GFR

March 14th, 2010 (Retroactive post)

Today I finally arrived in southern Tanzania to begin my second volunteer experience with the organization GFR. I had met up with David, my contact from Chicago, and Nestor, the country director for GFR Tanzania, yesterday in Dar, and we spent the entirety of today driving down to the town of Njombe - 11 hours in all.

A little bit of background on GFR: The philosophy of the organization is to find families in poverty who want to start businesses, but are unable to do so because of a lack of capital. They then give these families money, which they can use not only to start their business, but also to meet their basic needs of food, housing, medical care, and education for their children.
GFR has previously worked in two other East African countries – Rwanda and Uganda – both in which they experienced a great amount of success (over 700 families taken through the program in total). They recently started working in Tanzania, where they are now sponsoring 31 families in two small villages, Igwachana and Mhanghale, each located a few hours outside of Njombe.

As they did in Rwanda and Uganda, GFR has teamed up with other organizations within the country to help accomplish this goal, and in Tanzania that organization is the Catholic church. The reason they are even in Tanzania in the first place is because one of the board members became friends with a nun from Mhanghale who is currently studying in Chicago, and the partnership has grown from there (Nestor, in addition to being the country director, is also a priest working out of Igwachana).

Unfortunately GFR has not experienced the same level of success in Tanzania as in their previous two countries, and therefore the purpose of David’s trip this week is to determine why their model isn’t working as well here, evaluate other community projects they might get involved with to support the local village, and visit some of their current donor recipients, which include not only the families, but also some sponsored school children and two associations of women who have each started businesses.

My role in all of this has never really been set in stone, and in fact has been adapted several times since my original conversation with David back in October. Nonetheless, I always had faith in him that he would make the time I spent here would be worthwhile, and it turned out I was right to do so. David has asked that I come along to all the site visits with him this upcoming week and evaluate how things are going and identify where any problems are occurring. He has also asked that I help him evaluate the feasibility of some potential projects in and around the local communities which we will be visiting in the upcoming week. Once he leaves at the end of the week, he has asked that I then stay on and continue visiting families to help them continue developing businesses and moving forward on the path to self-sufficiency. At this point I’m not entirely sure what all of this quite means, as I have yet to see the actual program in action, but I am excited for this week and excited for the work.