After a lengthy application process we are very happy to announce that Busega Scotland has opened an account with the Bank of Scotland. This will make our financial reporting and auditing process simpler. We are also registering for Gift Aid which will enable us to reclaim tax on donations made by UK tax payers. Please contact us for more information .
Account Name : Busega Scotland
Sort Code: 80-22-60
Account Number : 14126960
The Kalwande students were very happy to go and buy safety boots at the start of the new term. This should keep them safe when working in the mechanics workshop. They said thank you to the Moving on project for making this happen.
Arrange a fundraiser during
the ‘walk week’ to add to the proceeds
While this is a West Indian refrain, there maybe a version in Swahili as there is an indigenous form of the game in Sukumaland. We don’t know if is still played, how widespread it was and how many people played it, but play it they did. The Sukuma are the ethnic group who live in and around Mwanza, and the largest tribe in Tanzania.
The reports page now has an account of a Busega Scotland seminar that considered the challenges facing young people when they leave orphanage care.
The seminar highlighted the research of Julieth Godwin, Busega Scotland Apprentice. She looked at the difficulties faced by orphanage leavers in holding down jobs. Christine Carney described the operation of the Busega Scotland Moving-on Project. The seminar concluded by developing improvement recommendations and priorities.
Please read the report.
It makes interesting reading in understanding the challenges faced by orphanage leavers and what the Moving-on Project needs to do to improve its service.
The contractors have finished the work at Mayega and the children are delighted with their new fence. Having led chaotic lives before their admission to the orphanage , the fence gives the children a sense of freedom . They feel safe and will no longer be bothered by village drunks. This was a particular problem for the girls.
Across Tanzania vulnerable girls are often forced to get married when they are very young if they have no family to provide for them. Extended families too poor to care for orphaned relatives see it as a way of ensuring the girls are fed as they become the responsibility of the husband. A girl can be sold for a few cows . The United Nations Population Fund has a fact sheet on Child Marriage in Tanzania for further reading.
At last the contract is signed for the security fence at Mayega. It has taken two years of negotiations to resolve the land ownership disputes and thanks are due to the many Tanzanian Government officials at village , district and regional level who made this possible. Busega Scotland is also grateful for the efforts of Arnold and Valerie Barrow in getting things moving. The Mayega staff and children are delighted. They have been bothered by village men drunk on local brew. The fence also means that we comply with Tanzanian Children’s Homes regulations.
Chole – poor but spectacular.
Imagine an environment – green, fertile, bordering a lake with limitless supplies of water, having ‘moonscape’ granite hills and friendly, hardworking people. Why is this not a land of ‘milk and honey’ and a tourist paradise? But this is Chole, twenty five miles from Mwanza but ‘light years’ away from the developments in the city. There is no road and only 4×4’s can get there with difficulty. This is Africa of our Zambia days, and of decades before that, but with two major differences – HIV and the ubiquitous mobile phone!
It is in Chole that Busega Scotland and another local NGO, called CODEHA (Community Development and Humanitarian Assistance), are considering our second, and an agriculture-based Family Support Project, with the Chole Women’s Group. There is a local mission hospital, that may agree a health insurance scheme, and Chole is close to Kalwande, where our motor mechanics students are in college.
Busega Scotland has good connections with the area and we had lunch with the parish priest!
There is a clear need to support the Chole community and work is underway to see if, along with CODEHA, we can develop a viable project. This may be our biggest challenge yet but what a difference Busega Scotland could make.
When we are home we get asked many questions that seem to imply ‘living in Mwanza must be hard’. However much we try to reassure folk that it isn’t, we reckon that knowledge of David Livingstone, the ‘Heart of Darkness’ (the Congo not Tanzania) and the ‘White Man’s Grave’ (West not East Africa) makes our inquisitors hard to convince. We tell of the Rock City Shopping Mall, less than ten minutes from our door, and that we arrive in Mwanza on an Airbus not behind a yoke of oxen! So we needed some photographic evidence and here it is – a plate of chocolate cakes! Admittedly our first while being here but definitive proof that we are not deprived! Mrs Livingstone never managed such baking (as far as we know), so it sucked to be David. One final comment, that will make Christine’s pals raise their eyebrows – she said the cakes ‘aren’t really for us but just a trial for when our ‘kids’ arrive’, in about a week’s time! These are chocolate cakes and, I am pleased to report, made with Tanzanian cocoa.
