Wednesday, February 29, 2012

The seed is planted



Makuyuni Primary School Classroom

What can I do? How can I help? How do these kids ever get ahead in life? These are questions that just popped into my head when we visited this school in Tanzania, Africa just a couple of weeks ago. We went to Africa on safari and thought we would take some gifts for a village or classroom. On our first day of safari we mentioned this to our guide, Clamian, and he knew just the place to take us, to Makuyuni Primary School in a village outside of Arusha.

 The headmaster, Samuel greeted us with open arms and took us on a tour of the school.
Headmaster, Samwel
Samwel discusses the shortage of textbooks




The kids held up their textbooks: Only 10 in the classroom!
1000 students, 6 teachers, 160+ students per classroom, 3 to 5 children per desk. Order, politeness, beautiful children.  No chalk, no teaching aids, maybe 4 to 5 worn textbooks per classroom. Pencils, paper, crayons, the school supplies we take for granted, non existent. Hence the question, what can we do, right now?

 The first thing we did was leave money so they could buy chalk --- such a simple thing, we could have brought a suitcase full of chalk instead of soccer balls and frisbees!
Samwel accepts the Schrey's gifts

Monday, February 27, 2012

Shopping in Tanzania









Our idea for Jambo Creations was taking form and originally we were going to buy the fabrics, beads etc in Tanzania and create fashion accessories inspired by our travels there.  There was inspiration everywhere. Beautiful fabrics, lots of color, jewelry. Just look at how these women are dressed as they go about their daily round.  Much of their time is spent fetching water and wood.  It is not unusual for women to walk 5 to 7 K each way per day to bring home water.




















We knew that the beautiful pieces we saw would be marketable, but as we took a closer look we could see how intricate and labor intensive this work is.  However, the solution to this challenge lay in the future.  See my blog, "The Mamas" coming up to see how beautifully it all came together.




                                                                                   

Shopping was so much fun