Bamba Village

My new favourite program is Bamba. It’s an African village that we’re going to work with on talking about Malaria, TB, and Governance (Tanzania is re-doing their constitution and want the citizens to be involved in the process so we’ll be bringing in an expert to talk to the community about this and their other issues). The village itself is very beautiful and situated in the middle of two large hills that lead into mountains on either side of it. There are some houses but also huts with straw roves and all the palm trees had slashes in them all the way to the top like stairs to get coconuts for their food.

We met with the leader of the village and our contact from Faraja that lives there, and the rest of the participants met with us outside the leader’s office. It’s a mix of ages and even some small children were with us while we talked (a chicken also joined at one point) and they are all very eager to learn. One man actually said that he felt blessed that we were coming to their village because normally any kind of training is in Morogoro and hard for them to get to. I'll be getting more pictures once we start the programs next Wednesday and then I'll show some of the villagers. 

Linda and I led the session with Mako translating and it went really well. The atmosphere in general has been the best so far of all our programs because they are so eager to learn and so grateful. It still amazes me that even having so little here in comparison to us most of the people I’ve met are happier and friendlier than most people in Canada (except the guy that wanted me to marry him and bring him to Canada today…. He was creeepppyyyy and I was not impressed). It’s given me a lot of hope in this particular project and We’ve already started to arrange to spend a night there in two weeks. The key will be to have Frank or Norbert with us to translate but other than that It should be an amazing experience working there!!

Houses in the village

Some of the kids playing soccer in the village

One of the houses