Things Behind the Sun

Looking for plastic bags to make purses, a project Margi brought to the Bibis-- most of Mbagala is built on a trash dump, this was taken just outside the house.

So Mbagala seems pretty sweet, right? And if its all great and good, you might kind of wonder what the problem is. What is there to fix, really? What are we trying to do to help? Theres a lot going on. Firstly, the water situation sucks. You can't drink the tap water anywhere here, or you can get all kinds of nasty shit. So at Bibi Jann's, they use a chlorine-based cleaning solution and bottled water. Problem is, the solution tastes like hell and the bottles are expensive. So we're trying to work something out there, whether its a prototype carbon nanotube filter (yeah i know, sounds awesome) that might get donated, or a deep-well merry-go-round pump (what? Yeah me neither-- check it out).

Sarafina: she stays at the school because she has nowhere else to go.

Next on the list is the health situation. Some of the kids are HIV-positive, and they're all in less-than-ideal health situations. Ben had a hell of a wake-up call to the reality of the situation when he checked on one of the kids, Isa. He hadn't been to school in a week and a half, at home extremely sick. His bibi finally decided he was dying and took him to an extremely small clinic, but his bibi was extremely sick herself, so much so that she had to go home. Ben and crew arrived at hour 6 of Isa sitting alone and unseen in the waiting room. After rushing him to a Harvard clinic and using connections to be seen quickly, he was double diagnosed positive for HIV and malaria. His malaria was so bad they had to treat him intravenously and give him injections every 8 hours for 2 days. He got so scared of the needles he ran away and nobody saw him for 36 hrs. Sum of the story: theres a lot of aspects about the health situation that need attention. One important one is a viable transportation option, which is where the bus we’re trying to buy comes in.

Isa

Isa's bibi

And we can't forget money. Money, money, money. The bibis are pretty much completely dependent, as the crafts don't yield nearly enough to support to themselves. Two of the bibis didn't eat for 2 days without telling anyone because they couldn't afford food. It had to be paid for out of the school money, which means less food for the kids. Only one bibi (of 30) owns a bed net, their only protection against malaria. Speaking of malaria, medicine (preventative or treatment) isn't covered by the gov't here, so Ben had to buy Isa's injections, because Isa's bibi obviously couldn't afford it. While Jann can cover some costs, there are obvious gaps that need to be filled. $50 a month for 30 bibis is $1500/month, which is no easy sum.

Juma, an "honorary" male bibi

So thats kind of what we're doing. These aren't easy problems to solve and we don't really know how to solve them. The worst part of the entire situation is that we're only talking about 100 people here. Bibi Jann's is constantly turning people away. They only accept either the most promising students or those in the worst situations. But that means that there are thousands of people, in Mbagala alone, stuck in situations like these with no one to turn to. No Swedish fundraisers, no over-eager Americans, no one. And forget the rest of Tanzania, or East Africa, or the continent, or the developing world. Shit.

Alone, looking out at a big world

IN NEED