Today we indulge in the
Philanthropic part of our African trip and I am most excited. The explosive
emergence of social media bringing remote injustices to our dining table
conversations coupled with our innate bleeding hearts has created a new vector
in our world. This one has many faces such as social responsibility, social and
corporate citizenship and social philanthropy. Our company, Fair trade safari
admirably donates all of its net profits to such initiatives and encourages us
to match them. My daughter happened to read my itinerary before the trip and
like many of her generation she is single-minded in correcting all the
imbalances in our world. To this end she redirected one large 20kg duffel bag
with soccer balls, soccer cleats and jerseys from its original destination
of Senegal to mine which is Tanzania. Aisha runs a non-profit http://connectforcare.wixsite.
In the morning we visited an NGO
called SOS Children's village www.soschildrensvillagestanzania.org who's
mission is to strengthen the family life of every young child and to provide a
family and a home to those who don't have one. I was impressed with the school,
the boarding and lodging facilities and the caliber of the administrators. The
environs reminded me of my young days in boarding school far from home and it a
brought a tear to Fern's eye as he flashed back to his early life in Cuba. To
travel two continents away from anything that is familiar and then to succumb
to overwhelming familiarity is truly a human condition. We are of the same clay
transmuted differently.
 |
| ( Dancing shoes for Ibuka's kids) |
As we left the SOS campus we were
flagged down by a well-dressed local policeman and cited for speeding! Contrary
to our initial reaction it was not a shakedown and we proceeded to our next NGO
with Edwin the driver a little unhappy. Ibuka dance foundation in Arusha is our
next stop where we are introduced to this NGO that provides dance training to
youth and teaches them this art-form and skill which they can leverage in their
lives.
Brian and his friends leads our group through dance moves on the large outdoor stage and then dance their most complex and acrobatic moves for Fern and Ali to photograph at close range. Their moves gathered inspiration from the cameras in their faces and the cameras were only to happy to oblige. I donated the dancing shoes to Ibuka and Fair Trade and several members of the party donated money in support of the cause. What a wonderful second 'hit' this effort was. If the Serengeti and its animals had us walking in the clouds, these NGOs had us back on the earth enjoying the richness of humanity.
Brian and his friends leads our group through dance moves on the large outdoor stage and then dance their most complex and acrobatic moves for Fern and Ali to photograph at close range. Their moves gathered inspiration from the cameras in their faces and the cameras were only to happy to oblige. I donated the dancing shoes to Ibuka and Fair Trade and several members of the party donated money in support of the cause. What a wonderful second 'hit' this effort was. If the Serengeti and its animals had us walking in the clouds, these NGOs had us back on the earth enjoying the richness of humanity.
Today had
been earmarked on the trips’ itinerary as the ‘social philanthropy’ day
and one that my daughter Aisha and have looked forward to most. Aisha is
home and I am her emissary in Africa bearing gifts for local children.
Two duffel bags are packed with deflated footballs the largest donation
coming from the Bukharis even as we prepped to leave for the Airport.
We stopped at the local Puncture repair shop to inflate the balls and
the small crowd watched in wide eyed glee as crumpled leather turned
into colorful spheres… greens with adidas motifs, reds with black
borders reminiscent of Masai’s shawls that we photographed yesterday,
purples and blues like the tropical flowers of this landscape and white
that looks officious and world-cup like! Tap-tap-tap the repairman
showed his ball juggling skill, tap-tap the onlooker retorted with the
green ball, bounce-bounce in the dirt and soon balls were being
exchanged and played all over the gas station! A damp rag was summoned
and the balls respectfully wiped down like a cut-glass antique bowl
being passed from hand to hand to admire the light reflecting off the
crystal! In that one instant it is evident to me…sport though apparently
physical, most immediately and inexplicably dials an ethereal
connection to the uninhibited soul within. In this crowd of ten from up
and down the human and economic range there was this transcendence of
the immediate gas station reality into a ‘let my Messi skills show your
Ronaldo skills’ delirium. We are playing gas-station soccer … 
Even
as we put all the bouncing balls into car Malawani (Baba Phillips)
tells me about a non-profit called ‘Pens 4 kids’ that he works for.
Amazing … here is a Sernegeti tour guide and master off-road driver
distributing millions of pens to kids in the deep bush of Africa…places
where there are no roads and little connection with other humanity. His
drives tourists like us to places where most of his countrymen don’t
venture… villages that live amidst lions, people that live on the animal
migration routes and those marooned deep in the Rift valley. Here he
delivers his precious gifts of ‘writing instruments’ as we somewhat
snootily refer to them in our schools. This is how some kids get there
‘back to school’ supplies…
 | |
| ( this is how you take a 3 layered photograph! ) |
No comments:
Post a Comment