I moved in to my new home on Thursday. It is about 30 minutes walk outside of Arusha in a place ca
ll Sinoni. There is tarmac half the way there and the rest is a mud track with some occasional rubble thrown into the bigger holes. Not dissimilar to something you would find at Brick Kiln Farm. I live with an extended family around a small court yard used for washing and cooking. There is mama and baba, and their too sons Boneface and Allen. Then there is Francis who is an orphan and has been with my family for some time. 2 other girls that don’t speak English but I gather are some kind if house maids. There are also three young children, but am not sure to whom they belong.
The home is very basic - no hot water, a squat toilet, all cooking on coals outside and a tin roof, but also very friendly indeed.
ll Sinoni. There is tarmac half the way there and the rest is a mud track with some occasional rubble thrown into the bigger holes. Not dissimilar to something you would find at Brick Kiln Farm. I live with an extended family around a small court yard used for washing and cooking. There is mama and baba, and their too sons Boneface and Allen. Then there is Francis who is an orphan and has been with my family for some time. 2 other girls that don’t speak English but I gather are some kind if house maids. There are also three young children, but am not sure to whom they belong.The home is very basic - no hot water, a squat toilet, all cooking on coals outside and a tin roof, but also very friendly indeed.
It has almost been a week with TCBA. They are a small micro-finance organisation run by a Mr Sauni. There are about 450 clients, who are small entrepreneurs from in or around Arusha. To qualify for a loan each individual must form a group of 5, to which the loan is provided. This reduces the risk of defaulters as the group is jointly responsible for repayments. Loans begin at 100,000 Tanzanian Shillings which is about £50, with at maximum of £250.
The types of business that we lend to varies but could be street food vendors, small tailors, charcoal collectors really any small scale enterprise.
There are 4 permanent members of staff: in addition to Mr Sauni, there is Julius the accountant, Emmanuel who vets the clients and Lightness who assists him. The offices are in the centre of Arusha, this is where clients will come on a Monday and Wednesday to make repayments.
The types of business that we lend to varies but could be street food vendors, small tailors, charcoal collectors really any small scale enterprise.
There are 4 permanent members of staff: in addition to Mr Sauni, there is Julius the accountant, Emmanuel who vets the clients and Lightness who assists him. The offices are in the centre of Arusha, this is where clients will come on a Monday and Wednesday to make repayments.
They say that the simple things in life are the best. When I have a spare hour or two I tend to ask the guys at home what they want to do; the answer is always the same… “can we go for uji?”. So we walk half an hour into the town sit outside a shop on the side of the street and get half a pint of very hot porridge from and thermos flask. There we will sit for a while watching the world go by. If we are lucky we can wash the uji down with a plate of chips.
Apparently Arusha is the gateway for Tanzanian safari, so naturally I thought I should give it a go at the weekend. So along with the other volunteers, I took the short trip to the Arusha National Park, although it is one of the smallest parks it is supposed to be the one with the most varied terrain and includes the not insignificant mount Meru which at 4500 meters is bloody big - but somehow overlooked by Kilimanjaro. I thoroughly recommend the safari. We took a 4×4 on a game drive in the morning seeing buffalo, warthogs, zebra, buffoons among other things - then a walk with an armed ranger. We walked through forest and marshes finding more water buffalo and loads of giraffe which were only a few yards away, also 3 types of monkey all in the trees. When in the forest with the monkeys we heard what sounded like gun shots in the distance, it wasn’t though – the guide told us it was a bush-buck warning the monkeys of some danger. They then all went crazy, making a very loud grunting/barking sort of noise – this, in turn was a warning to other animals further away. I don’t know if we were the cause of the commotion, or if we should have been worried about some other imminent danger. I guide didn’t seem bothered so we continued our stroll. Unfortunately no lions and no elephants, for these I need to take a longer trip to one of the bigger parks which I hope to do soon.
As we all know, nothing happens fast in Africa. Well until today that is; I was a bit annoyed because my camera suddenly decided to stop taking pictures. Not really believing I would be able to get it fixed I went to a small photo studio, who asked me to leave it with them. Within 45minutes I had a text with a quote, and after agreeing in 2 hours I collected it in full working order with a new fuse in one of the circuit boards controlling the lenses. How about that for service?!
I had a bit of a shot in the arm earlier this week. I was beginning to get a bit frustrated with the management of the micro-finance I’m working with. There are a number of things that I am not keen on. Anyway, I got out of the office for a client visit – traveling about 30 minutes by bus from the office. There I met a lady who has had 5 loans from TCBA. Her business is very simple… twice a week she travels from Arusha to the border with Kenya to buy salt, she takes about a ton and a half, which she sells wholesale to shops in Arusha. It seems somehow the salt is cheaper in Kenya. She uses the capital from TCBA to buy the stock, of which over the years she has been able to increase the amount considerably. The effect is that she has been able to save enough to build a house and send her daughter to school. It was a perfect example of both the need for credit and the power of micro-finance — and by the way, she had never missed a repayment in 5 years!
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