Jul 29 - Generous Gibraltar To Carry Out Charity Work In Tanzania
Generous Gibraltar is made of up four friends will be travelling to Songea in Tanzania to assist with a number of charity projects including running workshops for teachers and empowering young girls by teaching them about the importance of education.
Next week, College of Further Education teachers Nicola Howes and Gianna Bosano, as well as accountant and tax advisor Louise Goncalves and company manager Liam Roche will spend a week working with the local communities in the area alongside international children’s charity COCO – Comrades of Children Overseas.
The idea came about after Gianna mentioned she wanted to help with a charity this summer, and Nicola suggested visiting Songea.
The last time Nicola was there she was part of a fundraising venture to climb Mount Kilimanjaro to raise money to build the Hoja Secondary School, which has since seen more than 200 students graduate.
Nicola said she reached out to the person who helps lead the projects in the area, and he was thrilled to hear from her nine years later.
She added: “I know that this is a really good project to support because they’re really appreciative and what you take from them is a completely different way of thinking. We take what we have for granted and I really enjoy doing charity work like this.”
The Generous Gibraltar group is hoping to raise a minimum of £1,400 to help with their tasks, which include:
- Arrange and deliver workshops to support teachers in the community.
- Deliver a presentation and activity to empower 120 girls and highlight the importance of education.
- Introduce the Mooncup in the community as a way to help improve hygiene in an eco-friendly manner.
- Fund and help set up a health awareness day to educate the community about Malaria and HIV/AIDS.
- Visit two nursery schools (children aged 3-6) and provide them with any toys that have been donated by the generous individuals in Gibraltar. Funding is also needed to make a playground for these children.
- COCO helps to support the community by giving small loans. The loans are of 50,000 Tanzanian Shillings (approximately £20) each and are repaid over a period of six months. Any extra money raised here will contribute to this worthy cause, where you are supporting locals so that they can provide for their families.
Apart from the fundraising, the group is also busy getting the necessary jabs ahead of their trip.
Gianna and Nicola have been working hard at helping with the teacher training and explained that children in Tanzania are taught in Swahili in primary school but in English in secondary school.
Gianna said: “We have to do a number of presentations for the teacher training and we’re trying to remember everything we learnt while we were doing our teacher training and put it down to a couple days so that we can teach them as much as we can.”
“We’ve also been working on how to empower young women and have liaised with other individuals to create this presentation and researched ideas for it,” Nicola said.
Louise said she’s looking forward to doing a more hands-on project where she’ll be working directly with community.
After having completed a charity trek in Morocco, she felt like she was disconnected from those benefitting from the money raised as the communities she saw along the way would have benefitted from the funds as well.
She said: “This is different. You want to immerse yourself in the culture that you are trying to help. The fact that you can actually go there and see the difference that you can make and you can appreciate what you have as well.”
To learn more about the upcoming trip, you can follow their Facebook page on https://www.facebook.com/GenerousGib/ and to donate visit http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/team/GenerousGibraltar.
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