Global Outreach Trip Summer 2010


Every Summer, volunteers travel to locations in Africa where they can participate in community projects and directly experience the meaning and value of cultural diversity. We are now beginning to plan for our trip in Summer of 2010. If you are interested in joining us, please send us e-mail (info@aiscs.org ) or leave us a phone message (510-273-9044) and we will contact you directly. For an application form, click here. Information about our 2009 Global Outreach Trip follows. For information about our trip in 2008, click here.

Global Outreach Trip 2009


Our trip this year was extremely successful. Fourteen people, including two engineering interns from UC Berkeley, traveled to the Shirati/Nyamogono region of Tanzania and, aside from very meaningful and rewarding personal experiences, took part in a number of useful projects, including:

o Construction of a rain-water storage tank that holds up to 13,500 gallons of water. click here

o Teaching the women's group how to bake in the brick oven we built in Summer of '08. click here

o Continued construction of the only vocational school in this part of Tanzania (Instruction to begin in January).

o Helping in the local hospital and medical dispensary

o Helping in the local school

o Setting up a hospital food program click here



o Construction of a 13,500-gallon rain-water storage tank.
There is no running water in Shirati, and the only water available is bacteria and parasite infested water from Lake Victoria over a mile away. A family may spend hours a day hauling and then boiling water. The new rain-water storage tank receives rain water from special rain gutters that run from the roof of the vocational school to the top of the tank.


o Teaching the women's group how to bake in a brick oven.
 In Summer of 2008, we built a brick oven near the vocational school. Until the brick oven was built, bread was imported from Kenya and was very expensive. This Summer, we taught the women's group how to use the oven. They are now baking 70 loaves of bread a day and providing much of it to orphans and the elderly. They also plan to sell bread in the weekly open-air market to raise money for the group's activities.


o Setting up a hospital food program
The hospital in Shirati is not able to provide food for its patients (it often is not able to pay its staff). AISCS has negotiated an arrangement between the women's group and the local hospital and the local dispensary under which the women's group will prepare meals for patients. One of our major fundraising activities is to raise money to buy the food and pay the women's group for meal preparation.