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.

Tailoring Students benefitting from Hoja's Vocational Training Centre

I just received an email from Oswin containing only this picture. At the recent UK volunteers' meeting on Sunday 1st March, we all learnt that the VTC was already open for booklearning, and that practical classes would begin in two weeks.

The VTC is an opportunity for local students who don't have a place at secondary school, to learn a trade or skills from which they can earn a living.

I'm happy to see that in the last week or so the VTC has indeed got up and running properly, as shown in this picture of students studying tailoring.

Great news.

UK Volunteers Meeting, 9 November

Apologies if you've had problems finding our main website lately - it's been down for some time but we will get it back up as soon as possible. In the meantime, we're going to resurrect this blog to keep you up-to-date, and hopefully put a widget into the new website (when it appears) so news from this blog appears there too.

In the meantime, there is a page for Hoja on COCO's website, which can be found here. Feel free to direct anyone there.

Hoja is looking very exciting these days. Yesterday we held a volunteers' meeting at Julia's house in London, attended by around 15 people, to discuss progress and future plans.

Lucy from COCO was there, to tell us about her recent visit to Tanga ward, and showed us what she'd seen and how she thinks the project is going, which seems to be around 95% positive (Lucy has corrected me to 100%!).

COCO have been kind enough to support the Hoja Project for some time now, and are taking on the Vocational Training Centre being built there, which is hugely appreciated, as it would be a massive project to be taken on by volunteers.

A number of us also gave accounts of our impressions and feelings when we have visited Tanga and Mpandangindo in the past, and it was reassuring to hear how positive everyone felt about the project.

Some of the day was also set aside for discussing fundraising and awareness raising ideas, and there certainly seemed to be a general feeling that we would like to put on some bigger events and get some smaller regular events going as well. Watch this space.