Help & Growth
In July 2020, the Tumaini charity working in Tanzania became an NGO with the name Tumaini Orphan Support Organisation (TOSO) which is currently operating within KAGERA, GEITA and KIGOMA Regions.
Please look at their new website www.toso.or.tz
The Kagera Region
As Kagera is such a large geographic area to cover, Tumaini with generous donations from supporters has gradually established six offices in strategic locations:
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Murgwanza Head Office
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Muleba
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Kayanga
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Chato
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Biharamulo and Kakonko
The office managers report directly to Dr. Wilson. Each office is staffed by two social workers, an office attendant, a tailoring teacher, a carpentry teacher, an English and math teacher, and an accountant.
The Work
There are about 400 Wahudumu (community workers), who provide services to the widows and orphans in the surrounding areas. They work in pairs (one male and one female) to oversee the Tumaini families and children in several villages. These workers are provided with bicycles so they can weekly family visits to monitor their health, school attendance and give caring advice and assistance when needed.
Community Workers teach AIDS prevention and encourage all families to be tested. Tumaini provides bus fare for sufferers to access treatment, if treatment is available.
As Tumaini expands its work, it enters new areas: taking emergency help to those in severe difficulties, and registering new orphans to Tumaini’s care.
Tumaini returns periodically to all villages to continually provide our registered orphans with new clothing, school supplies and mosquito nets. These are joyous occasions for the village, with families gathering and waiting patiently for hours in the sun to take their turn.
Water
Most villages rely on a dirty pond for their water which is often located a long walk from their village. The pond is shared by both humans and wildlife, including crocodiles and venomous snakes. This dirty water is used for cleaning and cooking; hence, dysentery is common. Each year, 24,000 Tanzanian children under five years of age die from drinking dirty water.
Tumaini is enables villages to access clean water for the first time. In the past 14 years, Tumaini supporters have funded nearly 100 shallow & deep wells and protected springs, enabling villages to access clean water for the first time.
In 2018, generous Canadian donors funded 4 new wells in memory of family members, bringing fresh water to hundreds of grateful families in several districts.
Old House
HOUSING
Houses are traditionally built using easily available resources: wattle and daub, clay or dung. Roofs are grass or banana leaves and in the rainy season water pours into the house, soaking everything. Houses are usually just one room shared by the whole family for sleeping and cooking, which can create health and fire hazards.
Since 2002, Tumaini has built hundreds of new houses providing safe, healthy homes for desperate families. Trainee students in Tumaini Carpentry Schools build the wooden items for the homes. Newer homes now incorporate updates such as weather-resistant fired bricks, corrugated iron-sheet roofs, 3 internal rooms, wooden doors front and back for ventilation, mosquito screens, wood shutters on windows, and a water harvesting system. Cooking is done outside in a separate well-ventilated structure protected from the elements.
New House
Education
Primary schooling is free in Tanzania, but children cannot enroll unless they have school uniforms, books and pencils. This prices education out of reach for most subsistence farmers’ children and is an impossibility for AIDS widows’ families and child-headed families.
Each child registered by Tumaini receives a welcome package of 2 sets of clothing, school uniform, books, pencils and a mosquito net. The new clothes enable the child to re-enter society, the school supplies enable entry to primary school and the mosquito net protects them from malaria. Children are also offered a Children’s Bible “Biblia kwa satoto” donated by the Bible Society.
Secondary Schools: Children who pass the final primary school exams can attend government secondary schools. However, most cannot afford the costs for uniforms and school supplies. Tumaini helps by supplying as many as possible with the Government mandated Daftari (10 hard-backed exercise books), pens, pencils, school uniform, shoes and a school bag.
Whenever possible Tumaini also provides bicycles which reduce the long walks to and from school and solar lamps to enable homework at night after chores of food production and animals are completed.
Further Education
Vocational Schools: Tumaini has set up five carpentry and five tailoring schools across Kagera. In the second year of the tailoring course, students sew required school uniforms for other orphans to attend school. Upon completion of a two-year tailoring course that includes Math and English, each graduate goes home with a treadle sewing machine to set up their own tailoring business to support themselves and their family. Every year, Tumaini requires a minimum of fifty new treadle sewing machines. One treadle sewing machine costs $250 and can change the life of an orphan in Tanzania.
See our Donate Page.
College Courses are for two years, training students for careers in teaching, dispensary, accountancy, administration, book keeping, secretarial, social work, agriculture, laboratory work, building, plumbing, electrical, tourism and community development.
See our Donate Page to support a student.
University allows very bright students to study for degrees in Law, Psychology, Medicine, etc.
Micro-financing is available for adults and families wishing to change from subsistence farming.
A loan programme has been established to assist the new businesses. Projects include improving their agricultural yields, setting up businesses such as goat husbandry, rearing chickens and cows, bee keeping and fish ponds.
Goat projects are very popular with widows with young families – milk boosts the nutrition/diet for their children and the widows can breed the goats again and have more kid goats to sell. Child HIV transmission is reduced by enabling HIV infected mothers to ween their babies off breast milk onto goat’s milk while the infants are young, before their teeth come through.
Bee keeping is being funded as an important industry. Honey can be harvested for families to eat and sell to generate income. The bees pollinate sunflower crops which are crushed to make oil for cooking and to sell. Local clinics can use honey to dress burns and open wounds.
