First day at work

Monday, June 2nd

It was really quiet when I arrived last night, but Moshi came alive this morning! Everyone was hustling and bustling about, but I could barely keep my eyes open. Ahh jetlag. Nothing a little Tanzanian coffee can’t remedy.

Joseph and I went to a cute little restaurant called Central Garden to get breakfast and to discuss the plan for the summer. As some of you know, my project has grown exponentially over the past few weeks due to the awesome success of the project on GlobalGiving. I knew I would need help driving around to meet all my different community partners, and although I’m trying my best to learn Swahili, I definitely need help translating. Joseph and I met last summer when I was working in Arusha and we hit it off pretty quickly. He’ll be starting at the Moshi University College of Cooperative and Business Studies in September, so he’s free for the summer and seemed like the perfect person to help me with my project.

With a good plan and some much needed caffeine, we set off for KASI, the Kilimanjaro Association for the Spinally Injured. I was introduced to KASI last summer and I was blown away by the awesome work they were doing. I don’t have enough time to do them justice by fully explaining what they do, but I promise I will soon. Just trust me now that they are a spectacular group of people doing really great work.

Recently I had the awesome opportunity to fundraise for the project of my choice on a website called GlobalGiving. I decided to raise funds for KASI and if you haven’t seen my project page already then you should definitely go check it out now:

http://www.globalgiving.com/pr/2100/proj2060a.html

The project has been extremely successful and we managed to raise over $9,000 in just a few weeks. The project was part of a competition and because it raised the most money, GlobalGiving is awarding us an additional $3,500 in pursuit of our project. We have big plans ahead of us and I was so excited to get going!

Dr. Henry Nyamubi is the Executive Director of KASI and we had been e-mailing a lot over the past few weeks with much excitement. He has some really great ideas and I can't wait to see how everything works out. There is a lot more that I could write about today but Moshi is calling me and I want to get out and do some exploring. I promise I'll write more soon.