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On a bright morning in late April, thirty mothers and their young children gather outside the house of a local chief in Kono District in rural eastern Sierra Leone. The children twist and turn anxiously as their mothers undress them and hand them to workers from the local health unit.  This could be a lifesaving visit: over the next few hours they will be measured and weighed to determine whether they are malnourished and vaccinated against a raft of preventable childhood diseases as part of a monthly health outreach session for children under the age of five.

Pediatrician Leo Ho worked in the intensive care unit (ICU) of the MSF-run Gondama Hospital in the Bo region of Sierra Leone from February to August 2007. Set in a region constantly plagued by malaria, even in the dry season, Gondama village has a high death rate due to this disease, especially among children.

Amadu Suma used to think there was only one way to solve problems--authoritarianism. Now he knows otherwise, and says that Nation Building training has taught him not only to listen to other family members and solve disputes, but also how to organize with others to fight corruption in his community.

Staff at a clinic in the coastal slum of Kroo Bay, in Sierra Leone's capital, Freetown, are keeping a diary of their working lives for the BBC news website.

A group of 16 refugee families have moved into rehabilitated houses in the Liberian town of Bensonville as part of a process to locally integrate some 3,500 Sierra Leoneans who cannot go home or are unwilling to repatriate.
"We are delighted to move into our new community in Bensonville and these beautiful, standardized buildings after living in makeshift shelters for more than a decade," said sexagenarian Musa Kamara, one of 118 people who moved to their new homes from the Banjor and Samukai camps.

Mahmud Konneh recently finished building a latrine in his village, Tilorma, in the Kenema District of eastern Sierra Leone. It is one of 30 new latrines that have been constructed by Tilorma villagers under the Community-Led Total Sanitation (CLTS) approach.