Citizen Cartwright

Many things to be thankful for in Tanzania

We returned from the coast on Thursday (happy holiday weekend, America!) to hear that, while we were gone, elephants had been seen in the yard of the house where we’re staying. And that “100” mongooses in the yard fled as they heard the approach of our car.  

Those missed moments aside, we have seen in the yard a troop of a dozen black-faced vervet monkeys, including mothers with babies clinging to their chests.  

Annie has written up another of her interviews:  

Goodness' story
By Annie Dineen  

Goodness Massawe, 24, was born in the village, a healthy child. At age three, she became disabled due to unknown causes, and was confined to a “wheelchair,” a plastic garden chair equipped with bicycle tires. Her days were spent alone at home, able only to sit and watch as her siblings left the house every morning to work or study.  
 

  
Her neighbors mentioned the Jifundishe Free Library to her, and eventually she found someone to push her chair up the road – a treacherous ride over rocks and ruts – to see the library for herself. She discovered that the library had all the books she’d missed by being unable to attend school, and she began to study at the library. She learned to read and write.  

Goodness also joined the library’s knitting group and began to knit well, despite her handicap. She sold the pieces she completed to Jifundishe for sale to the public, earning enough from the sales to buy herself a real aluminum frame wheelchair, which takes more easily to the rugged road.  

Now, Goodness is educating herself with the help of the library staff and sees a future of self sufficiency. Her dream is to work in an office, despite the near impossibility in her culture. “Now she’s seeing different because she has something that she didn’t have before,” her sister says.  

There are many people in Tanzania in Goodness’ situation, trapped in a rural location due to physical or logistical barriers, who are prevented from learning because of the difficulty of traveling to an urban center, where a library, if there is one, would be located. 

Tanzanian seascape

Ah, the glories of wireless Internet. I’m writing this from a thatched cottage on the coast of Tanzania, looking out on the Indian Ocean. Jifundishe founder Deb Kelly asked Annie and me if we’d like to take a side trip here, and we jumped at the chance to see more of the country.

We drove for about five and a half hours here to Pangani, past Mt. Kilimanjaro and through a poorer area than we’re used to – where instead of houses made of brick with corrugated iron roofs, they’re made of mud mixed with cow dung and the roofs are thatched.

We passed plantations of sisal, traditionally used to make rope and rugs and now a focus of experimentation for biogas and biofertilizer. We saw lots of baobab trees – called upside-down trees because the branches look like roots – and termite mounds up to six feet high.

Annie has written up another interview of a Jifundishe program participant: Mama Laisser (women become known as “mama” when they marry).

 

An inquiring mind

By Annie Dineen

Angelina Laisser, born in 1951 in Arusha, has an adventurous spirit. With no husband and thus necessarily self-sufficient, she has unfearingly embraced every opportunity to support herself and her family.

In 2005, Jifundishe approached her about creating a library in a building on her property. A highly educated woman, Mama Laisser attended school through secretarial college, in a time when most women her age were unable to even attend primary school. Recognizing the value of education, she consented to Jifundishe’s request and refused to charge it rent for the first two years of the library’s existence. “We are really lucky to have Jifundishe here,” she says, “because everybody now is free to read.”

Even after the library moved to its current location, Mama Laisser remained an active part of the Jifundishe Free Library. She and seven other ladies began to bead jewelry as part of a project organized by Jifundishe. “It’s not a small project, it’s a way of earning money,” she says.

The library provides the materials and the women gather to bead and socialize. For each piece a member of the group completes, she earns a certain amount of money, and an equal amount is deposited into a fund collectively controlled by the group. The women’s first decision on the use of the fund was to go to the eye doctor, and Jifundishe split the cost of transportation, doctor fees, and, for some, glasses.

 

The women have also used money from the fund to buy seeds for farming, allowing them to plant twice as many crops. Jifundishe hopes the fund may promote microlending, with the women making small loans to each other for individual projects.

 

Mama Laisser continues to keep an open mind for new ideas. Browsing in the library one day, she encountered a book about pigs. She applied her readings to the pigs she owned, adjusting the way she cared for them based on what she’d read in the book. She currently owns around 30 pigs. She also has chickens, goats, and cows and grows products like maize and bananas.

Through the library, Mama Laisser says, “We are learning much and much and much.”

View from the top

Annie and I spent the first part of this week at Kilimanjaro Film Institute, editing the interviews of Jifundishe beneficiaries with student videographer Ezra Kaaya and a student editor named Lightness Mollel.

 

 

We’d been told that the school’s students sometimes are hired to film tourists as they climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and we asked Ezra if he’d made that video climb.

 

Our jaws dropped and bounced across the floor when Ezra told us that he’d made the video climb twice – but had made the climb 30 times before that.

 

It turns out that before Ezra enrolled at the film school, he worked as a porter as a way to help support his mother and his two siblings who still live at home.

 

Ezra, 24, said he’d made the 30 climbs over 18 months, once heading up Kilimanjaro again a day after he’d come down.

 

The porters carry all the supplies, from food and clothes to tents and chairs. Ezra said that, for example, six climbers typically would have 15 porters. He climbed with tourists from places including the United States, Europe, China, Russia, Israel, India and South Africa.

 

The pay: 5,000 Tanzanian shillings a day, about $4.40. Tips per trip ranged from nothing to once, $100 handed to him by an American. But they averaged $25 to $30. A problem, Ezra said, was that at times the tip was given to the guide to be divided among all the climb’s support staff – and sometimes the guide would keep more than his share.

 

 

 

What was it like? “You can face a lot,” Ezra said. “Maybe the guest is sick. You have to be flexible. You work under high pressure. You can go with clients who are not cooperative, and you can’t be angry because it will interfere with your ability to climb.”

 

He said that once a climber from France died, and the guide ran off because he felt he should have been able to save the climber. On one trip, two porters died – and the other porters had to carry their bodies down the mountain.

 

Ezra’s dream is to open his own company providing tours and videos of them.

 

We asked Ezra a probably typical American question: What was the lesson of the mountain?

 

He said he gained confidence that “it will be possible to solve any challenge.”

Villagers' stories

Annie has finished interviewing recipients of Jifundishe assistance. Here is her first writeup.

 

Debora’s story

By Annie Dineen

Imagine yourself in a nine-by-nine-foot space, the size of a bathroom maybe, or a small office cubicle. It’s dark, the cool cement cube allowing a sparse few rays, and many more mosquitoes, to enter through the door, the room’s only opening. At night, you sleep alongside your mother and five siblings, occasionally accompanied by a goat or chicken. When it rains, you cook what food you have inside as well. There is no electricity or running water.

Welcome home.

 

This situation is home to 17-year-old Debora Mnyawi.  Last year, her family couldn’t afford her school fee, declared by the government to be the equivalent of $20 a year but in reality closer to $250, due to fees for everything ranging from food and uniforms to hoes to cultivate school and teachers' gardens and the salary for the watchman. For a family like Debora’s, that could amount to as much as two years’ income. Unable to pay, she faced the fate of many impoverished young girls like herself: marriage. For Debora, this would have meant the end of her studies and a life of doing all household chores and all farming except plowing, as well as taking care of her future children.

Fortunately for Debora, she discovered Jifundishe. Selected to be a Houston Scholarship student, Jifundishe paid the entirety of Debora’s school fees for her remaining two years of secondary school as well as her medical bills when she fell ill later that year. Jifundishe also bought her kerosene so she could continue to study after dark.

Aware of the change in Debora’s life, Debora’s mother sought Deb Kelly, Jifundishe founder, waiting all day, every day, for a week at the Jifundishe Free Library for a chance to talk with her. She joined Jifundishe’s knitting group, receiving payment for each piece she completes. The money she earns helps her to buy food and pay the rent on her family's “apartment.”

Sitting outside their concrete cube, Debora’s mother in a beautiful traditional kanga dress and Debora carefully dressed in a skirt and a second-hand shirt reading “Purina Dog Chow Incredible Dog Challenge, Team California,” Debora passionately described her dream to become a doctor to bring improved health and kinder practices to the people of her village. As the family’s chickens clucked noisily behind them, Debora thanked Jifundishe in excellent English for changing her life.

 

***

 

As far as the Houston Scholarship, the anxious waiting is over, and the results of Thursday’s fundraiser in Washington are in. Enough money was raised to avoid pulling any of the current students out of school, but not enough was raised to take those students to the next level or to help additional students.

Sending a student through four years of high school here costs about $1,000.

Tax-deductible contributions can be sent to:

Project Able

c/o Jifundishe Treasurer Chrissy Burnham

317 Magnolia Circle

Southern Pines, N.C. 28387

 

Getting answers, some easy, some hard

Annie is well into her project in the villages here, working with Jifundishe staff and a local film student to interview recipients of Jifundishe assistance in their homes. The project includes videotaping the interviews, editing them to three minutes each, and writing up the recipients’ stories as well.

 

Left to right: Jifundishe staffer Meleck Akyoo, Kilimanjaro Film Institute videographer Ezra Kaaya, Jifundishe staffer Elly Mbise, and Annie.

 

No interviews were scheduled for Thursday, and Jifundishe founder Deb Kelly asked Annie and me if we’d like to go with her to Arusha to sit in on one of the trials at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.

We drove through lush savanna, with coffee, banana and rice farms. In the distance were palm trees; exotic species such as purple jacaranda trees; and other large trees with crimson flowers appropriately called flame trees. Women in their colorful “kanga” dresses, balancing the traditional heavy loads on their heads, walked along the highway. 

Arusha, population about 500,000, was our first experience of the chaotic bustle of a rapidly growing African city.

 

The Rwanda tribunal was created by the U.N. Security Council in 1994 to prosecute alleged perpetrators of genocide in Rwanda.

 

We watched the trial of Jean-Baptiste Gatete, a former Rwandan mayor and political party leader, accused of genocide and crimes against humanity. Gatete allegedly urged civilian forces to rape and kill Tutsis: to “rid themselves of the filth by killing the children and raping the women before killing them.” He also allegedly killed people with his own hands.

 

We listened as a woman described through her tears being raped multiple times and losing many members of her family to the Hutus’ machetes.

 

Now, as I write this with rain pouring down on the tin roof at Deb’s house, we’re back to more mundane occupations like wondering about the results of Thursday night’s fundraiser in Washington.

A Monday morning in Tanzania

After 15 hours in the air, my daughter, Annie, and I arrived at Kilimanjaro Airport at – you guessed it – Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania.

 

We’re staying with Jifundishe founder Debra Kelly at the four-room house she rents just outside Arusha National Park. And when I say just outside, as I write this I’m looking about 25 feet out the window to a hedge, on the other side of which is the park. When we arrived, Deb told us it’s not safe to go outside after dark. Where we’re from, such a warning might be about the threat of urban crime, but here it’s because wildlife from the park – even elephants – tend to stray in.

 

 

 

Deb’s four-room house looks nondescript from the outside, but inside it’s charming Tanzanian rustic. At night, its rooms are graced by five-inch, celery-green-with-blue-spots house geckos, beloved because they eat insects including malaria-carrying mosquitoes. Another nightly attraction is the bush babies, little bug-eyed primates that scamper across the tin roof and wake us with their screeches.

 

We’ve arrived at a time of potential crisis for Jifundishe and the young people it helps to educate. The global financial crisis has led to a decrease in funding, putting in jeopardy some of the scholarships that are the recipients’ only hope for education.

 

A fund raiser is being held in Washington on Nov. 12. Here’s the invitation.

 

TANZANIAN STUDENT SCHOLARSHIP FUND EVENT

at Annie and Andy Houston's home

 

Please mark your calendars for

Thursday, November 12th from 5-9

907 East Capitol Street, SE

Washington, DC

 

Learn about the scholarship fund.

Talk with Chrissy Burnham and Ann Lawrence who have met the students and their families.

See a video of Tanzanian life.

View and buy Tanzanian crafts.

Partake of refreshments.

Have an opportunity to contribute to girls' and orphans' education

 

If you cannot attend and would still like to contribute, checks can be sent to

PROJECT ABLE

c/o Chrissy Burnham

317 Magnolia Circle, Southern Pines, 

North Carolina,  28387. 

 

No gift is too small.

 

Many thanks to those who have already contributed to the scholarship fund. 

You have made a difference in many lives.

 
RSVP: annihouston@gmail.com

 

 

Note to readers

As you know, my Citizen Cartwright blog is aimed at informed and want-to-be-informed citizens.

And as a want-to-be-informed citizen myself, I am accompanying my 18-year-old daughter on her gap-year trip to Tanzania, East Africa. We will be spending a little over three weeks in a rural village under the auspices of the nongovernmental organization Jifundishe. Afterward, we'll be visiting some of the nearby wonders: Ngorongoro Crater, a collapsed volcano teeming with wildlife that is a U.N. World Heritage Site; Olduvai Gorge, an archaeological area excavated by Louis and Mary Leakey; and Serengeti National Park.

Where we're going, even many businesses only have electricity for part of each week. So I'll be blogging on our experience as electricity availability allows.

My first entry is this morning, with an e-mail from Jifundishe founder Debra Kelly and a link to Jifundishe's November newsletter.

If you're already a citizencartwright.com subscriber, you'll receive my updates automatically. (If you sign up as a new subscriber, please note that you'll subsequently receive an e-mail you'll need to click on to activate your subscription.)

We hope you'll be traveling with us by blog.

Message from Jifundishe

Jifundishe is a nongovernmental organization in Tanzania that provides educational opportunities to rural villagers. Here is the latest e-mail from founder Debra Kelly:

"Greetings from Tanzania!

As many of you have probably read, East Africa is experiencing a very severe, three-year drought that is now affecting millions of people. This year’s maize crop was not adequate to feed even a fraction of the people here and the months ahead will be tough and frustrating for many. Though we are not an aid agency that addresses issues of hunger, we are very concerned with the impact of a famine on the students we support and the folks who live in the village where our library is located as well as the country as a whole.

Creating economic opportunities for women is one way that we can help. Our cooperatives have taught women skills with which they can earn money to help support their families. A purchase from our holiday shop will be a wonderful way that you can help these families through these troubled times. I hope you will consider making a small purchase to help us in our efforts to reduce poverty by increasing literacy.

As the holidays approach, we want to wish all of our supporters, volunteers and partners a wonderful and joyous holiday season. From Diwali to Eid El Hajj to Hanukkah to Christmas, it is a time for families all over the world to celebrate their love of God and each other and it really does show that we are all one big village under the sun.

Enjoy this month’s newsletter and accept our best wishes to you as well as our continued thanks for your support of Jifundishe.

Deb"

Jifundishe's November newsletter (pdf)

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