Back to business
After an amazing weekend on Zanzibar Island it was back to business. Karume met me at the clinic on early on Monday morning and from there we made the trek into Dar, a teeming city where 3.5 million people swarm.
Since already having spent a few days with Karume I’m getting to know him a little better. He is a respected and trusted man amongst the people who work at the mission base. He is the husband of one of the Tanzanian doctors working in Dr. Joel’s clinic and he has also aided a German businessman to set up a children’s home here in Mwandege, so he knows how to steer through all the red-tape. Thinking about it now, there probably isn’t a better person than Karume to be helping me at the moment.
Our first appointment was with the department who look after the registration of Non-Government Organisations in this country. The home will need to be registered under a certified NGO before I can apply for a license to operate a children’s home. This could prove to be tricky as it will mean I’ll need to assemble a board of people I trust here in Tanzania to form the NGO. This could take quite some time. Interestingly enough, there was a clause that would allow me to use the NGO that is already established in Kabale, Uganda. Under that clause I could start an annex of Akanyijuka Children’s Home/VCCS here in Tanzania. It’s obviously some sort of East African arrangement. It would certainly mean I could bypass a lot of red-tape and time, but this is not for me to decide. That option is merely a thought and nothing else. It’s something that would need to be discussed in depth with Ps. Edward and the board of VCCS in Uganda.
After there we headed to the Dept. of Social Welfare and Child Services to go over the legal docs in more depth. The woman in charge of child services was helpful. Initially she seemed against the notion of setting up a home in Tanzania, informing me that the government rather prefers community oriented programs that assist families within their homes, rather than having a dedicated home just for children. I told her that this was a fair call, but then asked her about the infants that are abandoned at birth and she said it would be acceptable to take these infants to a place of refuge, such as a children’s home. I reassured her I didn’t come to Tanzania to fix something that wasn’t broken. If the government is more for community-based programs and not for dedicated home’s then that’s not for me to question. I continued to explain I have no desire to setup a home where there is no real need. She was kind enough to print out a government record of all the registered orphanages and children’s homes in Tanzania. I’m not sure how privileged that information is, but it gave me a good idea of where not to go. She rattled off a few places on the list, places that had a number of children’s homes already in operation. Basically Dar es Salaam, Dodoma, and Arusha are the big three. She plainly said if I wanted to set up in any of those three cities then there would be a good chance the government would reject my application.
This was good news for me as it confirmed much of what was on my heart before coming to Tanzania. Upon coming here I never had any desire to set up a home in Dar, or any ‘established’ city like Dodoma and Arusha. I really felt called to go out into the Western part of the country… to the ends of the earth, as it were. The woman then rattled off the names three towns out West that are in need. The first two I had never heard of but the last one I had. Funnily enough it was one of three towns out West that I had originally planned to visit as a potential site for a home. This place is sits on the border of Tanzania and Burundi, and would take a day and a bit to travel by bus. It would actually to be quicker to drive from Kabale in Uganda, through Rwanda, and into Tanzania than to leave from here in Dar es Salaam. Unfortunately my flight to leave Dar is on Friday morning, so I just don’t have the time to go out there this time around. If I had known earlier last week then I probably would have made the drive out. Karume actually offered to escort me out there until we did the math and realised that it wouldn’t work due to time constraints. When I told Karume I had originally planned to go there on my own he didn’t seem to think it was a wise idea, not for the first time at least. This confirmed some advice I took from an Australian missionary couple that were working in Dar. They said pretty much the same thing; that I would struggle as a foreigner out there on my own.
Me going there on this trip is not important. What’s important is that this place was on my heart before coming to the country and it’s been identified as a place by the government that is in need. It’s a place I can now really seek God for and that’s all that matters at this point in time.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 20th, 2010 at 9:30 pm and is filed under Ponderings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
