Road Trip

As Travel Team members of SIHA’s International Branch, we have to make many decisions on behalf of SIHA as an organization regarding projects. Planning projects can be thought of as taking a road trip and planning your route. The project plan ensures our activities (our route map) line up with SIHA’s Guiding Principles (route restrictions) so we can successfully achieve our objectives (reach our destination). While some decisions may come easily, others may challenge our personal beliefs or a clear choice may not be evident. The challenge lies in ensuring our plan aligns with our mission and vision and in justifying actions we wish to take. 

In the spring, the International Team members signed up for projects that interested them, or to which they felt a personal connection. We came to Tanzania looking forward to empowering people or organizations in addressing barriers to health in their community. However, following extensive in-country research and data collection, perhaps a given project for which we initially signed up no longer seems to fit within SIHA’s scope, or barriers have become too extensive to foster effective, sustainable change. This accurately describes the situation some team members are facing with few of the projects this summer.

                                                                                                                                                                
              Therefore, although we may be passionate about what a given project is trying to accomplish, our plan for the summer may in fact be to implement the steps necessary for it to discontinue. Regardless of the emotional implications of the situation, it is important to remember that our involvement in a project that is outside of our scope or capacity may be more detrimental to communities than helpful. As we are in the midst of evaluating our current initiatives and implementing steps involved in closing out some projects, this topic is especially relevant. Should we continue down the same road, take a detour, or just stop the car altogether? These are all important questions to ask ourselves as we write up our project plans.

       Luckily, each project team was able to submit a rough draft of their project plan before our trip to Zanzibar! Check out this group picture on Prison Island:

Life of Pi-esque Boating Adventure!

Safari njema! (Safe travels!) See you next week!

SIHA International Team

Little Victories

Mambo vipi! (What’s up?)

 

As we enter into our fourth week in Tanzania, a hot topic of discussion among us team members has been the amount of impact a group of eight students can realistically have over the course of three months in our host communities. A misconception about our working abroad is that we are donating our time to help those in need, when in reality the amount we gain from this experience far surpasses the amount we actually have the capacity to give. And as we begin to meet with members of community who have their own expectations of SIHA, this can be a very overwhelming thought.

 

Nonetheless, awareness of our limitations as a student-run organization is an important step. As the impact of the change we strive to make is not always immediately apparent,  it is important to be patient and remember the “little victories” that we accomplish along the way. For example, during a recent meeting, a leader of the Maasai notified us that as a result of SIHA providing subsidized bed nets to people in his community last summer, there were no Maasai deaths from malaria over the past year. Comments such as these reminds us that although our efforts favour our personal development over tangible impact in the community, our small accomplishments are appreciated and should not be dismissed. 

Thought-provoking discussions at our weekly Strategic Planning Meeting

Although three months is not a long time to be in-country, our lovely community consultants, Charles and Gladness, are in Tanzania year round to continue with project activities after our departure. As this is the first year community consultants are working with SIHA, we look forward to observing how their presence maximizes the impact we have, including improvement in project continuity, community engagement in projects, and community relations with SIHA.

 

Thank you again for reading. Next week we take a mid-summer trip to Zanzibar! Talk to you then.

 

SIHA Team 2016

www.siha.ca

Quads of Steel

Hello again everyone!

This week our team was at a bit of a standstill. In accordance with a new Tanzanian law that places stricter regulations on the activity of volunteer groups, we were not yet permitted to work to our host communities. With everyone’s mind becoming saturated from hours of project research, in the latter part of the week we decided to exercise our legs instead of our minds and bike to the villages in which we will be working to become more familiar with the route and the villages themselves.

Biking to the villages proved to be more difficult than anticipated, but nonetheless gratifying and enjoyable in its own way. Some challenges faced while biking in Tanzania include riding through deep sand, sharing the road with motorcyclists, beating the heat, and warmly returning greetings to roadside locals who were all eager to say “Hi” to us Wzungu (foreigners).

Gladness & Moni biking home from Kikongo

Eight kilometres southwest of Mlandizi, one of our host villages is Kikongo, in which SIHA’s health initiatives have been targeted primarily towards malaria and water sanitation. A highlight of our first visit here was being shown the rainwater collection system SIHA implemented back in 2012. It was exciting to see something we have been reading about in reports for the past year first-hand. On a second visit to Kikongo we also had the opportunity to meet with the standing WEO (Ward Executive Officer) to introduce the new team and inquire about his potential involvement in our projects.

SIHA also works in Mwanabwito (a village roughly twelve kilometres west of Mlandizi), the breathtaking route to which more than compensates for the longer bike ride. While waiting in Mwanabwito to have our introductory meeting with the VEO (Village Executive Officer), the SIHA team had the pleasure of watching schoolchildren exhaustingly playing ball for hours on end. We remembered, however, that water is only available 3 kilometres away at the Ruvu River, really driving home the issue of access to clean water in this community. In all, our time spent in Mwanabwito provided some necessary context for many of our projects this summer.

Our sixth team member, Maria, joins us today. We are excited to catch her up to speed in all that has gone down since our arrival and introduce her to all the lovely Tanzanians we have met thus far.

Thanks for reading, and see you next week.

Baadae!

Website: www.siha.ca