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I grew up with Sesame Street; not just watching it, but feeling almost personally connected to it. My biggest connection to any kind of fame or celebrity at all is that my uncle worked on the show, which meant Sesame Street was not only something that appeared on our television, it belonged to the world of my childhood in a way that was both ordinary and magical. Like a lot of children, I learned lots of things from Sesame Street. Numbers. Letters. Colors. Shapes. How to count. How to notice patterns. How to sing along even when I did not fully understand what I was singing. But Sesame Street did something far more important than teach children how to recognize the number three or the color yellow. It taught us how to recognize a neighborhood. It taught us that the people around us mattered. There was the man who sold food at the grocery store. The person who brought your mail. The teacher at the school. The doctor who took care of you when you got sick. All of the people whose daily life crossed yours again and again until they became part of the map of your world. Sesame Street taught children that community was not an abstract idea. It was made of faces. Friendly faces. Familiar faces. Faces that came in and out of your day and helped you understand where you belonged. That is a powerful thing for a child. Children do not experience the world first as systems, policies, programs, or institutions. They experience the world through people. Through the mother who wakes them up. The grandparent who remembers their favorite snack. The neighbor who notices when they are missing. The teacher who expects them to show up. The shopkeeper who asks about school. The auntie who corrects them when they misbehave. The pastor who blesses them. The nurse who treats them. The social worker who listens. The older cousin who walks them home. A child’s world is built through repeated, reliable connection to the people in their “neighborhood.” That is what Sesame Street understood so beautifully. A neighborhood was not just a place. It was a network of relationships. It was the web of people whose lives touched one another’s, and whose ordinary presence helped a child feel known, safe, and included. In child welfare and care reform, we might use more technical language for this. We might talk about the ecology of the child, and Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. We might explain that a child’s wellbeing is shaped not only by the household, but by the relationships, institutions, communities, and wider systems surrounding that child. All of that is true, but maybe Sesame Street gave us the child-sized version first. Who are the people in your neighborhood? Who are the people that you meet each day? Those questions are not sentimental; they are foundational, because every child lives inside an ecology. Every child is held, harmed, protected, overlooked, strengthened, or separated within a network of relationships (and systems). A child is shaped by what happens at home, but also by what happens around the home. By whether parents have support. By whether schools are accessible. By whether health care is available. By whether neighbors are safe. By whether local leaders are equipped. By whether churches understand their role. By whether social workers have the tools, training, transportation, and time to do their jobs well. This is why family strengthening matters so much. Family strengthening is sometimes misunderstood as a softer or less urgent form of child protection. It can sound less dramatic than rescue. Less immediate than removing a child,and less emotionally satisfying than stepping in as the hero in the middle of a crisis. But family strengthening is not doing less for children, it’s actually paying better attention to the world children actually live in. It is asking: what does this child’s neighborhood need in order for this child to be safe and loved here? Not somewhere else. Not in an institution. Not in a place built to receive children after everything has already broken down, but in the family and community where that child’s life is already rooted. When we support family strengthening, we are not simply helping one caregiver with one need. We are strengthening the connection points that surround a child. We are helping a parent remain steady. We are helping a grandmother keep a child in school. We are helping a local social worker reach the family before the crisis becomes separation. We are helping a church become a place of support rather than shame. We are helping a community see that poverty is not parental failure. We are helping local leaders build the structures that allow children to remain safely connected to the people who love them. In that sense, those of us who support this work from farther away become part of a child’s global neighborhood. That is a humbling thought. We are not the center of the child’s story. We are not the closest face. We are not there to replace the people who already belong to the child’s daily life, but we can become the kind of distant neighbor who helps strengthen the child’s local neighborhood. We can help make sure the social worker has fuel to make the visit. We can help make sure the caregiver has access to training, counseling, or economic support. We can help make sure the local organization has stable funding, good tools, and room to plan. We can help make sure the community-based systems around the child are not constantly weakened by scarcity, donor pressure, or outside control. That is a very different posture from the one many of us inherited. For a long time, global child welfare work invited outsiders to imagine themselves as rescuers. We were told, directly or indirectly, that the child’s world was empty until we arrived. The child needed us because there was no one else. The orphanage became the setting, the child became the symbol, and the sponsor, donor or volunteer became the answer. But children are almost never living in empty worlds. They live in neighborhoods. They have names attached to them. Families attached to them. Histories attached to them. Communities attached to them. Even when those relationships are strained, fragile, or under-resourced, they matter deeply. Often, the work is not to remove the child from that ecology, but to strengthen the ecology so the child can remain safely within it. That does not mean children should remain in unsafe situations. Child protection requires courage, discernment, and sometimes urgent action. But it does mean we should be careful about assuming separation is the first or best answer when what a family may actually need is support. The question is not, “How do we become the most important people in this child’s life?” The question is, “How do we strengthen the people who already are?” Maybe that is why the old Sesame Street lesson still matters. The people in a child’s neighborhood are not background characters. They are part of how a child understands safety, identity, responsibility, and love. They are the faces that teach a child, “You are known here.” “You are expected here.” “You belong here.” For children at risk of separation, those connection points can become not just formative, but also protective. A trained social worker is a person in the neighborhood. A supported caregiver is a person in the neighborhood. A safe teacher is a person in the neighborhood. A local church that understands family strengthening is part of the neighborhood. A community volunteer who knows when to report a concern is part of the neighborhood. A kinship caregiver who receives support instead of judgment is part of the neighborhood. Even a donor, church, or partner across the world can become part of that neighborhood, not by becoming central to the child’s daily life, but by helping the people in the local web of care become stronger, safer, and more reliable. That is what ethical support should do. It should help make children’s worlds safer. It should strengthen the hands of the people who know the child’s name, language, story, family, and community. It should honor the fact that children thrive not because one heroic person arrives, but because many faithful people, in roles large and small, create the conditions for belonging. Sesame Street taught a generation of children to look around and notice the people who made up their world. Maybe care reform is asking us to do the same thing now. To look around the child and ask: Who is already here? Who needs support? Who has been overlooked? Which relationships need strengthening? Which systems need repair? Which local leaders need to be trusted, equipped, and sustained? And then, from wherever we are, to take our place humbly in that wider neighborhood; not as the hero arriving from far away, but as a neighbor with a role to play. A person connected to other people. A supporter of the local faces a child meets each day. A participant in the larger ecology of care that helps children stay rooted, safe, loved, and able to belong.
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 When you support HCW’s work in global health, you deserve to know exactly where your investment goes, what our specific lane is, and how local experts are steering the ship. A common question we get from our dedicated donors and supporters is: What exactly is the relationship between Helping Children Worldwide (HCW) and Mercy Hospital? Are the employees at Mercy supervised by HCW? Does HCW make administrative decisions about the hospital? We want to pull back the curtain and share a transparent look at our operations, our role, and the incredible network of allies we collaborate with to save lives. Our "Right Lane": We Equip, They Medicate To understand our operations, it helps to understand a core principle of ethical international development: sustainable impact must be locally led. HCW does not run Mercy Hospital. We do not hire the staff, we do not admit patients, and we do not make clinical decisions on the ground in Bo, Sierra Leone. Mercy Hospital is completely independent, governed as an autonomous organization, and operated by a 100% Sierra Leonean medical staff Under the United Methodist Church Sierra Leone Annual Conference Health Board. Our role is very specific: Helping Children Worldwide acts as a capacity-building ally and technical advisor, supporting hard-working healthcare providers with what they need to save lives. Breaking Down the Support: What HCW Brings to the TableOur job is to ensure the frontline team at Mercy has the structural scaffolding required to succeed safely and efficiently. We fulfill this role through four distinct pillars:
The Power of the Network: Linking Allies to Strengthen the SystemOur impact doesn't end at the walls of Mercy Hospital. Through the Together for Global Health Network, we are able to expand our technical advising far beyond a single facility to a dynamic web of local allies. Instead of working in isolated silos, this network allows us to provide powerful linkages between organizations—strengthening the entire healthcare ecosystem by connecting those who have a specific need with those who have the clinical solution. For example:
By remaining anchored in our role as a technical advisor and resource bridge, we ensure that local health systems grow stronger, more connected, and entirely self-sufficient. Thank you for partnering with us to champion a model of global health that respects local expertise and builds true independence!
 Most people think hepatitis is a single disease. In reality, hepatitis is a general term that simply means inflammation of the liver. There are several different types of hepatitis causing viruses—including hepatitis A, B, C, D, and E. While they all affect the liver, they differ in how they spread, who they affect, and how they are prevented or treated. This World Hepatitis Day, we're focusing on one form in particular: hepatitis B. Hepatitis B is spread through contact with infected blood and certain body fluids. It can be passed from mother to child during birth, through unsafe medical practices, or through accidental exposure to blood. While there is a safe and highly effective vaccine, hepatitis B remains one of the world's leading infectious diseases. Over 250 million people are living with chronic hepatitis B worldwide, and hundreds of thousands die each year from liver cirrhosis or liver cancer caused by the infection. The burden is especially high in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated one in every ten adults is living with chronic hepatitis B. In Sierra Leone, an estimated 18.6% of the population—1.2 million people—live with chronic hepatitis B (compared to around 0.2% in the United States). Although newborns have been vaccinated against hepatitis B since 2007, the majority of people in the country remain unvaccinated, and access to screening and treatment is severely limited. Most health workers in Sierra Leone are unvaccinated against hepatitis B, putting those who regularly come into contact with open wounds, needles, and other sources of infection at increased risk. Despite organizations like PIH leading the charge on this issue, there are no national policies in place to mandate the vaccination of health workers or ensure that vaccines are free and accessible for them. Suprised to hear this? So were we. Since hepatitis B vaccination became part of the routine childhood immunization schedule decades ago, most Americans have been protected since infancy. It's easy to assume that healthcare workers everywhere have the same protection. But they don't.  Recently, the leadership at Mercy Hospital identified this gap that many of us never would have thought to ask about: they identified that the vast majority of the hospital staff members have never received the hepatitis B vaccine. Rather than accepting this as "just the way things are," they brought forward a plan to change it.
This highlights both an important challenge and a powerful example of the strong leadership emerging in Sierra Leone. For years, Helping Children Worldwide has worked to support local leadership because we believe the people closest to the challenges are also the people best equipped to identify the solutions. This vaccination campaign wasn't our idea—it was Mercy Hospital's. Their leaders recognized a preventable risk facing the people who care for patients every day and made protecting their staff a priority. To us, that speaks volumes. Healthy healthcare workers are essential to healthy communities. When doctors, nurses, laboratory staff, and midwives are protected, they can continue serving thousands of patients with confidence and safety. Investing in the people who care for others strengthens the entire health system. Something as small as a shot in the arm can reveal a critical gap in the healthcare system—but it can also point to a powerful leadership opportunity. When local leaders recognize these gaps and take initiative to address them, even simple solutions can become transformative for entire communities. This World Hepatitis Day, you have the opportunity to be part of that story. Your donation will support Mercy Hospital's ongoing mission to provide compassionate, high-quality healthcare and to equip its leaders to respond to the greatest needs facing their community—including initiatives like protecting their healthcare workers from hepatitis B. Together, we can continue strengthening a hospital that cares not only for its patients, but also for the people who have dedicated their lives to caring for others. https://donate.helpingchildrenworldwide.org/campaigns/3521-mercy-hospital |
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Get Involved
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Child's View Storybooks
- Child's View Storybooks - print
- Product - Em's Journey Digital Download
- Rescuing Princess
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- Tiny Miracles
- musu's story - the global village
- Mamaw's House: Twice Orphaned Child's View Story
- Monjama's Journey Digital
- Hope Lights the Way -the Dr. Aruna Stevens Story
- Rescuing Princess - Child's View Storybook
- Optimistic Voices Podcast
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©2017 - 2027 Helping Children Worldwide | 10304 Eaton Place, Ste 100. |Fairfax, VA 22030 |703-793-9521
All donations in the United States are tax-deductible in full or part. | Donor and Privacy Policy
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