On the 5th day of Stand Tall Christmas
We are introducing the adorable Samweli
Samweli is the only child that we sponsor who never had any spine problems. He comes from what I call the “before Stand Tall” days. I met him on my first trip to Tanzania around the same time I met Benson. They would attend the same local school program called Jipe Moyo where I was volunteering.
Technically, Jipe Moyo was a nursery school. I was working with the Mama’s, while another volunteer taught the children. This was a “school” where the children carried the benches into the “classroom” everyday so they could have a place to sit. There was one blackboard and one piece of chalk. There were literally no other supplies; no paper, pens, pictures on the walls, nothing.
You might ask yourself why children would choose to come to a school like that. The problem is that even though public school is free in Tanzania, parents still need to send their children with a uniform, shoes, school bag, notebooks, or pens. These costs seem astronomical to many Tanzanian families. So they came to us instead.
Every morning, you would see a ragtag bunch of mostly 4 and 5 year old children walking themselves to school. They wore the same clothes everyday, many were malnourished and some had other illnesses or parasites. It was one of the most beautiful and simultaneously heartbreaking sites to see their smiles as they came running up to the building calling out “teacher, teacher!”
In the midst of the chaos, one child stood out, Samweli. He was the only child whose mother walked him to school...every single day. Although he wore the same clothes, they were always clean and all the holes had been sewn. And he was distinctively a rolly-polly, well-fed little boy. It was immediately apparent that he had a mother who loved him. This family really struck me. I worked hard and found him sponsorship through a girl who was living in the same hostel as myself.
Regretfully, things don’t always go as planned. Samweli was sponsored for about a 1.5 years, then his sponsorship literally disappeared. I got a teary phone call from his mother because Samweli was about to get kicked out of school for failure to pay. To be honest, I felt guilty that I found him a sponsor who would just throw him away so carelessly. By this time, Stand Tall International was created and we were still finding our way, so I just snuck Samweli in with the rest of the children attending school.
To date, he is 10 years old, entering 5th grade and is just killing it. His mother is still incredibly involved and actually moved villages so that we could transfer him to a better school. He attends everyday, loves his classes, joined the debate club, and loves practicing him English. He had some challenges in school last year, so he voluntarily stayed after school until 8pm everyday to get tutoring. What kid does that?!?
Running a nonprofit taught me that we can’t help everybody, as much as we would like to. We have to have some parameters in place to define our program. But, I’m happy and honored that Stand Tall keeps supporting Samweli year after year and I know that he deserves everything he gets.
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