SKIP HYMS - Tanzania

SKIP HYMS (Hull York Medical School) work in the town of Kibaha, west of Dar es Salaam, in Tanzania with a local NGO called MYODA (Mkuza Youth Development Association). Through running community days, seminars, speaking at local high schools and working with young children in MYODA's nursery we aim to improve awareness of children’s disability, increase local knowledge of HIV/AIDS and improve access to healthcare and education to all children in the area.

History

Established in 2007, SKIP HYMS is still a very young branch of SKIP. We completed a needs assessment trip to Tanzania in the summer of 2008 to meet various potential partner organisations and identify an area or community that could most benefit from what SKIP has to offer. Following a lengthy discussion and evaluation in October 2008 it was decided that our project partner will be MYODA.

MYODA are a small grass roots NGO based in a town called Kibaha, west of the city Dar es Salaam, who work towards sustainable youth development and eradicating poverty whilst fighting against the medical and social problems of HIV/AIDS. MYODA was developed in 2004 by Obedy Kuguru who saw the needs of the children and youth in Kibaha and wished to help meet these.We returned to Kibaha in the summer of 2009 in order to further research the needs of the community, to decide what interventions we could hope to develop which would meet the needs of the local people and to further strengthen our ties with MYODA. The information we gathered on this trip gave us an idea of the number of children living with disabilities in the area, what they and their families felt they needed most and the ways in which we could help with the curriculum at the nursery.

What will our project do?

This year we are sending our first official wave of volunteers! There are two waves of volunteers, each spending two weeks on the project. When in Tanzania they will get involved in several aspects of the project:

• The Nursery - help in teaching the curriculum (there are currently around 70 children and one teacher), as well as thinking up as many fun extra-curricular activities as possible!
• Disability awareness days - opportunities to increase the communities’ awareness of disability as well as help forge a support network within the community, things that many of the families we spoke to felt would be helpful.
• HIV/AIDS awareness seminars - in conjunction with MYODA and aiming to increase local knowledge.
• Rose Marie Secondary School - a girl’s school near Kibaha with whom committee members have previously stayed. We hope to spend a few evenings with the girls, helping them improve their English as well as getting to know each other!

MYODA wish to provide more support for children with physical and learning disabilities - the community regards them as useless and worthless, looking upon them as the ‘cursed ones’. We hope to develop our project in the future to further help them in this goal, as well as continuing the above interventions.

The ultimate aim of our project is sustainability. While our interventions at the moment are still relatively small, as we develop as branch we hope to make an impact which is useful to the community and which will last after we have left.

What are our goals?

Our main goals for this year are to:

• Fundraise to support MYODA’s project in Tanzania.
• Successfully send our first group of volunteers to help with the project, and to further strengthen ties with the community.
• Plan future interventions in conjunction with MYODA that tackle disability in the community, poverty, youth development and HIV/AIDS as well as continuing to develop our current ones.

How do we raise money?

So far we have had a number of fundraising events, including a quiz night, a supermarket bagpack, cake sales, ticketed events and parties as well as private donations.

Contact us

For more information about SKIP HYMS or our project please contact us at skiphyms@googlemail.com.