Lydia Hartsell

For the last two weeks I have been attending some of the Rotary Meetings here in Dar es Salaam.  There are six in Dar es Salaam and seventeen some clubs throughout the rest of the country.   There are also a couple Rotaract clubs.  I’ve been attending the Mzizima club of Dar es Salaam; it is the club of my host counselor.  My host counselor is Mr. Surinder Bhandari.  He is the current past president for the Mzizima club.  He has been very welcoming me to so far: him and his wife took Anand and I out for dinner this past Friday and even let us call our families from their cell phone.  It is pretty expensive to call the states from here so I haven’t called home since the first two weeks after arriving, and so my mother and I were thrilled!

I want to brag briefly about what I’ve learned about this club so far.  They are the only club in Dar es Salaam whose membership is almost entirely Africans—actually my host counselor is the only Indian-Tanzanian in the club.  The other clubs of Dar are mostly comprised of Indian-Tanzanians, ex-pats, and Tanzanians.  One of the past female presidents of this club was the first female club President in all of Africa and the third worldwide.  She is a retired judge of the high court of Tanzania.  Active in their community, the Mzizima club is also working on a microfinance project with a club from the United States.  They plan to work with local microfinance organization here in Tanzania to reach about 5,000 low income people. 

Rotary Mikocheni-Dar es Salaam in the newspaper

For the past Rotary Community Service Day on October 10, another club of Dar es Salaam, the Mikocheni club, visited a women’s hospital to help clean the building and grounds and to provide a few renovations.  They provided new large trash bins and replaced outdated lighting fixtures.  An especially neat situation unraveled on that day as well.  During the Rotary cleaning, a woman in labor came into the clinic and within a short time, she had given birth to a healthy newborn.  Acting on this, the Rotary club quickly began to raise funds from those around and ended up collecting 102,000TSh (about $80!) for the newborn and presented it to the mother.  I attached a picture that ran in the newspaper about this event.  Among other clubs in East Africa, the Rotary clubs of Arusha and Moshi  (northern Tanzania) are planning a walk for polio on Oct. 24^th and the clubs of Kampala (capital of Uganda) were on the evening news for their recent service cleaning project.   Other Rotary projects include clean water projects, distributing insecticide-treated nets, and planting trees.   The Rotary club of Zanzibar even hosted a career day this past week.  They scheduled many speakers of a wide range of professions and partnered high school students with the respective professionals of whom their career interests lie.  They held one last year and had over 300 students attend (this is a huge turnout considering the size of Zanzibar!).  It was so successful that the government asked them to schedule it again for this year.