Humanitarian Service Expedition Update May 2025

Our first humanitarian service trip is shaping up wonderfully well! Our group of 8 travelers will depart Salt Lake City on June 5 and arrive in Mwanza on June 7 for a 10 day stay in Tanzania.  I will precede them by one week to organize details and coordinate school instruction and community development and cooperation with community leaders.

Africompassion’s main mission is to lift children out of poverty by providing clean water, education and medical care. We also work to help families out of poverty through community development and education.  Our development of the Africompassion School for Hope is progressing well, now that we have a completed building with six classrooms and a wonderful bathroom / toilet facility with eight bathrooms.

As part of this trip, we will bring transformational supplies and materials to empower the teachers to provide a life-changing education for the students at the school.

Our primary goal on this trip is to work with community members to perform service for the extreme impoverished and to help villagers and leaders to experience and identify ways they can serve the very most vulnerable and impoverished members of their community. We desire to change the vision of the community and help empower them to change their circumstances.

In the future, we desire to build a community education center and a vocational training center for adult education that will allow youth and adults to receive remedial education and job skills training. We also desire to build a medical clinic to provide life saving medical care for villagers who currently do not have access to medical care.

We are excited to share that a doctor from a local town (about 20 miles away) has agreed to visit the school regularly and examine and treat our students. We are dedicating one of our meeting rooms as a school medical clinic and will seek to purchase a bed for sick children. If you would like to help us purchase some basic equipment for the clinic that would be amazing!!

We have been blessed to hire a teacher (photo on right) who is trained as a pharmaceutical technician and first aid emergency responder! God is truly good! Boniphace is a great addition to our team! We have received a generous donation of $600 to purchase first aid supplies and OTC medicines for the school. We are hoping to be able to purchase antibiotics and other prescription medicines for the students through a non-profit that supplies medicines to medical missions. We are working on getting the required documentation to purchase the medicines. We also hope to start a vaccination program in the future.

We have a number of service activities planned for the trip. After consultation with Jerald Malamba, our volunteer executive director in Tanzania and reflecting on our purposes as an organization and the size of our group expedition, we decided to fund the construction of a small house for a widow with inadequate housing. 

Jerald worked with the village leaders, and they requested the tribal clan leaders to present a list of candidates for the housing project. There were 28 different widows and families proposed. The village leaders picked Silper Juma, an elderly woman who has three orphaned grandchildren living with her. They have an old mud hut with a leaky thatched roof and sleep on sheets on the mud floor.

Working with Jerald, we engaged with the contractor (Edward) who built our school building and toilet facilities to help us design a small house.  After discussing the project plan and timeline, we decided to start the house before the group arrives so that we will be able to complete the project while we are there.

Edward and his workers have generously agreed to donate their labor and time to build the house and the roof! This is a great sacrifice for them!  They estimate 16 days of their time for six workers. We are extremely touched by their willingness to do this.

We are providing food expenses for them and their families during the time they work on the house to support this amazing sacrifice!

The expedition members will work with villagers to paint the house while we are there, build a latrine with a small septic tank and install rain gutters and a 1,000 gallon rainwater collection system for the families in the area.

The villagers have donated 4,500 bricks for the project! And Jerald has donated an additional 1,500 bricks to fulfill the total needed.

The house is a simple three-room house with a galvanized metal roof built out of burnt clay bricks. It will be plastered and have windows, a door and a cement floor.

We have other projects planned, such as visiting schools and planting trees, a community service trash pickup project, visiting families, helping weed gardens, depending on time.

Supplies update

Through generous donors we have received or been able to purchase the following supplies! We can use funds to help pay baggage fees, fund the latrine construction and rainwater collection systems and purchase a bed and furniture for the school medical clinic. We also need to purchase additional desks for teachers, book shelves for new classrooms.

Curriculum materials

Core Knowledge teacher manuals and student manuals, grades 2 – 4

Saxon Math teacher manuals and student workbooks, grades 2 – 4

Complete Essentials Literacy curriculum, grades K -3

English literacy teacher instructional materials

8 teacher laptops

Digital projector

1 Gb Wifi router

School supplies

30 student recorder instruments

3 teacher recorder instruments

14 soccer balls

Two soccer goal nets

Goalie gloves

Stopwatches, whistles

Six basketballs

Two volleyballs

Volleyball net

Two basketball hoops and nets

Two ball pumps and needles

90 jump ropes

Medical and first aid supplies

Nine bottles fluoride concentrate rinse

80 rolls x 200 yards dental floss

30 floss dispensers

120 toothbrushes

$800 first aid supplies, painkillers and medicines

Well water test kit

I look forward to sharing photos and stories from what will be a memorable trip!

Thank you so much for your support of our work!!

Steve Whitehouse

CEO

Africompassion USA