Ta ta TAN-EDAPS

So, I didn’t find a TV to watch the Japan-Scotland game (no big deal, apparently we were hopeless and lost 2-0). I was too busy moving out of my homestay in Ngyeku Village, ahead of moving to a new one in Moshono tomorrow. For the next month, I’m the new recruit for RISE Africa, another NGO doing all kinds of great work here in Tanzania.

My first month has been brilliant. At TAN-EDAPS, I’ve been doing some report writing, some fundraising and lots of picture-taking at the behest of my boss, Mr Mafie (like most people here, he doesn’t have a digital camera, so I’ve come in pretty useful for taking snaps).

Two things stick out from my time with him. On Monday I spent the day with one of TAN-EDAPS’ associated groups called Ngyeku Home Based Care (NHOBC), which arranges visits to house-bound people such as HIV sufferers or old folks.

We visited nine households that day. The first was a grandmother who lived in a shack in the middle of rural farmland, caring for her HIV-infected grand-daughter abandoned by her itinerant alcohol-loving daughter. The grandmother had no job, no husband and with East Africa experiencing a lengthy and cruel drought, no food or crops. NHOBC does a great job, on the limited budget it has, of ensuring these folks are not forgotten about.

The other stories were equally harrowing. The saddest for me concerned the fella below wearing the hat, 95-year-old Elisa:



He’s a grand old chap who can’t walk unaided, has major chest pains and is getting increasingly forgetful, suggesting he’s in the early stages of dementia. Also, in the photograph, that mudhut in the background, which you would not keep your evil slyly-parks-in-disabled-spaces neighbour’s dog in, is his house.

He likes visitors though, so our arrival was warmly welcomed and he squeezed my hand firmly and mustered a smile when I approached. He can’t speak properly anymore, so I’d like to think the series of grunts he gave me were intended kindly. The hat he is wearing was a pink women’s M&S number with a little bow on the side, a bit like one my Grandma Helen used to wear.

Obviously, he belongs in an old folks’ home. But they don’t have them in Tanzania, so he’s reliant on the kindness of his neighbours to bring him food, and groups like NHOBC, who are trying to raise money to help him find somewhere nicer to live.

My whole day with NHOBC was a bit like these clips they show on Comic Relief, where they send someone like Nigel from Eastenders to a penniless African community and zoom in on their heartache as the rich Westerner/peasant Africa pathos eats them up.

I now know how that feels, and it’s hard not to feel that same sense of pity, shame and even guilt, laced with a feeling that the world has never looked this unbalanced. Unlike the Comic Relief projects featured on telly, there’s no wheelbarrow-full of cash coming NHOBC’s way any time soon. But I wish them well and hope I can help them change that in the future.

Another brilliant group I had the pleasure of spending time with was Nice Orphanage & Daycare Centre. Here’s some of the kids doing a maths lesson:



The management have big plans of extending the centre from its current use as a daycare centre into a fully residential campus for over 40 kids, where they can get three meals a day and proper TLC, depending on finding funding of around £90,000. I did some report writing for them, and am in the midst of helping them to set up an ‘Adopt A Child’ scheme, to give these kids cash for things like schooling, food and clothes.

As an introduction to working for an NGO in Tanzania, TAN-EDAPS was class. The journey continues now with RISE Africa.

The word is I might be asked to do some English teaching. As per Robin Williams in Good Morning Vietnam, I’m toying with the idea of introducing the phrase “Yer maw” to the youth of Tanzania as a term of endearment.

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As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I didn’t bring my MP3 player to Tanzania with me, which I now acknowledge as a tactical error. I expected Tanzania radio to be awash with sufficient guitar rock and pop to get by; instead the only Western stuff is all horrible hip-hop and R&B. The closest I have got so far was a Mantovani-esque reworking of “Baby Where Did Our Love Go?” by The Supremes and that will not do.

However, from a scientific point of view, I can salvage positives from my experiment. On a bus to Moshi last week, a stream of anonymous African tunes on the radio was interrupted by “Against All Odds” by Phil Collins; a song I vehemently do not have in my collection at home, but in isolation, and as sanctuary from the rubbish I’m otherwise forced to listen to, it sounded terrific. “In The Air Tonight” or “Sussudio” would have been much better, but in the circumstances, I’ll take what I can get.

As I publish this blog, I have one ear on YouTube, listening to "Alba" by Runrig at jet engine-volume. It’s 4:01 long, took 27 minutes to load and is big, bombastic and worth every second of the wait.

Bye for now,

Ross