Proud to be Africans

To go to Africa as a volunteer was the dream of my life. On completion of my bachelor’s degree I decided to make my dream come true and left for three months to Tanzania. I chose Tanzania as a destination for many reasons, it is relatively safe, beautiful and the organization that I contacted offered me a position in an orphanage as I wanted.

Children from the streets

Tanzania is situated on the east coast of African  and borders Kenya. It is almost two time bigger than  Spain and has slightly more inhabitants. The capital city Dar es Salaam is located in the Indian Ocean and has around three million inhabitants.

In Tanzania, as in other African countries, family and community is the most important thing. Unfortunately, there are some exceptions and that’s why in 1994 a young woman named Winnifrida set up an orphanage on the outskirts of the capital city, in the Chamazi Magengeni district.

Fifty children, from different parts of the country, were brought there. Some of them were found on the streets, newborns with just a few days or weeks old, others were orphaned as a result of the HIV/AIDs disease. Today, the orphanage’s six buildings are home to 156 orphans, from a few months old to twenty-two years old. The children who receive funds to study at universities return home to the orphanage during their summer holidays to be with their ‘family’. The majority of children stay until they find a job and are able to ‘stand up on their own two feet’.

The stories behind the lives of these children are very sad. Many of them were found on the streets in rubbish bins or dumps just a few weeks old; others are the result of rape, where the mother is too young to take care of the baby; many are HIV positive, as a result of infection at birth; while others suffer the effects and recurrences of malaria, yellow fever and other diseases on a daily basis.

School first 

Monthly expenses for all children including school fees around $1,000 American Dollars. Each day, the children walk to the nearest primary school and some of them attend a secondary boarding school on the outskirts of Dar es Salaam.

Two girls from Austria, a boy from Japan and I were volunteers for three months. We spent the mornings playing games with the babies and the youngest children, singing, dancing or sorting out beans for the daily meal. In the afternoons, when the oldest children returned from school, we taught them English, German and even Japanese! They were very keen on learning all our languages.

We also spent the afternoons playing football. It is a very popular activity among both boys and girls and helped them to strengthen core values of teamwork, gender equality, fairplay and tolerance.

Yatima Group Trust Fund is the name of the NGO that runs the orphanage. To encourage independence, the government gave an in-kind donation of land to cultivate and some animals. All the children share tasks like feeding pigs and chickens, cultivating spinach, tomatoes and peppers. The products are sold in the local market to help the childrento pay their school fees.

In three months, I never saw children eating meat; they were only allowed to eat papayas and other fruits from their trees once per week. By selling those products they could get enough money to allow all of them to go to school and to have a mosquito net to protect from malaria-infected mosquitoes.

On numerous occasions, there wasn’t enough money for bread for breakfast so children ate a mixture of water, flour and sugar called ‘uji’. There was only one meal per day in late afternoon, which consisted of rice, ugali (a tough boiled mixture of flour and water) and beans.

Tanzania is a beautiful country, where Muslims and Christians live peacefully together. When the Muslim kids in the orphanage were fasting for one-month during Ramadan (holy month), the Christian children joined them out of solidarity and friendship. It is not an easy thing to fast during September in tropics! Tanzanians are nice and friendly people, proud of their country and their continent. 

In their national hymm  “Mungu Ibariki Africa” (God bless Africa) the word “Africa” is heard more times than the word “Tanzania”. I can only confirm what most foreigners say about Africa. Once you put foot on this continent, you have to go back, again and again.

Pavla Folbrechtova is a Sport and Cooperation volunteer in Madrid, Spain.