I’m in Arusha, Tanzania right now. Arusha is a fairly big city, right at the base of the Serengeti National Park and Mt Kilimanjaro. I’m volunteering at the Umoja Centre and will be here at least until the end of the year.
The Centre provides free education (English, IT and Key Skills) to young disadvantaged Tanzanians. I love being here because I can see every day the results of what we are doing. I’m in the office, helping out with research, fundraising and writing government applications. I’m running a newspaper club and teaching the students how to put together their own newspaper, the Umoja Journalist.
I’m having a fantastic time here, and it’s a bit hard to imagine how different life is now compared with a year and a half ago. On the one-and-a-half year anniversary of the stroke, I was in the Serengeti National Park, on game drives, camping, and marvelling at how everything turned out.
And now, a lot of the hard work of last year with fundraising is continuing, and I’ve discovered that it’s a lot harder to do fundraising in Australia when you aren’t actually in Australia.
