Due to the generosity
of donors supportive of Sleeping Children Around the World (SCAW), another
3,000 bedkits were funded and will be distributed in Tanzania between November 8 & 15, 2017. Team Tanzania 2017 B,
consisting of Doug MacDougald, team lead and members Gary Jewitt, Carol and
Joep Diening, travelled to Dar es Salaam and were met at the airport by Mama
Wandoa, Wendy Aaron and her son Jerome who are members of our Overseas Partner
Volunteers group, Upendo Information and Counselling Centre.
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Doug MacDougald, Gary Jewitt, Carol Diening,
Mama Wandoa, Joep Diening
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Travelling from Toronto took us around 17 hours flying time over the day and a half of travel to get to Dar es Salaam, a large city with a population of about 5 ½ million people. Given that Dar es Salaam is about 420 miles south of the equator and on the shores of the Indian ocean, the climate is fairly consistent: hot and humid with almost even hours of daylight and night.
Today was our day to
get organized for tomorrow’s start of the distribution of 600 bed kits. We visited one of the companies that supplies
bedkit materials for the children as part of the audit process to ensure that
the high quality of the bed kits is maintained.
UNOPLAST (T) Ltd under the name BANCO makes the mattresses for the
children and has been doing so for the last 16 of 17 years that SCAW has done
bedkit distributions in Tanzania. They
showed us how and where the mattresses are made and the materials used. We also met some of the folks doing the hard
work. Company owner and management
personnel, Davesh Dave and Deepak Desai were very proud of the company’s
involvement and are very supportive of SCAW. They sell the mattresses that they make to
SCAW at cost, provide free transportation of the mattresses to the distribution site
and provide some of the labour handling the mattresses. And the quality of the mattresses has proven
over the years to be excellent.
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Gary Jewitt, Deepak Desai, Mama Wandoa, Carol Diening,
Joep Diening, Davesh Dave, Doug MacDougald
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We next visited a
cottage industry site, where the shorts and skirts that are part of the
Tanzanian bed kit are made. The majority
of the bed kit materials are locally sourced which provides both
employment and economic benefit within the community.
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Cottage Industry Personnel Making Shorts and Skirts
for Bedkits
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This evening we held
our team meeting in preparation for tomorrow’s first full day of
distribution. We feel ready and should
be fully rested when we get up early to start the day. More to come…..
Joep Diening for Team Tanzania 2017
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