Us and Our Schools - Hoja-COCO Students Part 2 [video]

The next video after this morning's post.



Us and Our School - Hoja-COCO Students Part 2 from Phil Hatchard on Vimeo.

Again, all related videos to this are posted in the Hoja Project album on Vimeo.

Let Our Sponsored Students Introduce Themselves [video]

I did some filming when I was working on the Project in Tanzania from May 'til August this year. These are some of the students I filmed, introducing themselves.



Let Us Introduce Ourselves - Hoja-COCO Students Part 1 (7 Minute Version) from Phil Hatchard on Vimeo.

What we'd like to do with this is to start up some dialogue between some UK students (or students from elsewhere) and our sponsored students. I have quite a lot more footage, and will be editing together some of the questions that Hoja-COCO students would like to ask of students from developed countries, in the next couple of days.

If you'd like to be a part of this, please get in touch with me and let me know - my email is philhatchuk@yahoo.co.uk.  All videos will be uploaded to this album.

In other news, we're quite excited that Oswin, Hoja's founder and my good friend, is coming all the way over from Tanzania to visit us.  He's arriving in Newcastle today, and then will be coming down to London from the 6th December until the 14th.  He'll be leading various talks at schools and colleges, taking part in workshops, and attending COCO's annual ball and AGM.

Hoja Holds Meeting With Local Albinos Over Persecution

I was pleased to receive this email from Oswin a couple of days ago:

It is the fact that Albino are still killed in Tanzania.  Most of us are very unhappy with what is done to our fellow Albino.
Hoja Project, mainly funded by COCO, through its perfomance groups is educating the community and government leaders through perfomances, that Albino are not killed any more.
Till now no one has been killed in Ruvuma but many have been killed in other regions.
We plan to campaign that we remain in this state of peace in Ruvuma.
I have attached some photos of the members of the meeting organised by Hoja-COCO which was about how to protect Albino from being killed in Ruvuma Region.  The meeting was attended by government leaders and many Albino.  This meeting was conducted at Muungano Vocational training centre.
Asante sana

Although there has been less persecution of Albinos in Ruvuma compared to other parts of the country, I know this is an important issue to many involved in Hoja, not least because our IGP Coordinator in Tanzania is an Albino himself. The relative lack of violence does not mean that discrimination is not a problem.