Our first area of focus is a rural school district in Tanzania between mountains Meru and Kilimanjaro. Tanzania is a particularly good place to concentrate our efforts because the government is committed to increasing education in rural areas and will put teachers in villages where schools have been built.
The people in this district, who survive by subsistence farming, desperately want schools. Many villages have built simple, one-room structures but several are too small to accommodate all the children, are only half built, are in a terrible state of disrepair or simply need basic items like desks. That’s where we come in.
First, we require that a village has shown deep commitment to their school prior to our engagement–we view our job as helping those who have already begun the hard work of helping themselves. If there has been visible and measurable progress made by the villagers and they request our assistance, we then work with them to identify the needs of the school and to assess the commitment of the entire village to care for the school after our work is finished. Once a decision has been made to “adopt” a school, we then recruit volunteers and raise money to cover the costs of the project. Finally, we travel to the village for a week of hard work to help the locals finish their new school and to build memories that last a lifetime.
