Global Outreach Trip Summer 2011 (End of June to early August)
Every Summer, AISCS volunteers travel to the Shirati village area in rural Tanzania, where they participate in community projects and directly experience the meaning and value of cultural diversity. This Summer, volunteers will be working on projects in Shirati for close to five weeks, from the end of June to the beginning of August. Approximately 22 people, ages 16 to 60 will be going. The following are our major planned projects: - Construction of a second rain-water storage tank for the villagers. There is no water in the immediate vicinity of Shirati and many villagers have to spend hours a day just going to Lake Victoria, a few miles away, and hauling containers of (highly polluted) water. We built the first water tank two Summers ago. There's a very nice two-part video about it that shows the way volunteers and villagers work together on projects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t30F4etg46U and - Construction of a second brick oven. We built the first brick oven three Summers ago. The local women's group, which we organized, uses the oven to bake bread for orphans and the elderly and to sell at the marketplace to raise money for its own activities. - Construction of latrines at the vocational school we built. - Construction of a residence for teachers at the vocational school. - Medical assistance at the Shirati hospital. If you are interested in participating in next year's trip and would o Setting up a hospital food program click here o Construction of the first 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. |
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o Teaching the women's group how to use 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. |
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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. |