Serving Children in Need

Zanzibar is a small island off the coast of Tanzania. My wife and I have been travelling to Zanzibar often over the past few years due to the building and opening of our hotel Villa Bluu on the south east coast of Zanzibar, in Jambiani. During our visits we noticed that the children at the local schools do not have basic tools like a pen or even a notebook which we take for granted. So, we started to talk with the locals about this issue and realized that Jambiani, compared to some areas on the island in fact have a lot. At least these children have uniforms, some hardly have cloths to wear, let alone a pen. What we did see though is that the whole island is lacking basic material for education.

I personally am also employed by elipsLife and we sometimes replace our work laptops so I thought this could be an opportunity to do something useful with the old ones. I approached IT operations and the CIO on this topic and asked whether there is any further need for them or if I could buy them in order to support children in Zanzibar. Everyone was totally supportive of this idea to donate them to Africa with one condition: All hard disks had to be removed so no data from elipsLife and the customers would ever be accessible, obviously for data privacy reasons. We therefore bought hard disks for all them and installed a fresh version of MS Windows on all of the laptops. Next step was to bring them over to Zanzibar.

As we travelled two to three times to Zanzibar last year, we were able to bring over, so far, seven laptops in total without getting in trouble at customs. The challenge then was to work out who to donate them to, to ensure that the children are the ones actually receiving the computers and not that they somehow get taken and sold for personal benefit. As you can imagine corruption is still a huge problem in Africa. Fortunately, we know some good people on the island and after a few months we found a solution.

At the end of each year all the students do a final exam. According to these results they may be chosen to study on the mainland in Dar es Salaam. They then can complete their high school in a school with general higher standards and with better tools for education. Last year only six out of 6000 students made it. With the help of our local contact, we arranged a day where we personally could hand over the laptops to these six children. The students that passed the exams were already in Dar es Salaam so we arranged to hand the laptops over to their parents. After speaking to the teachers, who also have no laptops for teaching, we managed to organize a day where the parents would come to the school and we could meet the teachers and see the school. The school rooms are basic with small desks and a black board at the front. All the students were very curious but to be honest most of the students have never even touched a computer. While we were able to help these six students, we did however realize this is just a small step to help the children to develop further. Nevertheless, it was a special experience and now six students have a great tool for furthering their education.

Whenever you see things like this, it is always a wakeup call. It makes you realize just how lucky we are to be born with food on our plate, a roof over our heads and clothes on our back. We will therefore continue to help the children in any way we can. If you wish to also visit a school when you are in Jambiani staying with us at Villa Bluu, Karibu sana, you are welcome!