A New Foundation: The Drawing Board

Even today, I have mixed emotions about leaving Tanzania. The hardest adjustment for sure was not being able to be as useful as I know that I can be. The coolest thing about volunteering in a country like Tanzania is that you are able to give of yourself completely and have a great influence. I missed that feeling when I came home the most.

I thought frequently of the teens and the women that I worked with and was haunted by a sense of abandonment. I knew that more volunteers came after me to continue where I had left off. For example, Jipe Moyo (the woman's group I worked with) now has a building that they meet in rather than a yard. They have regular classes and meetings and are now doing outreach themselves.

The best way to handle the emotion of being home and helpless was to talk with other volunteers who were there with me. Through this communication, Meghan, from Portland, Ore., and Jennifer, from New York, and I came together in agreement that we could pour our energies together to create an organization. We decided we were all passionate about creating a sustained effort and have spent the last few months working to make that happen.

We decided to focus on education for at-risk children, primarily orphans. The term 'orphan' is different from what you expect. An orphan in Tanzania, and most African countries, refers to a child who doesn't have a support system. Orphanages are a Western idea brought in in recent years. For the most part, kids with no support system, meaning a parent or two have passed or are unwilling/unable to support them, go to live with relatives or neighbors. They are, in a matter of speaking, absorbed into the community.

That said, they are an at risk population and are unsupported by the non-existent state. There are many non-profits and grassroots organizations, like churches for example, that have made a point to support orphans, but as usual these function in such tiny microcosms that each and every orphanage is funded differently.

One place that we grew to know in Moshi is an orphanage called Upendo (meaning love in Swahili). Upendo is run by a group of Catholic nuns. There are 60 kids from newborn to 6 years old at Upendo. These are children who are unsupported by their families. In some cases, this is because the kids have a debilitating disease themselves. The younger kids are kept in a nursery and those age 4 to 6 are in a school setting. Once the kids are 6 years of age, they are either sent back to their family if one exists or they are sent to live on their own. At six years old. Some end up in street kids homes and some survive (or not) on their own in Moshi.

Because we are a very new organization and need to start in a functional place, we are going to start by funding the school program at Upendo and then fund each graduating class to go to primary school. We will meet with the primary schools to set up scholarships and to brainstorm ways for these children to have housing. There are some homes for kids going to primary school and children who are attending school are more likely to be accepted back by a family or a neighbor. In primary school, they are given one meal a day which takes a lot of burden of a family hosting an orphan. Remember, though, that the sense of community is very different than here. The family unit is only one part of the community. The community takes care of each other regardless of blood ties.

Supporting Upendo with school fees for the older kids and supporting the graduates is an achievable task. There is a graduating class of about 20 kids each year, a reasonable number for a brand new organization like ourselves. After we are able to sustain this support, we will move on to other at risk children, including those at other orphanages, and those at street kids homes. In many cases, the youth at the homes for street kids are male. The younger females either get taken into other families or are married.

Every day at the beginning of the school day, the kids in every school in Tanzania repeat after their teacher "Education is the Key to Life". We understand this and see it as the path for the opportunity to have a fulfilling life.