GrenAide

This is my eighth week of teaching here in Mwanza, Tanzania. In my time I've come to learn a great deal, perhaps more than I've taught my students. I've learned what it's like to teach in a place where there's rarely electricity, no students have textbooks and teachers' materials are chalk, a piece of foam to erase with and a poorly written textbook that's falling apart. This isn't to make you feel bad or like things are horrible, though. There IS a solution to the problems here.

I'm trying to raise money to get books for these students. What books, you ask? Free, open-source textbooks that all we have to do is get paper & ink and print them out. These kids have dealt with books that fall apart for so long that almost all of them know how to bind books. Seriously. It's ridiculous. Convenient, though, because that's what we'll be doing! (I'll be doing it with them)

Some of these kids have already been motivated to change things. The more students I can get through to, the stronger the wave of change becomes. Help me inspire these kids!

EDIT: Having gotten past my SECOND goal, I used took 55 bucks of my own and splurged on buying breakfast for every kid in the school. There are 281 students in all, from Form I to Form IV. Normally if they want to eat they have to pay for it themselves, so a lot of them just don't eat (lunch OR breakfast). So today, EVERYONE got to eat. It wasn't a lot, mind. It was two Mandazi (sort of like Chinese donuts) and a cup of tea. Like I said, it wasn't much, but it brought a smile to 281 faces. It's an incredible feeling, not the helping, but being around 281 people who are suddenly happier.