One Heart Source

(New posts related to One Heart Source: Aid’s Sunday Drivers)

I’ve just now realized that I’ve spent the majority of my entries blogging about everything but One Heart Source; the organization that I’ve come to Tanzania with. So here it is, a small verbal and visual tour of where / who / what OHS is:

The village that we live in is called Mateves, but if you were trying to take a taxi there, you would have to ask for Kisongo – a local market and more well known neighboring village. Our section of Mateves is home to roughly 500 people, a primary school, and a large textile factory run by the manufacturer A-Z. The introduction of A-Z has brought both good and bad things into the village; it currently offers hundreds of jobs, supplies most of the villagers (and us) with clean water from tanks they built. I’ll get into the bad once I know a little bit more about it. The people that live here seem happy, and can get everything they need between the market and Kisongo, the markets in town, and the small stalls or dukas that are placed along the frequently used dirt roads and pathways.

A Google Maps search will show you that the village of Mateves, Tanzania is about a 20 minute drive from the center of Arusha. A-Town is a city that lies at the base of Mt. Meru, one of Tanzania’s biggest mountains. Every day I get to look out on the horizon and stare up at the peak of Meru, which usually has a 50% of being covered by clouds. My hope is that soon enough I’ll have the chance to climb it – there is talk about going next weekend. At 14,980 ft it’s just several hundred feet taller than my only other previous climbing experience on Mt. Whitney. The plan is that it will serve as some sort of warm up for Kilimanjaro in November.

The OHS site is approximately 2.5 acres of land that is fenced off from the rest of the Mateves village. On the West end of the site, there is a compound with 9 mud huts that sleep about 6-7 volunteers per hut. In the center of the huts is the dining area and cooking station that we built in the first two weeks of arriving.

Each of the huts and the dining area has fluorescent lights that are rigged up to the solar panels that Joe and I got to mount to one of the roofs of the huts. They also happen to charge the cell phones, laptops, and iPods that are essential in our modern world in Tanzania.

On the opposite end of the site is where the ‘main house’ is being constructed. The main house is will be the source of housing and education for about 30 boys and girls at full capacity. The roof will be done at the end of this week, allowing for inspections to begin the week after.

In between the site and the main house is an empty lot which is now occasionally used as football field by the local boys in the village.

The resident animals of the site are: one dog that we’ve adopted named Tusker, two german shepards that we bought as guard dogs, and a handful of chickens that don’t do much of anything except eat our rice and crow very early in the morning.

The volunteers from OHS have arrangements with nearby primary schools to teach HIV education once a week. The American volunteers have the help of Tanzanian teaching partners (TP’s) to translate everything that is taught into Swahili. Most of the TP’s attend university in the Arusha area, but have chosen to live with OHS while on summer holiday. I’m supposed to start teaching in the fall, and I hope that I’ll have plenty of embarrassing stories to tell once it begins.

Because there isn’t any interaction with kids on the site as of now, OHS has been holding weekly street dinners to teach English and feed street children. The first few weeks of starting it, we found as many children on the streets as possible and told them to start meeting in a designated spot one day a week at the same time. We now have about 30 kids enrolled on a list aimed at trying to keep track of their backgrounds. If the kids miss a session, they have been told that they won’t be allowed to attend in the future. What surprised me about meeting these children is that most of them aren’t orphaned. 9 out of 10 have actually run away from their homes and villages and come to Arusha to try to find jobs or education. I’ve also come to learn that alot of them do receive help, but usually run away from organizations because they dislike obeying the restrictions placed on them once they are inside. I don’t think that the directors of OHS realized the amount of children that had run away, rather than being orphaned by AIDS, but I think are working to find a way to take in orphans rather than children living on the streets.

The 4 and 8 week volunteer programs that we have had going on during the summer are soon coming to an end, and we will be receiving about 15 new 10-week volunteers that will stay from October to mid December. Considering that we’ve had around 40 volunteers at the height of the summer, I’m looking forward to being around a smaller group of people.

The other news from this weekend is that Joe and I have finished negotiations in our hunt for personal transportation. Trust me, there is nothing like bargaining with experienced Masai tradesmen in Swahili. When we receive it, I will post pictures and hold a discussion for what you think it’s name should be. Until then, thanks for reading and leave me a comment or two so I know you’re out there.