Letter From Mwanza - No 3

22nd February 2008

7 am on Friday, or in Swahili time, 1 o’clock in the morning. All is well in Milestone House (that’s the name Joey has given to the volunteer house). Water and electricity are behaving themselves, it is pleasantly fresh the birds are singing, and dogs seem be resting after a night’s howling. It now seems to be the turn of the chickens to let the world know they are around. Free range here is really free range – they go anywhere, but unfortunately this means they are rather straggly and thin, a sort of antidote to battery farming.

Jane and I are now well into our projects. I say well in, in the loser sense, as both us need to get a closer handle on exactly what gets done in our placements, and more importantly what we can do to help. I think Mwanza Samaritans is more transparent than Jane’s place. Mwanza Samaritans Association (MSA) has been going since 2000, and was set up to help orphans, widows and the elderly in its local area. So far its main work has been with orphans. Orphans describe those children who have lost one or both parents, and often a child that has lost a parent is helped by their grand parents or other relations, but HIV/AIDS has made this much harder. It seems the single parents, perhaps suffering with HIV themselves are finding it more and more difficult to bring up their children alone. MSA offers some orphans the chance to go to a place very day during the week, get a decent meal, have a matron on hand to look after them, and get some medical help if required. The scale of the problem is huge – MSA takes in those under 6 years of age who only need to travel under 1km, and mostly just half a km away. This week some 25 children are in the centre, and Moshye Constantine, who runs the centre, would like to increase this to 50, and believes in his ward alone there are some 392 orphans under 6 who need help. Those over 6 yrs MSA would like to support through schooling, and require longer term emotional support. It is very hard on them that financially this just isn’t possible to do for most. I will talk more about this part later as we start to get into this area in more detail next week. The education side is a source of funding which could be developed further.

So in less than a week we have come across the problem I (and probably you) have wrestled with for many years. Is it worth it? Is tinkering at the edge going to make any real, significant and long-term difference on the lives of those who, in a material sense at least, have so much less than others.

I met Jane in town yesterday afternoon. Incidentally we have tried walking into town, have been on a Dala Dala (sort of crowded mini-bus); but the favourite seems to be taxis, whose pricing seems to reflect our desire to use them. We started at circa 4,000 Tz shillings (approx £2) and now after less than two weeks, we are paying 7,000 Tz shillings!!! Passing on the increase in world oil prices seems to happen very quickly in our case. Anyway, I went off when Jane went into her office (she has her own desk!!) and picked up my hand made ‘made to measure’ Kaunda suit, (for which I need to change much of my body to feel comfortable in), went to the bank, Barclays have just opened a new branch here (can’t get away from them), and bought Jane a wallet and meandered around town. We seem to be finding our way around now, and for some reason always get back to the same junction. It has a clock, is very dangerous for cars to cross, and seems to have some sort of magnetic attraction.

We had an interesting conversation with a young man selling hand painted cards. When approached by street sellers we now come up with the expression we find most comfortable, “sio leo” (not today). It makes us feel better than struggling to say no by any other way and leaves the option open that we could buy something at a future date. However when we said “sio leo” to this chap, he raised the valid point about what contribution we “muzungu’s” are making. From his view-point, he has seen many white faces driving around in large white cars for many years, and in the greater scheme of things, nothing much has changed. Well that’s the gist of his thoughts, and I have a deal of sympathy with his sentiments. Perhaps that is another thing we will come back to that later. In the meantime, I felt so bad I bought two of his cards to go with the two I had bought previously.

We have managed to curb Joey’s enthusiasm for trying to get us to communicate in Kiswahili until 10 am today, and then it’s off to our placements.

Thus endeth the first week as a volunteer.

Kwa heri for now - Donald