Letter from Mwanza - No 6

3rd March 2008

After our extended weekend away in Moshi at the wedding Jane will have reported about we return to our placements. In fact we are taking the day off today courtesy of hard taskmaster Joey, and will get down to serious stuff again tomorrow. It is now 2 weeks since we started at them, and in my case at Mwanza Samaritans (MSA) I have started to get my mind round what they do, how they do it, and now getting. We are trying to find some sustainable ways to help the orphans, widows and elderly in the ward area the centre is based.

The concentration of effort and resources has so far gone into helping some 30 orphans with food, day-care, pre-school education, and some medical support. Like so many voluntary organizations the bottom line is often the same – lack of money to do all the things people want to do. Moyshe has just completed his last years Annual Report, and because they received a large donation from TACAID of some $5000 they were able to help a lot more people with some children receiving free extra tuition, and some paid for to go to Secondary School. The Government pays for Primary Schools, but Secondary from the age of about 13 years has to be paid for. With some of this money $1500 they bought a plot of land some 9 Km out of Mwanza with the intention of setting up a private Secondary School at some stage. In addition to this there was a donation from Vodacom of 7 new computers – 6 still in their boxes with Moyshe itching to use them. We have discussed setting up a Secretarial Service and an Internet café with the hope these ventures will finance projects that MSA would like to do. Other ideas we have bashed around include renting out tents, using the building for weddings at the weekends, buying chickens to lay eggs for sale, several thoughts on providing some fee paying education, and many others.

So before last weekend we narrowed down the options into 3 areas:

Support for those just leaving Primary education and needing extra tuition to get them ready for Secondary School. I will talk more about this at a later stage.
Setting up a hiring business – renting out tents (mind you we need to buy some first!), using the hall for renting out for weddings and functions. The place before was used as a night-club, but is not in good shape. The extent of this problem soon became apparent. Joey and I went to the centre to do some filming. Sounds pretty impressive doesn’t it? He is going to make a DVD of our time here, and this was the first go with this. We dropped Jane off at TACOPE in town, and headed back to Samaritans. The sky went darker and darker, the heavens opened, the road turned into a river, and Joey started really concentrating driving to avoid the deep water. We arrived at Samaritans, charged out of the car at least 10 metres getting thoroughly soaked, popped through the front door to find 30 odd mtoto (children) quietly sitting in darkness whilst rain crashed onto the roof like Tchikovsky’s 1812 overture. I had told Joey about the possibility of the Hall being used for renting out and he was enthusiastic as he, Jenny and a few others had some time ago helped with getting it into a slightly better condition. However entering the room was like going into a dark grotto with waterfalls all around. The rain seemed to find every means to get through the roof, and unless we can persuade some fish to pay for their wedding celebrations I think a fair amount of work will be needed to get the room up to a decent enough standard.
We can’t escape looking into Secretarial Services of some sort with all those shiny new computers sitting in their boxes. What we need to find is some revenue activities which won’t cost a load to get going, and can be effectively managed.

So, hopefully, in another week we shall have come up with some practical ways to get some extra and more consistent income into MSA. There are certainly no lack of opportunities for money to be well spent. It is so sad that for the second time Moyshe has said he has so little money left that he may not be able to provide food for the orphans soon. Two weeks ago he said the same thing, but did manage to find some. He tells me he sometimes buys it himself for them. I still have not worked out how he manages to keep his wife and children when the only income he seems to get is sporadic and uncertain.

Kwe heri for now.
Donald