Notes from the Field 2009

By Robyn Browning

On Monday we visited a children's village called Food, Water, Shelter (FWS). It's a newer NGO which was started by five women from Australia about five years ago. You can read more about it at http://www.foodwatershelter.org.au/ It is still in the development phase, so the residents have not moved in yet, but the mamas have been selected and the hope is that they will move in with their children by the end of August. The mamas are women from the community who will live at FWS and raise a group of children from the Arusha area who are orphans. Each mama will have their own living space that they share with the children under their care so that attachment can be fostered and a parent-child relationship can be developed..

The most interesting part of FWS is that it has been developed to be eco-friendly and self-sustaining. They have nearly every eco-friendly technology I have seen so far at their site. We saw the rainwater collection system, the aquifer they are building, the organic garden they have planted (which they hope will eventually feed all 60 residents there), the tilapia pond they dug and now eat fish from, and the cows they have for their waste generation to use for bio-gas. We learned about the sanitation system they will be using for human waste. They will use urine as a nitrogen source to grow banana trees and will compost solid human waste to be used as fertilizer for the fruit they will grow. It was great to see so many self-sustaining systems being employed all in one place.

Yesterday we went to the new Arusha Lutheran Medical Center in town to meet with the woman in charge of the subsidized orthopedic surgery program that is operated out of the hospital. The woman in charge, Sarah Wallis, does outreach in communities where she finds children with physical disabilities. She meets with their families and tells them about the program at the hospital where the children can come and get operated on and then stay for the entire time of their recovery. The surgeries performed include cleft palate, club foot, and burn scars. Parents must pay 100,000 shillings for the surgery (approximately $90 USD) so that they have an investment in the medical care. Sarah is hoping to start another program that is focused on education about burns and includes the development of an acute burn unit at the medical center. She explained that she sees a lot of burn scars in the communities, mostly in the Masaii areas because the dwellings that the Masaii live in, called bomas, have a fire in the middle which can easily lead to children getting burned.

Tomorrow we leave for a weekend safari near the Serengeti. On Friday we will do a site visit at a community that will be installing a new water system for irrigation soon. The NGO Global Service Corps will be digging a hafir there so the engineers on our team are going to look at the site and give their input. We will then spend Saturday at the Ngorogoro Crater. On Sunday, I will leave the group and bus to Karatu where I will do site visits and be hosted by Minnesota International Health Volunteers. Monday I bus back to Arusha and then on Wednesday Kat and I will be busing back to Dar Es Salaam for our departing flight on Thursday.

I have finally arrived at the point in my field experience where my remaining days in-country are numbered and time is moving fast. There are still so many things that I want to do and see before I leave, so hopefully there will be time for the important things. I will hopefully be able to post again before I leave next week, but internet access will be limited. I plan to write some follow-up posts when I return home and have the ability to post pictures.