves the sharing of labor, creative collaboration requires sharing of new ideas.2. ENGAGE MEANINGFULLY & GROW A TEAM WITH A SHARED VISIONFor decades, it has been easy for many international (western) partners to solely craft the vision, interpret it, and implement it in a foreign culture with little or no ownership (of that vision) coming from the local partners. In as much as this approach has been effective for immediate interventions, it has mostly lacked sustainability and further deepened dependency. Cultivating a sustainable partnership means less of one partner pushing their “If you want to go fast, go alone; but if you want to go far, go together.”“For we are co-workers in God’s service; you are God’s ﬁeld, God’s building.” - 1 Corinthians 3:919www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

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ideas and more of both partners working together. Lack of meaningful engagement pushes one side of the partnership to operate more out of compliance and not out of commitment.This lowers meaningful rewards – it creates low speed, low trust, low autonomy, and low empowerment. Meaningful engagement happens when we go into cross-cultural partnership with the fundamental mindset of engaging and not managing (or micro-managing); helping and not necessarily heading them; learning and serving together, and not necessarily being the sage on the stage. Together with our local partners, we are shifting from telling vulnerable families our preconceived ideas of what we think they need, to an approach that includes and engages them in bringing about sustainable solutions.One way to multiply the impact of a meaningful engagement is to ensure that there is a shared vision between partnership teams. This creates a common language and brings alignment of core values. We are on the same team, but the question is, “Do we have the same vision?” Being on one team with the same vision, we have come to see ourselves as co-workers in God’s kingdom. We hold the common understanding that what we do is not about us. It’s about others. Our approaches might differ, but we are all heading in the same direction. It’s about helping vulnerable children and families get unstuck and move to a place where they can thrive with dignity, rather than being separated and dependent. We share the joy of seeing children being reunited with their families, feeling that sense of being home, and that sense of belonging. You may be aware of the popular phrase, “Teamwork makes the dream work.” However, it is important to know that in cultivating a sustainable cross-cultural partnership, teamwork makes the dream happen consistently when both partners start holding the same vision, understanding the dream, and having a great sense of ownership of that dream. Put another way, meaningful cooperation happens when team members or partners work towards a mutually desired goal. When it’s built right, TEAM = A platform where “Together Everyone Achieves More.” When it lacks meaningful collaboration, strategy, and a sense of ownership of the vision, TEAM = a platform where we derive no or limited impact from the investment of our “Time, Energy, Abilities & Money.” We need to ‘Do mission’ with the same vision.Image by pch.vector on FreepikGrowing a team with shared vision20 | EMPOWER MAGAZINE FALL 2022

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Enjoy the journey as well as the destination.3. ADOPT A TRANSFORMATIONAL MINDSET & ENJOY THE JOURNEYWe have come to learn that adopting a transformational mindset (open mind) plays a pivotal role when it comes to successfully cultivating and navigating cross-cultural partnerships. First, start Recognizing before thinking about Resisting. Becoming aware of the culture you are coming from and having the humility to be curious about the culture you are working in, and how you use and adjust your cultural knowledge and experiences when collaborating with others from different cultures is critical in successful partnerships. For example, we have the same goal with our partners on the ground, but with huge differences in economic status and material wealth; different means are used to get to that goal. And we recognize this.Secondly, start Learning before thinking about Criticizing. As humans, we have the tendency to naturally resist what we can’t understand, imagine, or control. In cultivating healthy cross-cultural partnerships, we must overcome that tendency. It’s okay to keep our eyes and minds wide open as we serve. However, when we criticize too quickly before even applying efforts to understand, we are putting a limitation on learning and growth. And that does not breed a healthy ground for a thriving partnership. What if we could stand to learn more about the unimaginable, and try to understand the incomprehensible? What if we could learn to become more of a student, and less of a critic? Sometimes, there are certain things that we don’t have to understand or control. And that is okay. We don’t always have to try too hard to control nature or try to force things to be the way we think they should be, but we can learn to live in harmony with it.Thirdly, realize that the journey is as important as the destination. With the saying, “The end justiﬁes the means,” it’s easy for us to purely focus on the ﬁnal result or the outcomes and forget to recognize the means to those results. In our partnership, we have come to realize that a sustainable cross-cultural partnership allows us to maximize the present while envisioning the future. The U.S. culture tends to be mostly high-paced and highly business-minded. We want it faster, we want it now, and we want more. From experience over the years, we have found out that this “go-go mentality” can ignore the cultivation of meaningful relationships that are essential to building sustainable partnerships. Some cultures like Sierra Leone tend to move at a slower pace and they are incredibly interconnected and relationship-driven. I remember when sometimes short-term missioners would be on the ground and they would be moving around at a high speed, and our local partners would say, “Hey, the time for that activity has shifted a little bit or it’s going to start a few minutes late. But relax. It will still happen. The world is not ending.” It’s understandable to have a long to-do list and to keep checking things off that list, but it is sometimes just as refreshing and rewarding to pause, reﬂect, and connect with others around you. Relationships count. The work will always be there, but the people we meet will not always be. So, it’s important to invest time in building meaningful relationships at every given moment.COOL FACTSA well-cultivated cross-cultural partnership builds lives of signiﬁcance and creates a legacy of real value that endures and replicates. The reverse is also true. When we get it twisted and fail to cultivate it properly, the tendency to build an imbalanced, shallow or short-sighted partnership increases. Such partnerships ignore the building of meaningful relationships that enriches the mutual experience of “giving and receiving.” The focus dwells on the bottom line of results without building meaningful connections along the way. And this does not create a fertile ground for a cross-cultural ministry to thrive and be sustainable.https://www.freepik.com/free-photo/business-executives-with-hand-stacked_1005993.htm#query=partnership&position=0&from_view=search”>Image by peoplecreations</a> on Freepikhttps://www.freepik.com/free-photo/business-executives-with-hand-stacked_1005993.htm#query=partnership&position=0&from_view=search%22%3EImage%20by%20peoplecreations%3C/”>Image by peoplecreations</a> on FreepikIMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS21www.helpingchildrenworldwide.org |

Empower Magazine Fall 2022

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