Wednesday July 6, 2011

The fact is that there is enough food in the world for everyone. But tragically, much of the world's food and land resources are tied up in producing beef and other livestock--food for the well off--while millions of children and adults suffer from malnutrition and starvation.
-- Dr.Walden Bello

Went to KidzCare again today. Got to see the primary school that was just recently painted inside and new desks were put in. It looks really nice now and the teacher is able to use the paintings on the walls to teach because there are animals, body parts, the alphabet, numbers, and different things like that on the walls so less books are needed. We played with the kids and read with them and then A taught Jocelyn and I how to dance! Jenny brought pipe cleaners and the kids loved making flowers, bracelets, eye glasses, rings, necklaces, spiders, snakes and people out of them! Kara, E, E, D, F, and I had some girl time lying on the trampoline, singing and laughing. When we were about to leave E asked me if I could sleep over at their house with them, and I really wish we could have!

We got home around 6:30pm, had dinner and then Brooke and Marco, the owners of Boona Baana came over after dinner for coffee and pie to talk about our future plans with the kids and also about children’s rights in Tanzania because Brooke is a lawyer here and deals with a lot of cases involving children’s rights. It was nice to hear their ideas and know that we are going to be working on projects that they need and will be beneficial to the kids and to their organization. I learned that not until 2010 were there any laws specifically in place for kids and even when there were some in place they weren’t implemented much. Also, the government and social welfare systems don’t care about the children, they are greedy and in it for themselves. As for boona baana, we talked a bit about sponsoring and they stated they would like if the kids were involved with the money they are receiving in the sense that they would learn budgeting and learn some money skills. I thought it was a good idea. Brooke and Marco have had numerous amounts of volunteers throughtout their fourteen years of owning Boona Baana and they said they have had some good volunteers but they have had many bad volunteers also. We asked them what made a bad volunteer and Brooke basically said “there are two kinds of volunteers, those who want to fill a gap, and those who are fulfilled already”. The one’s that are there looking to fill a gap and there to try and get something out of it tend to complain a lot and don’t get as involved with the kids. They have a lot of volunteers that had completely different ideas of what Africa and even boona baana would be like before they got there and when they are there they can’t deal with the reality. Brooke also mentioned this website: http://foreverangels.org/ and it’s honestly worth a look! It’s a home in Tanzania for orphaned children. After they left we all went to a place called Joevic that has karaoke and was about a four minute drive down the road from us.