Overview of Hope For Tanzania

DUFFIELD SCENE 2009

Back in 2007 I wrote 2 articles for the Duffield Scene about our canoe trip to raise funds for Tanzania. Martin and Philippa Grosvenor with their two girls Steph and Elli visited Tanzania in the summer of 2007, during which we helped build a classroom and taught lessons at the Tuishime Primary School. Since then the school, whose pupils are mostly poor or who are AIDS orphans, has doubled in size, the quality of education has improved and one of the teachers has visited us to see some local primary schools in action. In May 2008 we set up a registered charity which is called Hope for Tanzania. The reason for doing this was to take advantage of generous gift aid allowances and to promote the work in a more public way whilst maintaining credibility with sponsors. Two of the trustees - Peter and Maggie Zimmermann also live in Duffield.

The aims of Hope for Tanzania are to:

• Develop Tuishime School so that it becomes financially self-sufficient.
• Improve resources in the School so that children receive an education which is comparable with that in Europe.
• Support projects which will create jobs and improve the prospects of Tanzanians, e.g. by establishing funding for microbusinesses.
• Assist selected Tanzanians to become influential leaders by supporting their education, providing advice and encouraging them to live out Christian values.
• Provide opportunities for individuals and schools in the UK to give their time and skills to projects in Tanzania.

Our motto is Help for Today, Hope for Tomorrow.

In August and September, a team of 8 people will be in Tanzania for periods up to a month to help the school and carry out other work. Four of us (Kim Jeffery, Roger Lennard, Peter Harris and I) are from St Alkmund's Church whilst the other people live in Bath. Peter, a retired GP, was born in Tanzania but has not been back there since his childhood. Tim Wilmshurst, who also used to live in East Africa, has helped us learn a few words of Swahili. The support we have had from local people has been greatly appreciated.

During our visit we will help to complete the building of one classroom and build a new classroom for the oldest year group. The team will also set up a library with donated books, read books with children to improve their English, run art classes for older children and teach games. We will be taking some reconditioned laptops with us to leave with those teachers who are IT literate so that they can start downloading educational resources from the internet. One generous donor will fund equipment to print and copy school papers once we have found out the most cost effective way to do this. A further aim of ours is to identify projects which we can support during the next 2 years before our next visit in 2011.