One of the greatest rewardsof my trips to Africa is managing and monitoring the projects my travelers and fellow Rotarians are implementing at a primary school (equivalent of 1st through 7th grade) in Usa River Tanzania. This school has more than 800 students, classrooms with as many as 120 children, no electricity, 3-4 children at every desk. Yet, they all get to school every day with clean uniform after walking up to 5 miles and are obviously dedicated to learn and behave. It is because of these basic factors that my fellow travelers started raising funds in support of what we can do to make their school environment more conducive to education. To that end we have implemented a number of projects. The most recent project is building a hand washing station. There was a single spigot for all 800 children to wash their hands and their lunch plates. A photo of the chaos and the mess makes it obvious that many went without washing.


The new station was nearing completion when I was there 3 weeks ago and I am told that it has now been completed. (I will post photos as soon as they are available).

The next major projects are to fill and cap the floors in three of the classrooms (cement is crumbling) and to build a kitchen to replace the lean-to where large pots of corn and beans are heated over an open wood fire. The cost of fixing a classroom floor is $485 each and the estimated cost of building a kitchen with a wood stove and running water is $8628.00 US.

I have finally posted the photos from the Feb/Mar 2009 Safari. The link is http://www.acaciastock.com/gallery.php?gid=76 (can be reached via the ‘Stock’ tab on my website). A few of the highlights are attached.

The nature highlight of the trip was not the carnivores hunting and eating, nor the 10′s of thousands in the migration, but rather this little dung beetle. I had seen them on TV & the movies, but never in person. Nature’s tiny manure spreader rolled this ball more than 15 yards, and then buried it by crawling underneath and digging the hole under it to eventually lay it’s eggs inside it.