Paying-it-Forward

Joseph

Brenda (One Person co-founder and President) used her own funds to help Joseph receive training and set up his own business in Kahama, Tanzania.  

Summerland School in Lugunga Village.

The team delivered much-needed educational supplies. 

Joseph has now set up a preschool in his village, which they have called the Summerland School; this fills our hearts as we are based in Summerland, British Columbia. 

Joseph and others volunteer their time to teach the children the pre-academic skills that they need before attending primary school. 

In 2008, the then Summerland Mayor, David Gregory signed a Friendship Agreement between Summerland & Kahama, and Joseph's actions are another binding thread in the BC - Tanzania connection. (No financial funding is given, but the City of Summerland promotes our organization on their website.)

Here are our other blogs on what we have done to assist education in the Kahama region. 

Visit our facebook page for more photos and stories.

Contact us to find out how to sponsor the orphanage, volunteer or to make a donation. You can also donate online. 

Asante Sana - Thank You! 

Emmanuel, our wonderful Agent in Kahama, Tanzania

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One Person volunteer, Dr.Glen Burgoyne (middle) wearing a gift from Joseph  (left)
and Emmanuel 

Joseph and Emmanuel are amazing, hardworking men who live in Kahama, Tanzania.  Both have made every effort to help us on our visits to Kahama, acting as drivers, translators and tour guides! We value their friendship greatly. (You can read more about Joseph in my Nov. 15th 2013 blog.) 

Earlier this year we asked Emmanuel if he would be our representative in Kahama, and thankfully - he agreed! Thanks to technology and our annual visits, we were already in regular contact with the officials and coordinators of the programs we are supporting or have set up, but having Emmanuel on the ground has allowed us to act and react much more swiftly: his local knowledge and insights are invaluable.

Emmanuel graduated from the University of Dar es Salaam with a bachelor degree in political science and public administration. He currently owns and runs a day care in Kahama, runs training sessions for the Barrick Gold mining company and teaches written and spoken English to children. We are extremely fortunate to have him on our team.   

Emmanuel and me in 2012. We all got lovely red kangas this time!

For more information or to make a donation contact me , mail to The One Person Project, 10108 Julia Street, Summerland, B.C. V0H 1Z5 or donate on-line   

Strengthen one person - strengthen the family - strengthen the community.

Sponsoring Further Education in Kahama

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When One Person first started in 2006, co-founder and President, Brenda Lowe asked family and friends to sponsor World Vision children in the Kahama District. In the end we found sponsors for over 50 children in the area, plus more in Muhanga, Rwanda. W.V. is due to leave the Kahama region in the next few years so some families are continuing to sponsor through One Person - a great decision as we will visit the children on our trips and will deliver and bring back photos, reports and personal messages!

Brenda is also providing funding for a young man's education. His name is Joseph and I met him on my trip in 2012. He is an amazing young man who has been acting as an unpaid guide and interpreter whenever we visit Kahama.

Joseph translating and passing on information about the photos from Summerland B.C.
to the children of the Faraja orphanage on our 2012 trip.

This is an excerpt from Brenda's Planet Ranger entry earlier this year.

"I met with my friend Joseph for a trip to the bank to deposit $900 I’d saved for him. I first met Joseph on my trip in 2009. He’s waiter at the Pineridge and has been our salvation on these trips. Joseph is one of the most resourceful, thoughtful, caring, generous people I’ve ever met. He helps us with everything we need and would never ask for anything in return.

 I made a decision on my last trip here that I would like to help Joseph get a better education so he can find decent employment. Joseph works long hours as a waiter and makes less than $100 per month. He supports his family with anything he has left over after he pays his living expenses and will never be able to change his situation without some help. He’ll need two years of upgrading and then will be allowed to attend a vocational school for training to work at the mine.

When we visited Joseph’s parents yesterday, they thanked me for helping him saying that they never had enough to pay for him to get an education and are so grateful for him to have this chance. They said that the whole family depends on Joseph and when he has a good job, he’ll be able to help them."

Brenda with Joseph's parents Grace and Sampson in their village hut.

Strengthen one person - strengthen the family - strengthen the community

Contact me today if you are interested in supporting a child or young adult's education.

To make a general donation send a cheque to The One Person Project, 10108 Julia Street, Summerland, B.C. V0H 1Z5, donate on-line or email me. 

Muvuma Orphanage and Albinism

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At present there are two children with albinism at the Muvuma Orphanage Centre. Albinism is a rare, non-contagious, genetically inherited condition occurring in both genders regardless of ethnicity. There is a large albino population in the Kahama area who suffer from the stigma and prejudices of being different but more alarmingly, in Tanzania (as in many developing countries) there is a ‘trade’ in albino limbs as they are believed to have magical properties.

In 2011 Kulwa, a 15 year old girl with albinism was attacked in her village home by three masked men. They hacked off her arm above the elbow. This was only one of the 76 reported attacks since 2007, from which there are only 14 mutilated survivors. Even once buried, the victim's graves are desecrated.

UPDATE: In 2014 The Tanzanian government outlawed witch- doctors. 

Kahama District Council donated space for a new, larger orphanage (see April 12th blog) choosing land next to a school so that the children are not at risk of being abducted on their way to lessons.

People with Albinism (PWA) also suffer from widespread social discrimination, have poor vision and are extremely prone to skin cancer. The Tanzanian government and local bodies are trying to address the myths and discrimination, you and I can provide reading glasses, hats and sun block.

Flora (Amani Clinic nurse) and Brenda (One person President)

play with the children

The new, larger orphanage will be home to up to 50 children, including children with albinism.

For more information or to make a donation contact me , mail to The One Person Project, 10108 Julia Street, Summerland, B.C. V0H 1Z5 or donate on-line  

Strengthen one person - strengthen the family - strengthen the community.

2012 Trip: Rwanda/ Muhanga/ Evariste and his family share their food with us

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The  brick making volunteers were invited inside to have a late lunch, provided by Evariste and his wife (pictured by the doorway) to thank us for our help.  Lunch was cassava (a root vegetable) and beans.

Like most families in rural Rwanda, Evarist and his wife barely have enough food to feed themselves but they made sure that we were looked after. Brenda and previous volunteer teams have experienced this extraordinary generosity time and time again when visiting families in Rwanda and Tanzania.

Costa and members of another volunteer group -  
Groundwork Opportunities.

The family are part of a supportive HIV/AIDS co-operative set up by the NGO Costa is involved with, the Terimbere Rwanda Organization. TRO provides counselling and covers medical expenses for the family. AIDS is particularly prevalent in Rwanda as men infected with AIDS used rape as a deliberate weapon of war in the 1994 genocide.

We were joined by other members of the HIV/AIDS cooperative. Note the Ironman Penticton donated shirts!

Erin and Evariste's daughter Pamela

Pamela, who was three months old at this time, is not HIV positive.  

I believe that this must be due to the medication that prevents mother to child transmission

 (PMTCT)  but I will find out for sure and update the blog.

Acting as interpreter, Costa told us Evariste's story and explained the benefits of the HIV/AIDS support group. They have a pig co-operative, and thanks to your donations we were able to contribute to it on previous trips.  

Costa spoke to one of the group, an emaciated woman named Epiphany, asking for her permission to tell us her story. Epiphany was widowed and turned to prostitution in order to earn money to feed her children. She felt great guilt at knowingly passing on the infection, but having lost two of her children she did not want the remaining three to starve. Costa told us that Epiphany had been to many counselling sessions before she talked about her actions but once she did she was able to begin to heal mentally and in spirit, and the opportunity to be a part of the pig co-operative meant that she no longer had to resort to prostitution. 

It was at this point that Brenda told Costa that we were passing on donations of US$300 for the pig co-op. Costa turned to one of the older ladies and spoke to her, she clapped her hands and cried out, as did the rest of the group. Costa turned to us and said that this lady was in very poor health and was exhausted from having to walk to the market each day to sell homemade beer for little or no profit, and he had just told her "No more market. Now you can stay and help look after the new pigs."

I cried.

2012 Trip: Rwanda/ Muhanga/ Making bricks for Evariste's home

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Costa

Brenda met Costa on the first One Person trip (2008). His parents fled a Tutsis' massacre in 1959 and Costa was brought up in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo. His wife, Bernadette, saw her parents and siblings killed in the 1994 genocide and survived by hiding in the ceiling of a neighbor’s home. Costa was a member of the Rebel Resistance Army that helped to overthrow the Hutu regime and he has been imprisoned three times. He documents his extraordinary life in his book The Work That Brings Peace In Me.

Costa is committed to healing himself, his family and his homeland, he travels the world promoting peace and reconciliation, and has visited with us in British Columbia. He now lives and studies in Maine, USA.

Costa is part of TRO (Terimbere Rwanda Organization, formally known as GO Rwanda.) the organization that received our first shipping container. TRO works in the Muhunga region to implement a genocide reconciliation project, which supports genocide survivors through community reconciliation and rehabilitation programs. Perpetrators also undergo rehabilitation and receive counselling before they are paired with a survivor to build homes for vulnerable families.

In a previous visit Brenda and a team of volunteers had helped to make bricks for one house, and now our team had the opportunity to do the same.

Brenda, One Person President and co-founder

Rwanda is called The Land of a Thousand Hills, and I'm sure that we hiked most of them on this trip!
Mary wrote about the brick making day in her blog on Planet Ranger:

"Today we hopped back on a bus to Muhanga and then walked down the side of a mountain to a house where we were invited to make mud bricks to help the family that needed them. Since we are volunteers we made around 150 bricks for free, the family was very thankful because when they pay someone to make the bricks it costs 25 RWF per brick. 150 bricks isn’t a lot, and when I roughly counted the bricks of the houses around us, I figured that we probably only made enough bricks for a quarter of a quarter of the walls. But helping the family save around 3750 RWF was a good feeling since they could now use that money to buy a goat or something else for the house.

The bricks are literally made out of dirt and water. They start by pouring water onto the dirt and then they use their feet to squish the water around, making the ground wet enough for them to throw it into a square mold for the bricks. The men making the mud held tools that looked like bent shovels to pound into the ground to break up the mud, roots, grass and rocks from each other. Then they rolled up the mud into a medium sized ball and passed it to the person next to them who then passed it to a few more people before it ended up into the concrete molds where Brenda and another man squished it around to make a perfect square brick with no air holes.

 It was a great experience but I know that the people there were just doing it so we would be happy...and I know that they could have done it ten times faster than the silly mzungu’s did." 

Evariste, the house owner, digs and prepares the mud. Brenda and One Person Director and co-founder Sheena work with  Evariste and his family and neighbours.

   

Mary, One Person member and volunteer since our inception in 2007



Everyone helped to haul water!  Luckily the stream was only a few hundred yards down the hill...

Evariste Nsengiyumva moved to Muhanga in 1996 from the then dangerous Congolese border. It took him eleven years to acquire his own land and he has finally saved enough money to begin building his family home.

We were joined after a while by Bart, founder of the U.S organization, Groundwork Opportunities and his team of volunteers, so we were able to get two lines of bricks going! Groundwork

Opportunities raised funds to help us get our Muhanga shipping container out of customs storage when it was held for far longer than expected. 

 Rendering the walls with a sand mixture





The house was about three quarters finished. Families pay to have bricks made and build as they go - sometimes it may take years to build a small house.

As usual - we had an audience.  Erin shows the children their photograph.  

Erin helped teach in out Train The Teachers week in Tanzania on this trip. Her school, Holy Cross, in Penticton, B.C. donated books to St. Timothy's school in Moshi, Tanzania in 2011 (Bart had asked One Person to make a donation there in return for their raising extra funds to help get the shipping container out of storage) so she travelled to St. Timothy's to meet the staff and children. Holy Cross is giving the school long-term support. 

The house from the back

And the front

The government encourages people to not build the traditional small grass-thatched huts (Nyakasi) but to build larger homes with tin or tiled roofs.

 In 2006 (as a World Vision Volunteer) Brenda met this brother and sister who were orphaned after the genocide. They live in a remote area in a traditional grass hut. They told Brenda that in the rainy season, which lasts three months, they had to try and sleep standing up as the roof leaked and the dirt floor became a muddy pool.

It was very satisfying to take part in the brick making and work side by side with the villagers. Costa had been delayed returning from a trip so we were only at the village for part of a day, rather than the three days we had planned, so our contribution may not have made a massive difference to the progress of the walls in the house but by going back year after year and helping to build other houses in the community we are showing our commitment to our long-term involvement with Muhanga. 

2012 Trip / Tanzania/ Kahama / Faraja Orphanage

 Sheena is a One Person co-founder and Director. She is a teacher at the Summerland Montessori School (B.C. Canada) which supports the Faraja Orphanage.   

Most Tanzanian orphanages are not the traditional institutionalised facilities that most of us are familiar with.  Orphans tend to be absorbed into extended families or are taken in by neighbours. The extra child/children put a huge strain on the families who take them in, so the children spend time at an orphanage each day to receive care and food. 

In this instance a group of women from the Isegehe area formed a committee and put money together to form the orphanage, which they continue to fund and run. The orphanage pays for the children’s medical and schooling fees, and sends soap and other valued items back to the foster-family to help decrease the burden of an extra child/children.

  

EXCERPT FROM SHEENA'S ENTRY ON PLANET RANGER

"In previous years we have sent money to buy the orphanage meat goats and pay school fees, and we sent them supplies in the crate sent last year. Since I was meeting them in person, families from the school put together bags for each of the orphans and I brought some donated money and the money from our recycling program to help them. I have been carrying all of the stuff with me all this time, and I was excited to finally be able to deliver it.

Of course, getting there was not quick and easy. The ride we thought we arranged didn’t work out due to an uninsured vehicle and despite numerous calls to a variety of people, we were stuck for a little bit as to how to get out there. Eventually Joseph found us a taxi driver willing to take us out there (it is in a village outside of Kahama) and we set off, with our 32 gift bags loaded up in the trunk of the cab. We had been unable to make direct contact with the orphanage yet, so first we went to the World Vision office, where someone else jumped into the cab to direct us to the orphanage. Through channels we are still not certain of, Scholastica (who runs the orphanage with the help of other ladies in the community) had heard we were coming and was waiting for us.

When we arrived, we were very warmly welcomed, with lots of hugging and hand shaking and hand holding and hugging and laughing and more hand shaking and cries of “Welcome!” Once Brenda explained that I was the teacher from the book we sent them last year, I was re-welcomed and there was even more hugging and hand-shaking and an elderly woman was kicked out of her chair so I could sit there! There were orphanage kids and random neighbour kids there and some of them were really breaking my heart! All of the people I have met so far here are very clean and tidy (which I find hard what with all of the dust and lack of water pressure!), but quite a few of these kids were dirty, with torn clothing, and bellies protruding from malnutrition. One little guy, a year old or so, ate a handful of dirt.

I only had stuff for the Orphanage kids, so Brenda and Joseph went to get food for everyone from the store. Mary and I stayed and, with Scholastica’s son Isack translating, made conversation with the Faraja ladies. They were very surprised that Mary was only 17, comparing her to a girl there who was 17 and asking, “Why do you look so much bigger than her? What are you eating over there?!” When Brenda and Joseph came back, we fed all of the children some bananas and biscuits.

After that I handed out the gift bags and took pictures of all of the children. It was awesome! I brought pictures of the kids from my school to go with each bag and showed them to the children as they received their bags, explaining that that child sent the bag for them. It was chaotic and busy, but really great! Afterwards, we took more pictures and they all sang some songs for us. Then I discreetly gave Scholastica the money I had brought and after a lot more hugging and hand shaking and thank-you’s, we were off. I would have loved to have stayed longer, but our taxi driver was only willing to wait so long, so away we went! "

Thank you - from the children and youth in Kahama, Tanzania

Click here if you would like to volunteer here in the Okanagan B.C or offer support from elsewhere.

Click here if you would like to make an on-line donation or email us at info@theonepersonproject.org if you can save us the on-line fees and mail a cheque!