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LOHADA helps each of its resident children back to his or her home by
equipping each one with the means to survive: Education, good health and
love. |
Positive future for Arushan
orphanage: A volunteer's perspective
By our correspondent
I found out about LOHADA when looking for a voluntary placement
to do in Tanzania. There are countless programmes catering for people wanting to
do this, all promising a highly structured, life-changing, heart-warming
experience: I chose LOHADA because their modest website promised none of this.
Instead they have a small, undeveloped site that describes their project B to
provide a home and education for local children who are either orphaned or
unable to be cared for at home B and asks honestly for volunteers to come for
any length of time, to do whatever they can, without the hard-sell on how
uplifting such work can be. So coming to Camp Moses from England three weeks
ago, I had little idea what work to expect or what kind of people I would meet,
and it=s only just starting to make sense.
My first
impressions were that, without a clue about child development, Tanzanian
schooling and indeed way of life, the issues LOHADA is tackling were beyond my
reach and there seemed at first to be very little I could do to help. Each day I
was greeted by a swarm of children B squabbling, demanding, tireless B who I
couldn=t communicate with, even though their English far
outdid my woeful Swahili. My >help= was to play clumsily and wordlessly, worried
that someone would burst into tears at any second, get hurt in some horrific
fall, or, worst, stop and stare at this mzungu and realise that he was no
help at all. The whole thing seemed on the brink of collapsing into chaos, this
fallout made all the more imminent by my presence.
But even from this
outsider position, it soon became clear that LOHADA, although with limited
finances and resources, thrives because of the abundance of love and
understanding that binds the whole thing together. The resident staff are calm
and relaxed, and good humour their preferred method for handling anything that I
might deem a crisis. The children would arrange themselves for meals, say grace
and share food by some mysterious force; they would play easily and fairly
together, the older ones helping the younger ones and even translate for me when
they could: in other words, welcome me into their world.
So while I still
play clumsily, I babble back to the children in pigeon Swahili and will hurl
myself with them into whatever game they next devise. After only three weeks
here I=m already reluctant to leave; but while I=ll find
my own way back into the world, LOHADA helps each of its resident children back
to his or her home by equipping each one with the means to survive: education,
good health and love. I will leave richer and the children, so long as
volunteers and donors of all kinds keep coming and B most importantly B the
permanent staff are able to continue their work, will thrive. They have a strong
future.
Find out more about LOHADA's
activities at
www.lohada.org
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