Volunteering

Just to make it clear that it is not just one long holiday, I thought I should tell you more about Shika and the other projects that I have been involved with over the months.

Shika – Shika is now up and running and takes up much of my week. We are open Mon to Thurs, and the children come for 3 hours after school. We have children from Standard 1 (Tues and Thur) and Standard 2 (Mon and Wed) and we are teaching them English and Maths, and a life skills lesson which can really be anything, this week I taught them about Rwanda, in the past we have taught them about hygiene, nutrition, or more creative things like painting, making cards, etc. I can talk to the children now and am very attached to them, though they are hard work!

Make a Difference Foundation – This is the nursery that was set up by my friend David. He runs it in the front room of another of his friends, and invites just about all the children from his village. I went tand helped there a few times, but found it to be very hard work, and really not in my field of expertise. What I did do, though, was introduce the other volunteers there, so from that he had proper teachers volunteering over the summer, and lots of donations of teaching materials.
St Margaret's – The school that I mentioned in my first blog. However once Shika had started up, the timings made it impossible to do both.

Emusoi – A charity that I have visited for the first time this week. It was set up by an American nun in order to educate Maasai girls, who would traditionally not be educated as they are sold to a husband for a number of cows when they reach puberty therefore it is seen that there is no purpose in educating them. They are often brought to the centre by their mothers (the fathers generally disagree with the education and can be violent in opposing it) and the centre provides them with school uniforms and materials and school fees, as well as somewhere to live during the holidays if it is dangerous for them to go home. It gets funding from DifD and USAID, and President Bush visiited when he was in Tanzania. Despite this they still lack funding. I explained that I was an accountant and that if they needed help with any thing of that sort, I would be happy to.

Step by Step – An interesting charity set up by a woman called Margaret who has a daughter with Autism. There are no real services for children with disabilities in Tz, so she decided to set up her own day centre. When I met her, she had been running the centre for a while, but could then no longer afford the increased rent, so decided to build her own centre. This is where the volunteers came in, as painters. I spent many a day staring at the ceiling trying to work out if it needed another coat, or if the paint was just wet. It (re)opened on the 20th September.