Arusha, the land of the Maasai and their culture, is located in the northern zone of Tanzania and is the fourth largest town in Tanzania after Dar es Salaam, Mwanza and Tanga. The northern zone is comprised of four administrative regions: Arusha, Manyara, Kilimanjaro and Tanga.

Until about five years ago, Manyara and Arusha were one region, but the region was split into two because of its geographical vastness.

Population

According to the 2002 census, Arusha had a population of 1,292,973. Given the national annual growth rate of 3 percent, the population of this region was more than 1.5 million by the year 2009. The population of the town alone is about 400,000, but the people who visit the city every day for business, shopping and school make the real number of inhabitants there much more than that.

Arusha is the administrative town of Tanzania’s northern zone and commands a lot of income-generating activities of sizeable scale, such as mining, agriculture, cattle rearing, light industries and tourism.

Culture

Though there are now many people groups in Arusha, the Maasai hold to their culture and love to put on their traditional clothes.

The common language spoken is Kiswahili, which is the compulsory teaching language in primary school. English is also spoken to some degree, especially by young people because of interaction with the guests and tourists who flock to the town as tourism increases.

Economic Activities

Economic levels in Arusha differ a lot and the more affluent are business people who benefit from the tourism industry, mining, and farming sectors. Arusha is home to the world famous tanzanite, the precious gemstone that is mined only in Tanzania.

Arusha is the second government revenue collector, with the highest gross national product (GNP) after Dar es Salaam. It is also the hub of tourism, which is concentrated in northern Tanzania. Arusha is the gateway to the world-famous Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti, where visitors marvel at the great wildebeest migration.

The presence of the United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, East African Community Headquarters, East and Southern African Management Institute, East, Central and Southern African Health Secretariat, African Court of Appeal, International Postal Union, and the like make Arusha a cosmopolitan town that brings about 100 nationalities together in one place. However, the growth of this international community makes living costs high for the locals who don’t work in these offices.

Food Crisis Update

While Arusha has not experienced widespread hunger and no child in our Child Sponsorship Program has suffered severely from hunger pangs, several families have been touched by the price surge due to the general food crisis in the country.

Food prices have gone high in the past two years. The price for a loaf of bread has nearly doubled, and a kilo of cow beef, which used to sell at $1.70, now sells for $2.65.

Local Issues

The pandemic of HIV/AIDS is still claiming the lives of parents and guardians, leaving an increasing number of children as orphans without support. This might be one of the reasons that Arusha has such a high number of street children, now estimated to be 7,000.

Due to its geopolitical position, Arusha is attracting more people and growing quickly, which has caused an increase in the crime rate. It is well connected by tarmac roads to the major cities of Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. These cities have a direct influence on what happens in Arusha.

Water needs have increased in recent years, and this poses a challenge for the municipal authority to devise ways of solving the city’s water problem.

Home Life

Arusha has embraced both local and modern lifestyles and this is reflected by the types of buildings seen in the city and its environs. There are squatter areas as well as posh houses where affluent people live. New hotels are being built to cater to the increasing number of visitors who come to the town for various engagements.

Most of our sponsored children come from the squatter and periphery areas where the centers are located.

Schools and Education

Arusha is endowed with many government and private primary schools. The government has made it compulsory for all children to attend primary school, but this has triggered another problem. Those who finish primary school cannot attend secondary school because of insufficient classrooms, teaching facilities and teaching staff.

The government is encouraging individuals and the business community to contribute and assist in building enough classrooms for the increased number of secondary school students.

Church and Religion

Arusha has many churches, and religious activities are vibrant and alive in the town. People like to go to open-air gospel crusades and the presence of the Christian community is widely felt in Arusha.

The churches have seen a wave of revival from the late 1990s to the present, and although people identify themselves with their religious denominations, there has been a noted increase in the degree of religious tolerance and understanding.

The presence of Islam is seen in town and coexists with Christianity in peace but not friendliness.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

About 500,000 Kenyan children are missing school due to lack of food.

According to the World Food Program, in countries where school attendance is low, the promise of at least one nutritious meal each day boosts enrollment and promotes regular attendance. Where that is not offered, hunger interferes with the children’s concentration in class, affecting class performance. As famine takes its toll across the country, a growing number of students are staying away from school altogether to help their parents look for food (The Standard, Sept. 23, 2009).

Drought and famine have led to an increase in the high school dropout rate primarily in schools in the Njoro and Nakuru areas. While 29 percent of children in Nairobi are malnourished, that number increases to 42 percent in the Eastern Province (Daily Nation, Oct. 7, 2009).

The United Nations Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has stated that malnutrition is the major barrier to universal primary education in Kenya.

Famine conditions have also affected livestock in the rural areas of Kenya, undermining the primary source of income for pastoralists, especially the Maasai population.

Malaria continues to be another source of concern, and an increase in cases is predicted because of the El Niño rains expected to pound the country. Malaria is the leading cause of death in Kenya, affecting mostly the rural poor, particularly young children and pregnant women. Most cases affect children under the age of 5 (Daily Nation, Oct. 7, 2009).

While mosquito nets have made a difference in squelching the malaria epidemic, researchers are discovering that mosquitoes are now feeding earlier in the evening, which reduces the effectiveness of the nets. While there has been a dramatic reduction of malaria in children under 5 years, the disease appears to be shifting to older children (Daily Nation, Oct. 30, 2009).

Other threats to Kenya’s children include the H1N1 virus, child abuse and abduction, and neglect. The number of orphans in Kenya has risen to more than 2.4 million. In 2008, 38,325 children were described as neglected and 2,753 were abandoned by their parents (The Standard, Sept. 29, 2009).

The effects of poverty are felt most severely in the country’s rural areas, where half of the population lives on less that Kshs. 1,560, versus the more urban areas where people earn an average of Kshs. 3,000 per month. Of the 40 million people living in Kenya, 16.6 million survive on one meal a day and are most likely to die of disease, hunger or political violence (The Standard, Oct. 29, 2009).

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

Your work is not in vain; your acts of compassion are changing the world day by day.

I was born in 1982, the fifth of seven children in the household. I was born and brought up in a remote village of Empuyiankat in Kajiado district, Rift Valley province in Kenya.

My father is a polygamist, married to three wives with 24 children. My father and his wives have no formal education.

As a girl in the highly patriarchal Maasai community, my chances of attaining an education were dim. Girls in my community are raised to be submissive and dependent upon men all their lives.

Female genital mutilation (FGM) and forced marriages of 13-year-old girls to men decades older than them characterize the lives of 99 percent of Maasai girls. A gender-oppressive culture, few and understaffed education facilities, and long treks from home to school and back across the vast savanna plains full of wild animals are some of the challenges girls in my community endure to access education.

I started school at the age of 6 at Imaroro Primary School. My enrollment to school and the Compassion program was the defining event of my life.

The only reason I was chosen was because my mother had five girls and two boys, and at the time of our registration, my elder brother was too old and the other was too young to enroll. This left my parents with no choice but to take me to fill the one slot given to my mother’s household.

Compassion introduced me to Christianity, and enforced compulsory Saturday and Sunday Bible classes. The Maasai tribe is known worldwide for maintaining their culture and traditional way of life as well as resisting modern and western life, including Christianity.

I wonder what would have become of me if I was not enrolled in Compassion and now leading a Christian life? But I find clear answers in the lives of my former playmates in the village.

Like them, I would have spent my weekends not attending Bible classes but singing and dancing to morans (Maasai warriors) at the village as required by culture. I would have spent my evenings not doing homework or preparing for the next day at school, but making beaded jewelry for self-decoration.

Other than Bible education and other support offered by Compassion, correspondence with my sponsors was the major source of inspiration to me. Their love and commitment inspired me to excel in education and to pursue a career in social work.

I prayed to God to one day meet my sponsors in person. Now that I am in the United States, I will be meeting them in the near future, God willing.

At the age of 13, immediately after primary school, I almost lost the chance of furthering my education. The Maasai culture demands that girls at that age be circumcised and married off to much older men.

So many of my sisters went through this horrifying experience, and I was not going to be an exception. Having done well in my primary-level national examination, and with a strong passion for education, I talked to my mother and a Compassion social worker.

I told them I did not wish to go through FGM and that I wanted to continue with school rather than get married. The Compassion social worker sent help from a women’s group fighting against FGM and early child marriages in the district, who talked to my father and got me admission to Moi Girls Isinya, a boarding high school offering refuge to many Maasai girls.

Compassion International and the women’s group financed my education at this school. This move opened the doors to my future.

I enrolled in university in 2001 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in social work. My dream is to bring about lasting change and advocate for the voiceless girls and women in my own Maasai community.

Today I live in the USA in the state of Maryland and am in the process of applying to graduate school to pursue a master’s degree in public health.

Those of us who owe our success to the good deeds of Compassion always say a prayer asking God to bless the hearts of all those behind this ministry. There are challenges and times when expected results are not forthcoming, especially in terms of unmet numbers and statistics. However, lives are being changed.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates

The Maasai community has been rearing cattle for years, all their known lifetime and history.

In fact, there is a joke that goes around Tanzania about how the Maasai people claim that all the cows in the world belong to them, and the Maasai have the duty to return the cows to their natural home, in the Maasai community, which is why in the past there has been cattle rustling in the community.

To Maasai, cattle rearing is an adventure and keeping cattle is more than just an economic activity. Rearing cattle is part of the culture.

To have cattle is a symbol of prosperity and respect among the community members. Maasai are famous for their cows and goats that keep moving from one place to another in search of a greener pastures and water. Because of soil erosion and an effort to protect the environment, there has been a great and forceful campaign from the government to encourage soil conservation and land management.

The Maasai are being encouraged to keep few animals and sell the rest to improve their lives and escape the risk of losing them in times of droughts and famine. And as part of this, a new thing has been born in Likamba.

A sponsor of several children at the TAG Likamba Student Center visited them, and she was moved to do something to bless the children and support the families in their struggle against poverty.

But she actually decided to do more than just touch the lives of the children she is sponsoring. She was moved to respond to the people’s need and to the hundreds of children and adults in the community. She helped provide goats to all the families in the child development center.

The supply of a she-goat to each family of a sponsored child at the child development center is a new thing not experienced before and not heard of in the whole of Likamba community. There is great excitement and enthusiasm among the people as they now transition to a modern art of cattle rearing, keeping goats in house.

According to the pastor of the church, “goats are more advantageous than cows. They need and use a smaller space. They eat fewer grasses, and this will contribute to the protection of the environment. The goat is a great blessing to the people of Likamba.”

Much effort had to take place before the goat distribution was completed. It was not easy to get the supply of all 244 goats at once. Compassion had to look for the goats from different sources, bringing each lot to the families as they were available. Gathering the goats took about three months to complete.

Before the families were given the goats, the whole community was given three days training on how to take care of them, and each family was given the responsibility of making a special shade for the goats.

The people of Likamba also formed cooperative groups, and each family is contributing money every month to their common fund. The objectives of the cooperative are to:

• Improve the welfare of the group members and their families.
• Enhance cooperation among the herders and peasants.
• Protect and improve the health of their children.
• Have more power over the products of their labor (i.e., to have more when they sell milk and other products).

All these having been done, the families were ready to receive the goats. On the day of the visit, about 40 parents gathered at the church compound, waiting anxiously to receive the goats.

The pastor of the church welcomed the parents of the sponsored children and guardians to receive their goats. He read the following passage from the word of God,

“You will have plenty of goats’ milk to feed you and your family and to nourish your servant girls.” — Proverbs 27:27 (NIV)

The pastor also said, “The child is building. There will be building through the children. I am praying that Likamba will change.”

Now that all the Compassion families in Likamba have been supplied with a goat, there is great joy and optimism in the community.

I visited several families and took some time to talk with parents about how they have received the support.

Asnath is the mother of sponsored child, Amani. The family has two sponsored children, so they received two goats. I asked Asnath how she feels about the goat support to her family:

“The goat will do a great deal to support family income. With the goat we will be able to get milk. We will use the milk to increase the health of the children in general and sell the milk and use the proceeds to educate our children. Not only milk but we will also get manure, which we will use in our farms and thus increase the farm income for the products we will be growing.”

I asked her how she felt when she heard she was receiving the goat.

“I was very happy to learn that I will receive a goat. I was ready to build. I was ready to build a shade, and I used all the resources I had to accomplish the task. I bought three roofing sheets and two kilograms of nails. I had several pieces of wood, and this helped me finish the shade on time to receive the goat when they arrive. My husband is very happy also about this project ,and he has helped me in building the shade.”

Rose is the grandmother of Amani, and she is taking care of another child of the family, who is a twin sister to Amani and also a sponsored child, Neema.

One woman from a nearby village gave a testimony of how blessed the people of Likamba will be after receiving the goats. She told of what happened to her when she received a dairy goat from another organization that was helping poor families in her village.

“I received a loaned dairy goat from a project that was helping people fight poverty. The only condition was for that the loaned beneficiary pay back three goats as they reproduce. In the course of the years I was able to pay back three goats and sold several others. I used the money to buy cows and also buy land. I was able to support my children to go to school.”

But she said the advantage the people of Likamba is that they have not been loaned goats, and they don’t have to pay back.

The celebration and fanfare about the goats came to its climax on August 3, when all the children in the center had received all 244 goats. This was a great day.

People from all corners of the valley and plains of surrounding villages came. Children were dressed in special clothes they were given from the project center. A children’s choir graced the occasion with beautiful Christian songs.

Parents were so excited, and to show their acknowledgment for the goats, they had prepared gifts for the pastor of the church and his wife and the Compassion partnership facilitator and her husband.

The parents appreciated the effort they had put into making this project a reality. Maasai are generous people, and to give like this showed that they had accepted the message of the church.

After the church service, food and drinks were served to the invited guests and the community gathering. The entire time a group of Maasai women was dancing and singing on the church grounds, sending messages across the valleys and hills to celebrate the good news. A new era had dawned in Likamba. It was a special day, praying for the goats and dedicating them for the glory of God, for them to multiply and reach many families in the Maasai plain.

The government committed to support the children’s families and provide them with advice on how to take good care of the goats. The director of Compassion Tanzania, Dr. Emmanuel D. Mbennah, reminded the parents to acknowledge God, who used the sponsor to give them this unique gift.

For their part, the families appreciated the blessing and have promised to pass it on to another village that is running a Compassion ministry. They have decided that each family that got a goat will give out a goat when they multiply to another community. In this way they will support many other families, helping many people in the long run.

People are optimistic that after several years the goats will spread all over the entire area of the Maasai plain and that life will never be the same.

My Account l Sponsor a Child l Help Babies and Moms l Crisis Updates