Last year I spent one month working at Baobab Orphanage in Bagamoyo. This is a home where abandoned babies and children are welcomed into a family setting, given love, balanced meals, education and medical care. Great efforts are made to find families to adopt these children. I worked as a volunteer teaching English to the staff and children in the small rented house in town and in the afternoons I did manual labour on the recently acquired land about 13 kms from town. With help I planted over 50 fruit and shade trees and dozens of shrubs to make a boundary hedge around the vegetable patch. I had raised about $3500 in the UK before I left and Terri Place – the inspirational lady who runs the orphanage and I . bought windows and doors and the ceiling for the new house where the orphans will live. I was impressed with the speed and quality of work that was done so that when I returned in January to say goodbye I saw that the building was finished. I also saw that ‘my’ trees were flourishing. They still are as this email from Terri written this summer indicates:
Your trees are all just doing great, as are the herbs. I did see a cow try to munch one but I think it was saved.
I met up with Terri Place in Brooklyn in May 2011 and she told me that the next phase is to build a schoolroom. By sponsoring me in the walking half marathon in Baltimore you will be able to help us achieve this. These children really need our help. If you could see them you would melt. They know how important education is and they are very motivated to study from a young age. In January 2011 I am going back to Bagamoyo to help Terri with finding teaching staff and setting up a curriculum. I also hope to have some funds to buy primary school books, ship them out to Dar es Salaam and personally deliver them to the school. Alice and I worked on a project to provide 6 nurse training schools with text books and we learned that the most difficult aspect is actually getting the books to the schools.
If you would like to learn more about Baobab Orphanage please visit their website
www.tzkids.org
