Jane & Steve - Africa ‘26

  Let me start this post by saying that we are fine, are determined to make the best of our last week of vacation, and we don’t want to scare anyone from visiting Tanzania. The large majority of people we have met in Tanzania have been wonderful!   On Monday we met a man “William“ at the market in Dar Es Salam when we were buying fabric. He told us he was a taxi driver and asked if we needed a ride, so Steve got his number and we asked him to pick us up around 1:30 pm to take us to the airport to fly to Mafia Island, just off the Tanzania coast.  “William” showed up at the allotted time with a friend who was driving. First caution to you all - always check a taxi’s credentials (or use a taxi app)! Second caution - ask to be let out if you discover you are locked into the taxi! People here have been so kind and trustworthy, we had completely let our guards down.  On the way to the airport, “William” picked up three other men, they turned down a side street, stopp...

Our last day with the Reaching Children’s Potential Program was busy, rich and full of gratitude! We spent the last morning with our sweet wanafunzi at the Mukungo school. We were very pleased that most of them remembered our lesson  (question asking - “What is it?” and “It is a…”) from yesterday. Children are such sponges for language! We will miss them all!  In the afternoon we visited two new moms and met two Tanzanian infants, who seemed to be doing very well. RCP is working to reverse a fairly high infant mortality rate here. After our visits, we helped organize donated supplies in the medical clinic. To our surprise, a good portion of the supplies came from Partners in World Health, located in Portland, Maine!  A local farmer came to talk with Steve and share farming practices/ideas, with Deborah doing the Swahili-English translation. Mama Tony cooked a big meal (spiced rice, coconut peas, roasted chicken, fresh fruit) and many of the staff joined us for dinner....

  Love! The feeling comes upon me so frequently here - when the students come running out of the school house welcoming us enthusiastically, when I see the female Tanzanian maternal health workers gently providing  villagers support, when I see barefoot villagers all banding together to push a stuck farm vehicle out of the mud, or when a young single mom with 5 children welcomes us into her dirt-floor brick shack with a smile and a welcome “karibu”. Yes, these moments also happen at home, but against the backdrop of extreme poverty in these remote rural Tanzanian villages, and the multiplicity of hardships endured by most people here, the feeling is especially poignant.  In the afternoons, we’ve been attending mental health visits in the villages with Regina, a young Tanzanian who is finishing her Masters in sociology. Regina briefs us on the issues the mothers are facing, from illness of both themselves and their children, to husbands who visit witch doctors, drink too m...

Some of you have asked for more details about the Reaching Children’s Potential (RCP) program, a program based here in Ipalamwa to address the fact that about half of the children born in this region suffer from stunting. Stunting is not only a problem for children, but also for families, communities, and Tanzania as a whole. RCP helps combat this problem by: housing a maternal health clinic here in Ipalamwa; providing dozens of Tanzanian women who go out into the villages to conduct maternal health visits; providing volunteer teachers in the severely underfunded and understaffed area schools; helping villagers with appropriate technologies (see the handwashing station, above); delivering educational workshops throughout the villages, and most recently, helping the community address mental health issues.  Our work here has mostly focused on teaching English at the elementary level, teaching science at the secondary level, and helping with maternal health visits.  Success in li...

We had a beautiful  birthday yesterday  working with the RCP (Reaching Children’s Potential) program.  It started with teaching two lessons at the Makungo primary school, about 6 kilometers down a very muddy, bumpy from our RCP Center in Ipalamwa. The wanafunzi (students) speak only Swahili, and Grace, one of the young Tanzanian locals, accompanied us to help with Swahili. We worked with the kids on the alphabet, a few colors, and 5 new words in English via a game where they passed around that object in a circle and said the word. W e brought jumpropes and balls and played jumping and clapping games during recess, which was a big improvement over our first day when the kids were just running around the dirt yard or just hanging onto/grabbing and hugging us. The school has no playground, balls, swings or games, just a dirt yard.  We are learning that repetition is important to learning, so in o ur second lesson yesterday we had them write the new words and work more o...

  After a 1.5 hour flight from Nairobi to Dar Es Salam, a 50 minute bush flight from Dar, and over 3 hours on a very bumpy dirt road to Ipalamwa, we find ourselves in Tanzania’s remote Southern Highlands!     We are at our new home for two weeks - the Global Volunteers Health Clinic and base for Tanzanian staff and volunteers.   We are surrounded by a beautiful green rolling landscape, red dirt roads, and small simple villages. This could be one of the most productive farming areas in Tanzania, but tragically it is one of the poorest regions with the highest rates of childhood stunting. We are told that this is    due to lack of knowledge about nutrition and sanitation, lack of access to markets to sell produce, decimation by HIV/AIDS, and the fact that women (who are tasked with most of the farming responsibilities) are also burdened with very large families and all the domestic duties.  We are working with Global Volunteers Reaching Children’s Potent...