Meeting with Sister Nai and Charles and traveld to a Maasai School

We had a great meeting with Nai, my African sister who lived with me in the states for 3 months, and her husband Charles.  Charles is a lawyer who I sought advice on how to establish on NGO status in Tanzania.  He is going to assist Hope Ministries with getting that done and I am very appreciative of his legal advice.  We discussed other opportunities for Hope Ministries.

On Sunday we took a long journey with Nai and her friend Flomena on a 2 hour trip via very challenging roads to visit the Emboreet Secondary School.  They took us to a fairly new Maasai school that was started four years ago.  Flomena and her husband, being Maasai, wanted to help educate  these children so they can have a chance at a future.  Many of these Maasai girls do not get a chance at an education because they are sold for cows and married to men that are much older than themselves and then start a married life at a very young age and then have children.  Their lives are met with much hardship and Maasai men are allowed to have many wives.  Since the Maasia men have started going to other villages and cities, they bring home HIV to the villages.  Then they have multiple wives and then the virus is spread.

Since one of my first visits to Tanzania, I heard the sad stories of the Maasai girls, and I have felt called to help these girls get an education.  Thus Nai introduced me to this friend that has started a school.  They currently have 96 boys and 75 girls that attend the school.  It is a government supported school and just recently built a girls dormitory so they would not need to walk miles to go to school.  They found that if they did the families would put them to work and then would not come back to school.  As they gave us a tour of the facilities, which has many needs, we found that the girls we sleeping 2 to a bed and it was a twin mattress laying on the floor and they had no place for clothes.  The mattresses they slept on were 5-6 inch pieces of foam rubber.  The kitchen was a shelter of wood and tin and they cooked over open fires.  The main meals were rice and beans.  The parents of the kids are asked to help provide food like maize, corn and beans that they harvest from their fields to help feed the children.

I am continually amazed and saddened by the poverty and needs of these people.  I complimented Flomena and her husband for the assistance they are trying to give to these children, but they need help to make this happen.  If these kids are educated they have a hope for a future.  I heard stories of Maasai girls who are only 12 or 13 years old and they are sold for cows because the family needs food to survive and she may be sold and married to a 50 or 60 year old man.  It is so sad.  Then it starts a life of babies having babies.  These girls have children at way too young of age and then have many.  Now they have to deal with the affects of HIV on their families.   As I heard these stories I sat back and thanked God for allowing my children and grandchildren to be born in a country where these things do not happen.  How can we help these beautiful children of God?  This is the conversations that Lee and I had with the school headmaster, Nai and Flomena.

Please pray for these precious children.

Gayle

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