Lydia Hartsell

On Thursday Jan 28, Past President DK Lee and a group of 60 some Rotarians from around the world convened in Dar es Salaam to celebrate the building of a Maternal and Child Hospital in Kibaha, a district outside of Dar es Salaam.  The countries represented (and forgive me if I forget one) included Australia, England, Korea, Japan, South Africa, United States, Canada, Italy, Philippines, and Tanzania.  It was definitely a diverse group–typical of Rotary to bring together people from all around the globe.

The day began at around 8:30am when I met the other Rotarians at a very nice hotel in downtown Dar.  We loaded onto buses (air-conditioned too! this is a first for me in Tanzania) and drove about an hour and a half outside of Dar es Salaam to Kibaha District where Tumbi Maternal and Child Hospital is located.  Rotary is sponsoring an addition to and renovation of  this clinic in order to reduce the number of needless maternal and child deaths in Tanzania (which is pretty high).  I will include an article about this project from the Korean Rotary magazine in a later post. 

After a short ceremony and touring of the hospital and the construction site for about two hours, we hopped back in the buses and drove to a nearby field.  At this field, Rotary Dar es Salaam  had started a tree planting project about a year ago and now the Rotary group was returning to plant some more trees here.  The Dar Rotaracters, Rotary Scholars, and Rotary members all planted their trees by each other.  During the ‘laborous’ task (we had to shove dirt in a pre-dug hole in which the tree stood), one of the Dar Rotary members cried out to all the hesitant Rotarians: “Come-on now. Use your God-given shovels!” as he quickly paddled dirt into his assigned plot.  He also buried his business card in a plastic water bottle next to his tree.  Don’t know about environmental friendliness there – might defeat the purpose, but I think the tree will survive the plastic leaching.  I also decided to bury my business card (without the plastic bottle) with my family’s picture on it – so family you are now all part of Tanzania. If anyone ever finds it, I’m sure they will be shocked to find a Mzungu (white) family with nine kids.

A little bit later, we drove to a nearby school–Kibaha Girls Secondary School. Here we had a really nice lunch and the girls performed a traditional dance and skit for us.  After a series of talks by different people, the Rotarians from each country were assigned a girl that was to be our “tree pen-pal” as she would be taking care of the trees that we planted and updating us on the status of the tree.  I hope mine doesn’t die…

At the end of it all, we loaded back into the buses and drove back to Dar es Salaam to relax for a couple hours (oh wait I had class for 3 hrs) before having a luxurious dinner at the same hotel that we had met earlier that day.