Tumani Shamba

Daily Sister Adventina goes out on the streets of Bakoba looking for children.  Not any child.  Children who have been abused and abandoned to the streets of Bakoba.  When she finds them she tries to convince them  to come to the Tumani Shamba to live.  The shamba is a working farm on the outskirts of Bakoba.

Tumani means HOPE and that is just what the shamba is to these children.  Sister Adventina and her staff are funded by the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Tanzania.  The children stay at the shamba for a year or more.Some never leave until they are grown.  The sister and the staff work with the child to try and find extended family in their villages that they can eventually live with. 

They are placed in school and educated.  Some have never been to a school and it is hard to catch up to their grade level.  They have a doctor that takes care of all the children s physical needs.  Sometimes, though, the psycological damage is so great that the child returns to the streets.  A lot of them have had so little food that they are stunted in growth and sixteen year olds are the size of ten year olds.

When you enter the shamba with its many gardens and buildings you are greeted by the children jubilantly singing greetings to you.  They also dance for you.  It is Haki dancing which is very old and only done in this reagion.  The feeling of love, kindness and joy permeates everyone and everything that is done there.  The children are loved and safe here and they know it.

There is 56 children at Tumani at the present time.  They range in age from three years old to eighteen.  Can you imagine being dumped on the streets of a city at three because you are not wanted or are a burden to someone?  The older children help take care of the younger ones.  They work in the gardens that produce the food that they eat.

The evening that we were there for their supper they had ugali and a beans in vegitables and tomatoes.  Ugali is like our grits only a little courser.  They patiently wait to be served their food.  The helpings are huge and they can come back for seconds after everyone is feed.  No one goes hungry.  The youngest  are fed first and the oldest last.  The eat setting on the ground that is covered with sweet grass.

All food is cooked in giant pots over an open fire, every meal, every day.  No fancy kitcheons at Tumani.

The next day we went back to do art with them.  I had watercolor, brushes, collored pencils and lots of paper.  They used every drop of it.  They even turned the paper over and drew and painted on the other side.

The clients at We Care Arts, where I work in Dayton, Ohio had made butterflies and decorated them for the children of Tumani.  Such glee and joy.  Their eyes wide with amazement as we passed them out.  They absolutely loved the butterflies.  They even added to the decorations with there own brush and pencil marks and made them their own.

I took the 20 bottles of fingernail polish I had brought from the US.  Everywhere we have offered nail polish has created great amoiunts of giggles, laughter and pride in the girls.  But Tumani was the most fun.  From the youngest girl to the oldest every toe and finger was decorated with bright bold colors and everything was topped off with a coat of glitter polish in gold or silver or both.  Oh my do I have pictures to share from that afternoon.

It seems like so little but I have been told that everything that we had and everything we helped them do was huge.  From toes nails to watercoloring we gave them all a chance to express themselves in color and line.  None of which they had ever done before..  And they had a lot of pictures that they can keep and remember with.  They were so proud of what they had done that day.  The children humble me.

This is my last blog from Africa.  I am heading to Uganda tomorrow and flying home on Wednesday  I will be at the house about 6 pm on Thursday.  The first thing I will do is take a long hot shower.  Washing a a tiny bowl with a t-cup to rinse with is getting pretty tiring.  I will then call everyone to let them know I am home.

I will blog some more when I get rested up.  I have several more to put in.
Love you sharen

The Technology of Cell Phones and Computers in Tanzania

The Technology of Cell Phones and Computers in  Tanzania

Northwestern Karaga Region

Just think of what it would have been like to have placed cell phones in the hands of people 100 years ago.  That is almost what it is like here. There is no electricity, no running water, no land lines in this area for anything.  But there are cell phones and some computers in people’s hands.

This is all very hard to get a handle on.  It is incomprehensible to us in the US to understand.  On the coast (Zanzibar and Dar Salaam) they are a lot more technologically savvy.  A few land lines, maybe better phones, computers and internet service.  More towers, access to satellite services are available.

Here everything goes through very few towers.  The cell phones and the computers go through the same towers.  Personal private phones and computers and commercial (banks, and businesses) go through the same few towers. 

The modem we are using Carolee bought and I helped pay for Junes service so I can use it also.  In order to use our computers she has to take the Sims card out of her phone and place it in the modem device.  So if Carolee needs to take her phone to use somewhere the computers can not get on the internet.

Realize also that all the phone and computer waves are going through very few towers so this means that everything is slow, very slow.  Sometimes we can not pull up what we need.  G mail will only partially come up so you see you have new email but you can not get to the messages sent.  Nor can you email back.

I do not think I will ever be able to get use to this in the short time I am here.  Trying and failing to Skype with my son the other night was very disappointing.  It just does not have the connectivity to accomplish this chore.

On the other hand, looking at the big picture I think about all the people here who are able to communicate with their families and that makes me happy.  Many people who teach at this school have wives, husbands and children in other villages’ hours away.  They do not get home to see them for weeks on end, sometimes months.  They now at least are able to take talk or text with them on a regular basis.

These are not smart phones they are using.  In fact they are phones that ten years ago we though were fabulous.  There are very few smart phones here.  They work and that is what counts.  To these people it is a miracle.  I have been amazed when a woman walking along a dirt road with a baby on her back and a pile of stuff on her head pulls out a phone and starts to talk.

How they charge their phones when they have no electricity what puzzling me.  Carolee showed me all these tiny little run down, falling apart, ramshackle structures lining the main streets (or only streets) in the villages we pasted.  They are covered with advertising by the phone companies.  These are places where people with phones go to charge them, for a small fee of course

When one has electricity here it is still quite dicey.  We have gone for a whole day without electricity. When it goes out in the evening it is very black and dark.  The only light are the stars, the moon if it is out, my tiny flash light or my nook, if it is charged.

The towers also declare a time out several times a day.  Think about standing in a line for two hours at a bank and then power goes out or the internet goes out and then everything in the whole area stops.  That is except for the little lean-to shops in the middle of town that have been operating for hundreds of years selling their produce, meats, materials and all.  They do not need electricity. But I am sure that all of them have a cell phone on them.