Orphanage Volunteering

A country affected by extreme poverty, HIV/AIDS and a lack of opportunities, orphan children of Tanzania need immediate help and support. Your participation in an orphanage project is not only appreciated by kids but also by orphanage administration. Orphanage work is a great way to share your love, passion, and support as it goes to people who need it the most. Foot2Afrika works with 3 orphanage homes which are located in Moshi at the gateway of the world renown Mountain, Kilimanjaro.

Skills / Duration

There are no specific qualifications needed to join the orphanage volunteer project in Moshi. However, volunteers are expected to be flexible and patient. You should have passion and love for children and believe you can act as a healthy role model.The project is open all year round.

This program would best suit any one with a humane heart. Someone willing to reach out and inspire hope where there might be none, someone with a niche to leave the world a better place than he/she found it. This program would also suit groups of two to twenty with a common goal like fund raising to buy some home kitchen equipment or buy enough food to take them through a month, six months or a year. Such groups could initiate projects like painting the home, buying more beddings, toys, books, medicine, expanding the home building to accommodate more children comfortably.

Note that most of the basic things the home badly needs can be acquired locally more cheaply and one needs not to bring material things to volunteer. A volunteer's presence alone at the home is in itself an enormous blessing to not only the children, but also Tanzania as a whole. It would also be perfect for those looking for a set comprising of a school and a children's home as a single package.

Volunteers’ Responsibilities

Volunteers will teach English in the orphanage or school. You will help children to stay clean by guiding them in brushing teeth, showering, and personal hygiene. In any free time, mostly the evenings, you can organize games, drawing, singing, dancing, and other creative education and extra curricular activities. In the evening time, you will help children do their homework and monitor academic progress. If you do not want to teach in the school during the day time, then you can offer to take care of the children who stay at the orphanage (who can not go to school). Your help is also expected in dressing, food distribution, kitchen assistance, gardening, cleaning and administrative work.

Working at an orphanage

Once placed, a volunteer could decide to work in either one of the departments - Cook for the children, feed them, teach them, help with laundry, mop the floor, give those who are sick their medication and soothe them to sleep one at a time. At present, the centre is short of staff and most of the above chores are taken care of by a slim staff collectively with the children. The children are from different backgrounds hence, have different emotional problems in addition to societal effects that range from grinding poverty to HIV/AIDS. Others are from broken homes, where they were physically abused. This category of children together with those affected by HIV need special care, child psychiatric services and above all, friends whom they can trust and open up to - a motherly, fatherly, brotherly or a sisterly figure - a shoulder to lean on, sow hope and reap something in life. There are also those who have never known a mum or a dad - these are children who were either found abandoned by the road side or whose parents are long dead from HIV/AIDS.

Small things supported by a big heart can make a difference.