As my time in Tanzania draws to a close I'm pulled into reflection on my time here. It's been a rocky journey. There have been tough times like when the Morning Star School gardens were canceled and there have been high times like when we got the funding for the Green Eden school.

Development is a tough business. We spend hours, days, weeks working towards a project in hopes that it will revolutionize Tanzania and pull this country out of poverty. All that effort to have our project shot down in team meeting o it goes to completion and we find out it wasn't all that helpful to the Tanzanian people.

There are so many good ideas that end up being mediocre. But every once in a while we stumble upon that one gem of an idea. It may seem crazy, wasteful, or both but someone sees the magic in it and pushes through all the doubt. This is what it's all about, this is HEM orphanage.

When the project was presented in team meeting it sounded sketchy. An orphanage in some far off, distant part of Tanzania that wants to raise chickens. Do they know how to raise chickens? Can they sell the eggs? Are they just looking for something free from the white people? There were so many questions and I wasn't fully convinced. In spite of all the doubt one team member, Faith, pushed it through and pleaded with the team on behalf of these kids, it went through.

After one visit to HEM I could see this was something we needed to do and I'll show you why.
This is what it's all about. This is why I came to Tanzania and this is why you donated to send me out here. Yesterday we finished the orphanage, we moved the chickens in, and the printed off the care manual. Ester, the woman who runs the orphanage, is well qualified to care for these animals and has already established a buyer for the eggs. Like I said, this is one of those rare gems that makes all the failures worth while.

Before we started. Left to right: Faith, Manase (our translator), Anna

The completed coop.

All Tanzania needs is Faith and A Net

The Black Tiger's Acrobat Show. They are here so wellcome.

Thanks to all of you who helped with the Green Eden school! Some of us will be leaving on Tuesday to start building. My massive biceps have been enlisted in this cause. With any luck we'll have a fully functional school by the end of the day (or maybe the end of the month). It'll be a good week coming up.

This past week has been bitter sweet.


On Sunday I had to inform Geofrey, the headmaster of Morning Star school, that we were helpless to help his school. My heart broke as I explained to him that his mounting debt to the owner made the project unsustainable and therefore a poor candidate for HELP. Why is it that the neediest people are often the ones we help last? The town of Morombo, where the school is located, is probably the poorest place in Tanzania. They have no water, no power, no sewer, and no industry. It's a wonder that this place even exists. Well, soon they can add 'primary school' to the list of things they don't have. Not that it's HELP's fault, we don't have the resources to keep the school going either. This brings me to the lesson of this school: Faith. Geofrey, who wears a constant smile buried under his permanent scowl, is always telling me that God will send someone his way, someone that will save the school and keep it alive. In spite of the dwindling school attendance and mounting debt he is still sure that God will provide a way.

Monday brought some better news. We, as a team, traveled to a small town called Sanya Juu. In Sanya Juu we are building a chicken coop for an orphanage called H.E.M. It's run by a wonderful lady named Ester and the teacher there is a girl named Anna. If you ever wanted to hear a story about faith you need only hear Anna's. She's a bright, sunny girl, full of stories, songs, and games. Definitely the person you want teaching a bunch of young orphans. With Anna, there's never a dull moment and the smiles on her students prove it. Sure, they're orphans, but you spend one afternoon with them and you'll be convinced you're the one with the sad life. They laugh and sing, play games, and learn to read and write all at the hands of Ester and Anna.
This is Ester

Anna came to Sanya Juu from Arusha (the bustling city I live in). After finishing Secondary School her minister suggested that she come to HEM to help out. Anna doesn't get paid and she rarely gets to see her family but she doesn't ever bemoan her fate. Rather she sees her work at the orphanage as an extension of her devotion and service to God.This is Anna

Wednesday was another sad day. The second wave of volunteers left. They have done some amazing things. They have taught English and Women's empowerment, built pigs pens, cleaned up trash, fought AIDS and poverty, and more or less solved all of the problems of poverty. Which brings me to the title of this blog. With this wave we lost two of our best volunteers, Faith and Annette or Fainette as we affectionately call them. They have personally taught scores of young girls to reach for their dreams and to value themselves. Additionally, they have championed the chicken coop project, the Maasai womens health pamphlets, and several other projects. More or less if we left them here they might just solve all of Tanzania's problems on their own.Fainette, solving the problem of hunger (from lack of cookies).

Friday and Saturday brought Safari. It was a blast and a much needed break from the hustle and bustle of development work. We saw all of the big animals and the ugly ones too (that's Lion, Elephant, Buffalo, Rhino, and Wart hog, Stork, Vulture, Hippo, and Hyena). We didn't see the Serengeti but we did see the Ngorongoro crater.
The team on Safari!

Today, Sunday, I learned the massive importance of bed nets. Josh, one of our spunkier and more vertically accomplished volunteers woke to find that his bed was too short for him. I don't know how he didn't notice this over the past six weeks but the scores of mosquito bites on his feet (acquired over the past night) confirm his beds shortness. Thank goodness he's taking his malaria pills!

Tanzania is great and the Tanzanians are great people. They have so much faith. They don't always know how they will get by but they know they will with God's help. Thanks to Josh I now know how important the bed nets are. Thanks Faith and Annette, for keeping us going, keeping us safe from mosquitoes, and showing us how to serve.

Green Eden Primary School-You can help!

So we're trying to complete a school near the Kenyan border. They don't have a roof. As you may assume a roof is very important to learning. If you don't believe me just try doing differential calculus on a chalk board in the rain. If you think that's hard then you know what it's like at Green Eden primary school. Oh, and to add to that imagine that if you don't get your roof built by January you'll be out on the street. Have I tugged your heart strings enough? No? Ok, well I've got more. Unlike American schools these kids won't get bussed to another school, they just won't get to go to school at all.

Now you are probably hearing Alice Cooper singing,"school's out for Summer. School's out for-ever!" but before you get too far just think about the last time you balanced your check book (I know it's probably been a while, maybe you've never done it but you know you could if you wanted to). Well these kids won't ever learn to balance a check book, write sentences, or figure out the precise moment a train leaving chicago will pass a train leaving from Boston (face it this is a universal torture that no child should be deprived of.

So now is your chance to help. All we need is $3500. We have $600 and the good people at tipping bucket have promised not to take your money unless we raise it all. Do you have a dollar? Do you have five dollars? Weren't you just scolding yourself for having that double-shot mocha capuccino with the extra shot of carmel and whipped cream? How much did it cost? $10 so you could skip the next one and build a school. Think how good you'll feel. Not only do you NOT have to spend an extra 30 minutes hating yourself on the treadmill but you can enjoy the warm fuzzy feelings of building a school in Africa. Now if you think that'll feel good just think about how great you'll feel if you invite a friend to donate too. Perhaps you can go together to skip the next coffee run. Good moral support, healthy lifestyle, and warm fuzzy feelings-does life get any better? I submit to you that it cannot!

This is what you do:

Click here: Tipping Bucket

Make a pledge

Invite a friend

Feel Warm and Fuzzy

Repeat as desired

Be well my friends. Remember: Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world, for they are the only ones who have.

The Real Dirt on Africa Time

Well it’s been a busy week. I have learned what it means to run on “Africa Time” On Monday I spent the whole day searching out materials for a square-foot garden I am building for a small school on the outskirts of Arusha. This is the same school I mentioned in my last post where I met my friend Jacaca.

My friend Tanya and I spent the whole morning out searching for the various materials we needed for these gardens. Fortunately, there are many people in Arusha that build things so there are many hardware shops and they even gave us, for the most part, African prices. Often we get what are called Mzungu prices, that means “white person” prices. Basically they think, because we are white, that we are rich and will pay much higher than reasonable prices. Anyway, we still got Mzungu prices but some were pretty reasonable. Throughout our search for materials there was only one thing we couldn’t find, which happens to be the most common thing in Arusha and that is…drum roll please…dirt. There is no where to buy good dirt in Arusha.

Every hardware store we went to had all of the tools and materials we needed for gardening but none of them knew where to buy dirt and even looked at us funny for suggesting we would buy such a thing. Apparently, they’ve never tried to grow their own garden. Well after bouncing from store to store for about 2 hours we came across Trio Hardware and Irene. She knew where to get good dirt and even called the guy to supply it to us. As it turns out, she later explained, people in Arusha don’t know the English word ‘dirt’ or ‘soil’, which explains the quizzical looks. Thanks to Irene we’ve got our dirt and the gardening project is still on (pending project approval). This will be a great blessing to the kids of Morning Star Primary School.

After this week of shopping it’s become clear to me how little we appreciate time saving conveniences like cars, the internet, reliable electricity, and one-stop shopping. It’s taken me days to put together the plan and price out materials for this school. In America it would take maybe a morning to do all of this work, most of which would be done on the internet followed by a quick trip to Home Depot. It’s no wonder progress in Africa works on “African Time” the whole infrastructure we’ve come to expect and rely upon is completely non-existent out here. There’s a lot of work left to do.

Patience is a virtue; it’ll also get you fed

I made two new friends the other day. Geofrey and Jacaca. Geofrey is a school teacher working in Arusha. He is also a head master of a school on the outskirts of Arusha. The school he is headmaster of is entirely funded by his salary from his first teaching job. I met him as Tyler and I went out to look at his school to see what we can do.

L to R Geofrey, Annette, Gideon (a friend of Geofrey's)

While walking with Geofrey we picked up a street kid named Jacaca. He was wearing a yellow jacket so dirty you could barely tell it used to be yellow, he was covered with dirt and dust from head to toe and he had the same white spots on his head we see on most of the street kids, probably a fungus. If you ever meet Jacaca the first thing you will notice is his shining personality and infectious smile.

I’m sure Jacaca and his toy rubber tire had many plans for that afternoon but he was kind enough to put all those on hold to accompany us to inspect Geofrey’s school. What a contrast it was to see Geofrey’s bright, well dressed students greeting us in perfect English. Nevertheless Jacaca stuck around. He even joined Tyler and I as we discussed the school in Geofrey’s living room, where he sat quietly throughout our meeting. Jacaca’s patience paid off. At the end of our meeting a school worker brought him a bowl of the same lunch they served to the students. Wide eyed, he devoured the bowl.

While Jacaca was the only street kid we met that day his story brings into stark contrast the lives of the poor out here. None of Geofrey’s students pay tuition but they can afford to buy a uniform. Jacaca will probably never go to school, learn to read or write, and will eek out his life as a bus hustler, if he’s lucky.

This is what I’m doing out here. We will probably build gardens at Geofrey’s school and some day we may build pig pens. If he can turn a profit or at least feed his children then kids like Jacaca may get a chance at school and a future as bright as his smile.

Why wrestle with a pig when you can feed him bananas?

It’s been almost a week since I got here. Arusha is great! The weather is perfect and the jungle is beautiful. Contrary to what I’d expected I have very few mosquito bites.

On Monday we celebrated the completion of our first major construction project, a pig pen. This was a momentous occasion because we were moving the pigs and new piglets into the pen.

Moving the piglets was easy, they were cute and squealed while we carried them. The momma and poppa pigs were not so easy. The poppa pig tried to make a run for it which sent all of us dashing into the jungle. I was able to grab the pig on several occasions but 200lbs of scared angry pork is not easy to control. Well eventually we got him over to the pen and I grabbed hold of his ears and wrestled him to a stop. One of the locals and I got him into his stall where he remains. The momma pig didn’t try to run but instead just sat there. All of the guys with all of there might could not get this pig to move. So what did we do? We bribed her with bananas and she complied. Lesson for the future, if you need to move a pig bananas are far more enticing than a rope around the leg.

Departure

Today I'll be flying out to Tanzania. At 9:40 I'll board a plane in Chicago headed for London, a 9 hour flight. After a short layover in London I will board another plane bound for Kenya. Once in Kenya I will collect my bags and hop onto a small single engine plane going to my ultimate destination: Mt. Kilimajaro Airport. So as of Friday, Milwaukee time, I will be in Tanzania.

8341miles

I'll be living with about 15-20 other volunteers, all anxious and ambitious students looking to make a difference in the world. We are all HELP-International volunteers (click to find out more). Our focus will be to create sustainable projects and programs that will help the communities we are in (mainly Arusha, Tanzania) get out of poverty. I am creating a program to help kids learn proper hygiene, I also want to build some square-foot gardens. It's a daunting task but it's one worth doing.

So the big question is, Why Tanzania? In 2006 life expectancy in Tanzania was estimated at 50yrs, that puts them in the bottom 10% of the world. Furthermore, only 57% of children 5-14 are attending school and 45% of the population is without clean water. The perplexing thing is that Tanzania (unlike most other developing countries) has been a peaceful nation with little in the way of civil or international wars. Thus Tanzania can very much benefit from the types of education and development we are bringing.

I truly believe that the work that we are engaged in will be great, tremendous, and will make a lasting difference in the lives of the Tanzanian people. I am immensely grateful to those who's donations have made this possible. I know many of you would like to join in the work but obligations and commitments limit your involvement. I am so grateful to have this rare opportunity.

Check back often for pictures, updates, and video.

If you'd like to know more about HELP-International watch this short video: