In Ipalamwa, volunteers taught students math, geography, health and English using games such as scrabble, and hangman as part of language building. They made learning fun and creative for the approximately 280 Ipalamwa students who benefited from the volunteers who served.
Outside of the classroom, volunteers helped to paint a small building which will be housing volunteers. Last fall we accomplished one of the most significant activities by arranging 240,000 bricks to be used in finishing the new library and four classrooms. Volunteers enjoyed going down to the valley with students and locals to work every morning. They worked together to form and bake bricks in four different big piles to be used for these projects.
In their free time on Saturdays and Sundays, volunteers enjoyed watching and dancing traditional Tanzanian dances, seeing pottery being made, learning basket weaving and worshiping with the local people on Sundays. All of this was arranged by the local authority of Ipalamwa as a thank you to the volunteers.
The knowledge, skills, games, ideas and the joy left by volunteers during their relatively short stay have remained as a sign of hope for the future of the community.
The August team to Ipalamwa launched work on a new water delivery system. Currently students fetch water with buckets from a source approximately 1.5 km from the school. The first team to Ipalamwa this year dug trenches for pipes to deliver water and future teams will continue with the laying of pipe and installing a pump system. Future teams will continue to work on this project bringing water directly to the school.
POMMERN COMMUNITY
Pommern school has over 800 students from all over the country. These students have benefited from the service of volunteers. Volunteers have helped to teach Form Five English, such as syntax, semantics and word formation, as well as history and computer literacy. At the primary school they taught English and coloring to the kids.
Volunteers also participated in clinic out reach with local health aids in a nearby village of Mgagao where they served over 100 pregnant mothers and babies a day.
Apart from this, volunteers also helped to plant trees as part of the villages effort to bring back lost trees which were cut down for firewood and construction. The effort has been praised by the church and the village government as one of the best examples of partnership activities between Global Volunteers and our Tanzanian host partner, the ELCT. This project has been hailed as a good example for future life. We thank volunteers and local people who were involved in planting trees.
We're so excited to tell you that between January and March we were able to finish painting the new library, which officially opened in April. Thank you to Ron Reed and all volunteers who were involved in donating money and helping to work on it!
Thanks to the generosity of many of you, we reached our goal and in 6 months time raised approximately $40,000, purchased and delivered books for Pommern Secondary School. Each student now has a book for each subject, something rarely achieved in rural African schools. This and the many other achievements made by our volunteers to Tanzania working hand in hand with the school staff and students, has raised the bar in measuring quality of education to the point where leadership have now decided to make PSS a model school.
Upcoming projects will include such things as establishing science labs, addressing dormitory congestion, and staff housing.
The pilot public health training program for Rural Medical Aids (RMA) in Pommern was a huge success! Both volunteers and the RMAs report that it was not only beneficial in building skills of the front line health care providers, but also that it was a lot of fun! Two courses were taught with approximately 12 RMAs in each course. Lecture and demonstration was complemented with a lot of hands on practice and exchange around case studies and stories of local challenges and successes.
Our communities still need your support in building new classrooms. Students are doubling everyday in our schools and so is the need for more buildings to accommodate them. Unfortunately their parents are not able to do it alone due to poverty and the difficult economic situation in my country.
Apart from your support with medical skills and equipment in health care, we ask you to call Global Volunteers or contact, Tanya Battista Crespo, Global Volunteers Child Sponsorship Manager. There are so many children who are very intelligent but are unable to pay their yearly tuition because of poverty or have no parents.
Please come and share the love of our people and enjoy wildlife at the end of your service program. Tanzania has experienced peaceful leadership transition and therefore there are no political problems which may scare our people and visitors.
For more details about our service programs to Tanzania, visit Global Volunteers website at www.globalvolunteers.org
Thank you very much.
Harran Ngede
Global Volunteers' Tanzania Country Manager.
