Support in Tanzania from the Maasai Heritage Preservation Foundation

[Matthew Norton]

As you will all of read in my previous posts, i am cycling to raise money for the Maasai Heritage Preservation Foundation to support the school building that we are doing in Magadi, Kenya. This week we at the foundation have agreed to support a further school in Mlali, Tanzania. I met a wonderful lady from the village in Mlali whom has managed to progress in education to get to Edinburgh University where she is studying for a Phd. She has been determined to help offer the same opportunities for her fellow people and has set up and been supporting a school solely out of her own pocket for the past year. I have agreed to work with her in managing the school and creating a sond base that will allow the school to function without her personally paying. We at the foundation have agreed to support the schools work and are working on raising the $10k it will cost to build a school for 150 people in Mlali.

The difficulty that we face at this point is that the people of Mlali are extremely poor. In Kenya we are able to make it work because parents are paying a contribution to the running of the school, but this is not an option in Tanzania. The school was set up to help educate orphans who had been passed to their grandparent or uncles to take care of them. The poverty is so bad that education of the orphan is way down the list of priorities.

Watch this space and i will give an update in the future on how things are progressing.