Building a School and an Online Community

We're moving.

Our excursion has officially begun as we are now in Day 2 of our journey. While our team here in Cambodia is building a vocational school to support the locals, our team in Toronto has been working on updating the Make An Impact website which is now the new home of our sweat equity blog.

Follow our story, our progress, and our journey at www.makeanimpact.ca.

Looking for the big 5

Hi everyone, while on safari at the Terangeri Safari Lodge, we were unable to blog - no internet access.

Everyone enjoyed their accommodations and the food was well prepared. Unfortunately, we did not see any lions!!

We did see hundreds of elephants, many giraffes, warthogs, ostrich and many many birds.

Hope you enjoy our pictures where we stayed, eating breakfast etc.

On our return we ask the driver to pull to the side of the road to take a picture of Killi which some of us can see from our rooms at the Leopard Hotel.

Roger and Jack put a bid in on a 1956 Ford Anglia, but don't worry they have no room in their luggage.

By Kathy Nimz

Rotary meeting in Kilema

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Six Rotarians attended the Rotary Club of Kilema’s meeting with 22 of its own members present. It was held in a hall adjacent to the Church at Kilema. The head tabled decorated with fresh flowers. The meeting commenced at 4:30pm and for our benefit half of the meeting was in English with the other half being in Swahili.

The club was sponsored by the Rotary Club of Alliston and was chartered over one year ago. It appears to be an enthusiastic membership. We wish them well in their continued development as a club for the betterment of the community.

By Kelly McCague

Kilema Primary

Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Today was a national holiday in Tanzania, Zanzibar Revolution Day.

However it was not a holiday for the 2011 Sweat Equity team as painting continued today on the Kilema Primary school complex.

Kilema Primary was a District 7070 Sweat Equity Team project; along with private donors the project funded the building of the 8 school room complex.

This trip requires the prepping and painting of 3 of the classrooms. Painting continued on Wednesday and should finish up on Thursday.

The four accountants in the group are weary from the physical labour and dream of their laptops back home.

By Bill Wray

Kilema Hospital visit

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Diane and Kathy attended the morning report at the hospital. We listened to prayers and sang “SIMBEYA” in Swahili. No one laughed at us! After report, we were invited to the operating
Theatre to see a cesarean section. A beautiful baby boy was born – mom and baby doing fine.

While there were some differences to Canadian operating room practices, there were many
Similarities.

Dr. Masawe was very pleasant and answered our many questions. He even had a few questions
For us!

By the nurses

Furrow evaluation

Monday Jan 10, 2011

Queen of the Furrows

One of the projects that Rotary has funded is the restoration of 3 furrows in Northern Kilema. This will help provide water to a large area of Northern, Central and Southern Kilema. Water means crops, crops mean better nutrition and money and money means schooling, so this is a very important project. On Monday we toured the furrows, originally built when Tanzania was under German rule. The project will be administered by the Kilema Rotary. Much of the work will be done by the local villagers. The Rotary money will mostly be used for materials to construct intake and controls.

Joseph, treasurer of the Kilema Rotary club took five of us (lead by Kelly McCague whom we dubbed Queen of the Furrow) on a tour of the furrows to show us their current status and what they hoped could be done to improve them. For example one of the reasons that the furrow walls need to be upgraded is that local crabs (a baby one is pictured here on my glove) burrow under the rock walls and cause the water to spill back to the river. We hiked along a good portion of these furrows for the full morning and experienced spectacular scenery for which they could no doubt charge a fee to tourists. The accompanying trails often had challenging footing, intruding vines and trees, and slippery climbs but the whole walk was exhilarating. We of course struggled to keep up the pace in our hiking boots while local club members who accompanied us had no trouble making the trek in flip flops or equally non-supportable footing. At one bend in the river we happened upon a group of local children washing their clothes in the fast flowing water and laying it on the grassy banks to dry.

One of the additional benefits of the day was that we came upon a local marketplace which was teeming with local commerce. Many of the products were unrecognizable to us but trade appeared to be brisk. Much of the produce arrived on the heads of local women who magically were able to walk and balance their cargo with seemingly little effort.

Although it became obvious that the actual labour was going to be far better carried out by the local inhabitants, we came away with a very good comfort level about how the work would be undertaken and were thankful for the experience.

By Doug Holmes and Irene Byrne

I have seen hope

Sunday, Jan 9, 2011

Around 10:00 am in the morning we all went to church in our Sunday best! Four men, four children and six women followed the trail through the nun’s residence and up a grade between two huge trees to the Catholic Church.

We walked through the middle door of three wooden doors. All the children were arriving in
colorful clothing. All eyes were on us.

We followed the lead of the elderly and the children sit stand, sit stand. The children’s singing to a drum was breathtaking. The priest had the children (approximately 400) welcome us. We shook hands saying peace be with you. Diane, Audrey and I had communion - Roger was chicken!

Leaving the church the children filed out quickly. We took pictures, shook hands and showed the children our pictures. Sunday was a great day – tomorrow we get to work!!

By Kathy Nimz