"Mountains can't meet, but people can." The wisdom of
this Tanzanian proverb is a key to the wonderful time fifteen young people
from the mountains of Cumbria spent in July and early August renewing
personal links with friends from Rungwe District of Tanzania and making new
friendships with hundreds of others.
A posse from the group, all students of Wyndham School came to the offices
to Egremont Today to tell us why they find the link between Copeland and
Rungwe so important to maintain.
They set out with the aim of helping schools in the Rungwe District to build
a stronger future for themselves. A new secondary school at Lubala, which
was just plans on paper a year ago, now has classrooms and dormitories for
three hundred form 1 students. "It's great to see how the money we spent
two years raising has gone to provide something that has made a real
difference to children's lives," declared Charlotte. £2500 sent in
advance of the visit has provided 80% funding for the dormitory for over a
hundred girls – now complete and lived in! They also brought a whole gari
load of school furniture, seen being proudly unloaded by the children of a
primary school. They described the satisfaction of making real the
declaration at the heart of the Link - Together We Build by joining
in the physical work of laying the foundations for the science labs.
The computer, built by Ashley Napier in Egremont, and installed in Lutengano
Secondary School can do even more to enlarge horizons. It is their first
ever computer, coveted in dreams by millions of African children. They have
all heard of computers, but until Ashley, Chris, Jenny and Iwan came to
teach them how to use it they had no idea what a mouse was. Within a few
hours their pupils were accessing CR Roms for a vast library of knowledge
and writing documents, and the school, has now realised its dream of having
IT available to support its students. Yet they are realistic enough to know
that all their efforts are only scratching at the surface of the vast needs
of Tanzania. "It is like planting a token tree."
The experience of the visit put their lives at home into
a challenging perspective. "Britain is so trivial" complaining about
problems which are really so low on the scale of needs in which water and
food are basic. They felt guilty about having so much and not being able to
help everyone, and acknowledged the complicated and uncomfortable feelings
they had about being regarded as celebrities. People would sidle beside them
to have their photographs taken with real English people. They had to work
hard to prove that they really could do practical things, like build, dig
and paint, unlike the streotype of an English child with nothing to do
except spend huge amounts of money.
They came back with great respect for the hunger for knowledge they found in
all Tanzanian families. Alistair gave the example of a family that would
spend £150 a year to give their son a secondary education out of an income
from their shop of barely £10 a week.
They also came back treasuring the memories of the fun they had shared
through the universal language of music. Jo described singing "I Love You
Baby!" together in four languages, kiSwahili, Narkusa, English and
Welsh, for a whole journey in the gari - a Tanzanian lorry, and the scream
of delight they heard from hundreds of children at a primary school when
they brought out, among all the gifts they had prepared, a real football.
Below, first row, friends reunited, making music
together, children at a Tanzanian Primary School,
second row, a crowd of children, building together, and
Iwan learns to play a local instrument.
To connect with the website for the Copeland Runwge Link,
go to
com1.runboard.com/btanzanianlink
