Revidge Fold United Reformed Church Youth Trip to the Bethany Family, Tanzania
Preparation and Planning
In October 2006, the Bethany Family Choir from Magu District in northern Tanzania visited East Lancashire and gave concerts in our local churches, schools and community centres. The children touched our hearts, so much so that a group of 10 of us from Revidge Fold URC in Blackburn decided that we would love to go out and help at Bethany, a home for 130 deprived and vulnerable children. Nineteen months later, after careful preparation and planning, we set off on an 18-day adventure filled with joyful and memorable experiences. We had to fund ourselves for the trip, which included flights, inoculations, visas, accommodation and food. (It cost approximately £1100 each in all.) From January 2007, we attended monthly meetings to organise ways in which we could raise funds. We arranged bake sales, puppet shows, bag packing at local supermarkets, sponsored walks and ceilidhs. We shared the profits of these fundraising events equally among our group to assist with travel costs. We contacted the Youth and Children’s Office of the United Reformed Church and were also awarded a grant from the Carmichael Montgomery Bursary towards the cost of our venture. By July 2008, we were ready to go on the trip of a lifetime.
Eleanor Smith
Journey to Bethany
The flight from Manchester to Dar-es-Salaam was twelve hours with a four hour over-lay in Dubai. After leaving Manchester where all the shops were shutting at 7pm in the evening, it was strange arriving in Dubai at 6am and everything was open! The four hours quickly passed and we were soon on out flight to Dar-es-Salaam. We stayed at the ‘Sleep Inn’ overnight, leaving for Mwanza the next morning. The cheapest transport from the airport to the hotel was an 8 person minibus – this proved interesting as there were 10 adults each with an 80 litre holdall!
It soon became clear that the Tanzanians drive in an ‘every man for himself’ style. Stopping at traffic lights in Dar was an experience – the minibus was surrounded by street traders selling everything from peanuts to shoes. We made it to the hotel in one piece. We expected the hotel to be something similar to a youth hostel; however we were pleasantly surprised. But the area around the hotel was very poor, with run-down buildings. We had to get up at 0345 to get to the airport for our flight. Our taxis were provided by the hotel but proved to be no less scary than the day before, as they decided to have a race to the airport. The flight to MwanzaInternationalAirport was 90 minutes long. When we arrived at Mwanza, we found the luggage collection point was just three holes in the wall that the airport workers thew the luggage through! Graham Pountain, the English team leader, met us from the airport in the Bethany Landrover.
The road to Bethany was a long straight one that had been recently tarmac’ed to allow the President to pass from Mwanza into Kenya. We passed many Tanzanian buildings on the way out, and Graham explained that the concrete walled, tin roofed houses were the well-to-do ones and the mud-brick walled, thatch roofed houses were the poorer ones. It took us two hours to get to Bethany. When we arrived, the children flocked out of the buildings to come and greet us.
We did the journey back in one go; from Mwanza to Dar-es-Salaam, a six hour wait in Dar-es-Salaam before the flight out to Dubai and then a nine hour wait in Dubai before we could leave for Manchester.
Jenni Bates
Accommodation and Food
The accommodation at Bethany was one of the main surprises for me when I first arrived. Despite the many assurances from people who had been before that the accommodation in Bethany for visitors was really good, the excitement that people had shown on hearing the news that Bethany now had showers didn’t bode well for me!
Driving through Tanzania on the way to the compound from the airport didn’t reduce my sense of foreboding as it was very rare to see anything but mud-huts, and I was beginning to regret leaving my nice comfortable bed in England! However upon arrival at Bethany, I was pleasantly surprised to see that although obviously much more basic than what we have in England, the Bethany visitors house was clean, solidly built and had everything you needed for the two weeks spent there. It was comprised of 6 bedrooms/classrooms, a living and dining room, and a male and female bathroom. Being one of only three lads staying there this was quite comfortable, a large room with only three beds in it and a bathroom all to ourselves, but I can imagine for the girls, with 6 in the same size room and at one point (due to an overlap with another volunteer group) 15 using one bathroom, it was rather more cramped. None of them send to mind however – I think the accommodation had surpassed most people’s expectations! Living at Bethany was not without its problems however. As well as spiders and lizards being in the rooms, leaks occurred quite often early in the trip and on two occasions, the boys bathroom flooded due to the hot water tank above it and a morning had to be spent mopping up the water. Mostly however, the trip went remarkably without too many major problems – which all the group were thankful for.
Alongside teaching (which few of the group had ever done before), the thing that people were least looking forward to about the trip was the food. It was with trepidation therefore that we awaited out first meal (lunch) at Bethany!. It duly arrived, having been cooked over an open fire, brought in pots by some of the older children, and was revealed to be potatoes and cabbage – setting the tome for the next two weeks. On that first day, I still remember many of us commenting how nice the food was, and how much of a surprise this was. Much as this was true, potatoes and cabbage for lunch and rice and beans for tea became tiresome after two weeks, the repetitiveness of the food was broken up by rare treats we got some of the days, these included pineapple, fish, eggs, meat and even Tazanian style chips! These I think lifted all our spirits and made the diet more manageable, as did the sea of sauces that appeared throughout the two weeks that people had brought with them to add some flavour! Special mention must go here to Claire, who despite the many temptations of sauces, stuck to a solely Tazanian diet throughout the time we were at Bethany!! The food on the whole though was not too bad. Although there was much conversation (especially towards the end of the trip) of the things we would really like to eat, I think we all realised that for two weeks, we could manage, and that there were much worse predicaments that we could be in.
Callum Jones
Education
In Tanzania, our group got up at about 6.30am, in time for morning prayers at 7.20am. we started teaching at 8am and mainly taught English for about five hours of lessons each day. We were split into 3 teaching teams and had different ‘standards’ to work with. A standard in Tanzania is equivalent to one of our year groups. In pre-school there were over 20 children ranging in age from 2 to 7 but in most of the classes there were 10 pupils, and luckily there were enough text books and exercise books for the children to have one each. The younger children were happy to sit on the floor to work but some of the older standards sat on benches which they moved from classroom, to classroom, to the dining room, as and when they were needed. We then had a blackboard and chalk to help aid us with the teaching. We also tried to make lessons interactive and fun, one example of this is when we taught a class words such as ‘pour’ and ‘stir’. We did this by making our own ‘mud cakes’, which the kids helped with and seemed to thoroughly enjoy!
The children were really eager to learn and would often be early for the start of a lesson. If you asked for a volunteer, there would be 3 or 4 and everyone wanted to have a turn at reading out loud or answering a question. We were also responsible for marking their work and correcting any mistakes.
Naomi Tyson
Leisure and Entertainment
Staying in our own visitors block, you would think that we would be rather removed from goings on in the compound, but this was simply not the case. While we were there, some of the younger kids seemed to live in the steps outside the house, and this gave us an opportunity to get to know some of them really well, and it was very touching that within a few days of us arriving, the kids would come to the door of the house (as they weren’t allowed inside) looking for specific members of the group to sing with them or read them a story.
Morning services (in which all the children would gather) were held on the step just outside the house, as were unscheduled letter writing sessions, as the kids were so keen to learn, even outside allotted class time. The kids that were coming to England also had their English and maths sessions in the house, and before we had arrived, the group that were at Bethany before us had used one of the bedrooms as a teaching room, so far from being removed from compound life, the visitors house was quite a hub of activity!
We took a skipping rope with us, which proved very popular with the younger children. They quickly gained the idea of jumping over the rope. When they didn’t have any chores or lessons, they would come and borrow the rope, taking it in turns to jump over or turn the rope.
To give the children a break from lessons we took a parachute out with us and used it twice in two weeks. Purely because it was something they hadn’t done before the children loved it.
On the Saturday of the middle weekend, Callum and myself were invited to go and play football with the carers against the older boys at Bethany. Initially we thought it was just a practice, but it turned into a full 90-minute match, which was very hot and dusty even in the late afternoon. Our team won 3-1 with Callum and myself setting up all three goals between us. By the end of the match we were both exhausted.
The children had made footballs out of scraps and rags of material, which they either kicked around the compound or threw at each other.
We also asked two of the older girls to show us how to balance water. We all had a go but failed miserably to let go of the bucket. Although it was a lot lighter balancing water on our heads than trying to carry it in our hands. Then Anna and Maria, both aged 7, really made us look foolish as they arrived the water buckets around and made it look s easy!
There was time when we weren’t preparing for lessons, teaching or marking work that was free. We entertained ourselves by writing diaries, reading books or playing cards.
Callum Jones & Jonny Bates
Impressions of Africa
The lakeside location of Bethany was idyllic, and made even more so for us by the stunning sunrise and sunset every day – these occurred very quickly, due to Tanzania being near the Equator, but were beautiful sights. The poverty evident in most of the rural dwellings we saw en route from Mwanza to the children’s home, however, was far from beautiful. Some of these hits were made entirely out of branches and hardly looked like they could stand on their own, let alone function as people’s homes. It was also a culture shock for us to see so many things being transported on people’s heads – from women carrying bundles of the washing in Dar Es Salaam, to the villagers of Magu District balancing buckets of water which they had collected from Lake Victoria and would need to boil before they could drink. This really emphasized how lucky the Bethany site is in having its own filtration system to supply clean water. It felt like a safe haven, for its children and is visitors alike.
Scott Smith
Reflections on Return
Spending time with the Bethany family was an experience that I will never forget. Having never been to Africa before, it was a shock to see with my own eyes the extent of poverty there rather than just on television. Seeing little children struggle back from the lake carrying heavy containers of water umpteen times a day or watching petrol being poured into the tank of a Landcruiser via half of a plastic bottle and a piece of hose are images that will stay with me forever. It made me see quite how much we take so much for granted despite the fact it’s the simple things in life that really matter. Although the Tanzanians had very little in comparison to us, they were willing to share everything they had to make us feel welcome. We truly became and felt part of the family! It was amazing to see how happy and trusting the kids at Bethany are despite all the adversities they have had to overcome to finally reach a place of safety. In fact I think that the kids taught me more than we taught them just by the fact they were so willing to learn, took pride in all their chores, amused themselves without having lots of material things and were so resourceful with what they had. Two weeks isn’t long enough to change the world but I like to think that we helped to change some of those kids’ lives for the better and taught them something even if it was just ‘Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes’ and the ‘Hokey Cokey’!
Catriona Jones
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