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In July 2008, I am going to Tanzania with 10 other students and 3 adults to erect a windmill to bring clean drinking water to a small village outside of Dodoma. We are going for a month to erect this windmill and we will be visiting other windmills that the C.P.P.S. Mission Projects have constructed over 30 years ago. I want to bring awareness that anyone can make a difference in other people's lives. We will be seeing the before and after. How far they have to travel to get dirty drinking water, and then after all the clean water is easily accessible. We are currently raising money through various fundraisers and events for the actual windmill and for our trip.

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Ascending Africa's highest mountain to provide medical supplies for Tanzania!

In the summer of 2008, I will be journeying to Kenya on a study abroad program through Michigan State University. After this program, I'm going to Tanzania to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain at 19,340 feet. I am doing this not only for personal reasons; I am climbing to benefit the people of East Africa.

My project, Kilimanjaro: Climbing to Cure (KCC), seeks to find sponsors and raise $14,000 to send a 40-foot container shipment of medical supplies to support the Gonja Lutheran Hospital. The hospital, a rural medical facility in northern Tanzania near Kilimanjaro, is in dire need of renovation and basic medical supplies. It supports a catchment area of 124,000 people, yet has a mere forty beds and employs only two doctors. None of the money raised will fund my personal costs; all donations go directly towards shipping the medical supplies.

The container shipment may include many types of medical supplies and equipment such as portable x-ray machines, ultrasound machines, operating tables and lamps, surgical kits, autoclaves, caps, gowns, gloves, needles, midwife kits, and palliative care kits, among other things.

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A group of Temple Medical students are fundraising for an upcoming trip to Tanzania for the summer of 2008. We are heading to Karatu, Tanzania to work on public health projects, including health awareness and HIV/AIDS projects. We are also hoping to volunteer our time in the university hospital and local clinics to assist in screening processes and health education.

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Driven from a passion to create opportunities for orphaned and abandoned children whose destinies until now were dictated by geography and the ravages of the HIV/AIDS and abysmal healthcare, The Foundation For Tomorrow intelligently uses education to develop future leaders in Tanzania. Through a heartfelt combination of financial and emotional support, TFFT provides boarding school scholarships, teacher's training, libraries, computer training centers and other essential learning resources for these children.

Without TFFT, these children would be destined for a life on the streets, early child labor or child marriages as early as age five. Now, their dreams and smiles are as bright as an African sunrise over the horizon.

See It: The Community being helped

The Olevolos Project is an up and running non-profit organization with 501(c)(3) status. The main goal of the project is to build an orphanage for Jane's Orphans' Center in Tanzania, Africa. It is our hope that this orphanage will:

1. Support the children’s direct physical needs;
2. foster a positive social experience and alleviate feelings of stigmatization, discrimination, and ostracism;
3. Create an encouraging environment in which the kids feel empowered to develop into valued members of their community;
4. and provide medical, psychological, and psychosocial support (if necessary)

Whether it be through pictures on our website, letters between pen-pals, or a volunteer experience at the orphanage itself, it is our vision that this orphanage will be a joint-community effort based upon the collaboration of project supporters from the United States and dedicated men and women from Tanzania. We want to build a bridge and establish a long-term connection between the two countries.

We understand that people can help in a myriad of ways and would like to enable donations in any sizes or forms. Besides direct monetary assistance, project supporters have been getting involved through t-shirt sales (organized by the McIntosh girls at Greenhills School), lemonade lunches (arranged by student council at Northside Elementary), and chapel offerings (coordinated by Mary Clark at Detroit Lutheran). People have also made donations in lieu of wedding favors, birthday presents, and holiday gifts. One project supporter is attempting to raise enough money so that we can ship a container filled with shoes, clothes, blankets, books, and other materials.

As of September 4th, the project has raised over $65,000, purchased land in the Olevolos Village, and designed architectural drawings for the facility that have been approved by the Tanzanian Government. We are scheduled to start pouring the foundation of the orphanage this Septmeber. The contractors have estimated that the total construction time will take six to eigth months. So, we are hoping that the facility will be finished by the summer of 2008.

Please visit www.theolevolosproject.org for more information.

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AfricAid is a nonprofit organization that supports girls’ education in Africa in order to provide young women with the opportunity to shape their own lives and the futures of their communities.

On the African continent, where a lack of education so highly correlates with issues such as AIDS, obtaining an education can be a life and death matter both for individuals and for entire communities. For many girls in Tanzania, going to school has never been an option. In fact, around 95 percent of the country’s females do not complete secondary school. For the fortunate few who do attend school, many study in classrooms with no textbooks, few desks, and only one teacher for every 50 to 100 students.

Girls of the Maasai tribe have even fewer educational opportunities than do their female peers. The Maasai are one of the ethnic tribes of East Africa, well known for their tall, slender figures, brilliant red fabrics, beaded jewelry, and nomadic way of life. Recently, some of the Maasai have begun to recognize that modernization is forcing their way of life to slowly disappear and that, in order for their vibrant culture and people to survive, they need to have a voice in their future. AfricAid believes that girls’ education can provide this needed voice and help sustain the Maasai’s unique culture. Hence, it supports schools and other educational programs that empower Maasai women, as well as other young women throughout Tanzania, with that voice, giving the Maasai tribe and all African women a fighting chance to thrive.

Countless studies have revealed the important role that girls’ education plays in the development of impoverished nations. In its State of the World’s Children, UNICEF reported that in the developing world, girls are 60 percent more likely than boys to be “educationally deprived” and that “educational deprivation and poverty go hand in hand...thus, girls are in double jeopardy, affected by both gender and poverty.” In addition, former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has proclaimed, “There is no tool for development more effective than the education of girls.” Therefore, in Tanzania, where over half the population lives on less than $1 per day, women’s education is critical to eradicating poverty, easing population growth, raising economic productivity, and decreasing HIV transmission.

AfricAid believes that access to education is a basic human right. Yet, for young African women it is something significantly more powerful: a ladder to the future, an opportunity for advancement and social and economic empowerment, and an instrument of transformation. When girls and women are educated, their families, communities, and nations prosper.

Since 2001, AfricAid has accomplished the following in its mission to benefit girls’ education in Africa:

• Raised over $400,000 in cash contributions and school supplies. These funds have been used in the following ways:

• Funded over 200 one-year scholarships for girls’ secondary education
• Provided school supplies, computers, and other classroom equipment to nine primary and secondary schools in Tanzania, Ethiopia, and Zambia
• Provided funds for the construction of classrooms and related facilities at three schools in Tanzania
• Provided funding for a community school and an educational project in Zambia
• Provided computers for a new vocational school in Tanzania
• Purchased sewing machines for a vocational center offering an education to many “street” girls in Arusha, Tanzania
• Initiated a local “micro-credit” project for the funding of a school lunch program for a rural Maasai village in Tanzania
• Initiated Teaching in Action, a model teacher-training program designed to promote the procurement and dissemination of student-centered teaching materials and the continuation and expansion of active, participatory teaching methods among Tanzanian teachers
• Provided support for the formation of AfricAid clubs in schools throughout the United States, encouraging youth to get involved in AfricAid and other worthy service projects